FRANCE 98 – Communique Template

The French Organising Committee has just confirmed that the number of World Cup tickets to be sold by telephone to residents of the 18 countries in the European Economic Space has been increased to 170,000.

On top of the 110,000 initially forecast, 60,000 other tickets have progressively become available since telephone reservations opened on 22 April 1998. The CFO will therefore be keeping the promise it made to the European Commission to offer additional tickets to the general public as and when possible.

” On the one hand, ticket requests from certain non-European Federations have turned out to be fewer than the quotas they had been allotted by FIFA,” says Jacques Lambert, Managing Director of the CFO, “and on the other hand, we have made our final seat count, match by match, according to stadium capacities. This has been made possible because all the improvement work being done at the World Cup grounds has now been completed. For example, seat replacement work completed earlier this week at the Parc des Princes has enabled us to add an extra 1,000 seats per game. Also, we have released the seats held in reserve while awaiting the outcome of technical issues such as the amount of space to be taken up by camera platforms, and the means to be deployed instead of fences,” he went on to say.

The French Organising Committee now knows exactly how many tickets for matches in the first round and round of sixteen (apart from the Opening match) can be offered for sale to the residents of the 18 countries in the European Economic Space.

Since reservations opened on 22 April, information on tickets that have just become available has been transmitted in real time to the operators on the telephone platform. They have thus been able to adapt the level of reservation, match by match, to the number of tickets now for sale. This explains why 22 matches out of the 55 now sold out will not be open for any further reservations.

At the end of the sixth day that the telephone platform set up by the CFO has been operating, 101,000 tickets have so far been sold to the residents of the 18 countries of the European Economic Space. 16,000 of these seats were sold on 27 April 1998 alone. 22 out of the 55 matches open for reservations are now sold out.

Today, Monday 27 April 1998, 2.2 million calls from France and 600,000 from abroad have been clocked up on France Telecom’s network.

The FRANCE 98 telephone platform, which closed this evening at 8 pm, will be open again tomorrow, Tuesday 28 April, from 8 am to 8 pm. It will be open at the same times during the following days for the sales of the remaining 69,000 tickets.

A reminder: reservations for these tickets can be made exclusively by telephone, and only at the numbers indicated below, according to the principle of “first come first served”, with a limit of 4 tickets per match per person, and an overall limit of 16 tickets per person:

Payment for tickets ordered can be made by bank card, or failing this, a certified banker’s cheque (made out in French francs and which must be received by the French Organising Committee no later than 7 days after the order is made). Use of a card (card number) or a bank account is limited to a single order