FIFA World Cup Tickets

Results are out - what's next for those that didn't get lucky?

After stating that fans would start receiving emails “from no earlier than the 5th February”, most people hoped and expected that the status of their application would be known on Thursday. However, this was not to be and the slow release of emails by FIFA over the last few days has resulted in ticketless fans clinging on to faint hope that they may still be successful, convincing themselves that they just haven’t been told yet.

However it appears that most, if not all, of the successful applicants have now been able to discover their application status. This has been either through a link to view purchase history, an email directly from FIFA or through an update on the website, where application status’ has changed to “lost”, “successful” or “partially successful”.

Those that were successful will breathe a huge sigh of relief, even the ones that knew they were ‘guaranteed’ a ticket due to their SSC points total. For them, they can start planning the details of their trip to the USA, but for everyone else, it’s a question of - what next for tickets?

This short article explains what happened with the SFA allocation and lays out the next available options for fans to acquire World Cup tickets.

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WHAT HAPPENED WITH THE SFA ALLOCATION?

The Scotland group stage allocations and ticket prices ($60 cat 4 tickets not included in this graphic, they came out of the ‘value tier’ allocation).

For those on 12 points that may feel aggrieved that they were not successful in the ballot, it is worth remembering that the allocation given to SSC members (less than 4,000 tickets per match) meant that if everyone with 15+ points applied, then 15 points would have been the required threshold to guarantee a ticket.

Of course, not everyone applied and so the threshold dropped down to 12 points - which was an unexpected but welcome boost for many. In the final SFA guidance released following application data being sent by FIFA, it looked like 12 points would guarantee a ticket Vs Brazil, with those on 11 points entering a ballot for remaining tickets. At that point, there were more applicants for the Haiti and Morocco games and so it meant 13 points was the threshold to guarantee a ticket for the first two matches, with a random ballot for those on 12 points with a chance of receiving one of the remaining tickets.

However when FIFA ran the Scottish application data for the second and final time, the SFA revealed there were still nearly 1,000 people that had registered for “easy access” tickets; reserved for those with accessibility issues. That number far exceeded the number of supporters that have registered with the SFA as having such accessibility needs and so it was clear hundreds of people had made an error. What made this worse was the accessibility + wheelchair allocation was pitiful (only 6 wheelchair tickets per match!) and so the majority of those applications were doomed to fail.

The SFA sent out several emails asking those that had applied for the wrong category to cancel their application and start again. As a result, several hundred people did exactly this, and by changing their application this: