GFA Denies Ticket Touting

The Ghana Football Association(GFA) has denied a report in London´s reputable Sunday newspaper, the Observer, that our “football officials and civil servants were selling tickets to desperate fans above the official prices.

The GFA President Kwesi Nyantekyi, speaking exclusively to The Statesman at the Black Stars' camp Sunday, (the day of the Observer publication) said the story displaced a "shameful disrespect for the basic rules of journalism and a defamatory slur on the GFA and Ghana," as it made a general "but false allegation," without mentioning the names of the officials it said were involved in ticket touting.

"We cannot be held responsible for the way tickets which we have legitimately sold to the public are abused. That is the job of the police."

Every accredited official for the World Cup, including journalists, wear tags. The spokesperson for the GFA, Randy Abbey, who also spoke to The Statesman Sunday afternoon said, "No GFA official, government official or any other official has been involved in selling tickets other than through the official processes."

Two reporters of the Observer, the oldest Sunday newspaper in the world, wrote that FIFA was turning a blind eye to ticket touts, an illegal practice which usually takes place at all games on high demand.

The story referred to a highly organised exploitation of England fans in evidence in Stuttgart at weekend, where tickets were being sold from anything between ?950 (euros) to ?1,300 (euros) each, as the latest example the latest example of the widespread ticket-touting at this World Cup.

Many, the report said, have tickets been sold by Germans offloading at huge mark-ups seats they had obtained through Fifa's internet ballot.

But, the report went on to allege that extensive inquiries by Observer Sport have revealed numerous alarming breaches of Fifa's supposedly rigorous ticketing rules.

It stated its "findings" as follows:

• “Many of the tickets available on the black market were issued to the FAs in some of Fifa's 207 member countries worldwide, including Brazil, Japan and France. A significant number have come from ticket allocations reserved by the tournament's 15 sponsors, such as Adidas and McDonald's.

• “Football officials and civil servants from Ghana, one of the World Cup's unexpected successes, were seen by Observer journalists selling tickets at well over their face value before their victories over Czech Republic and the United States.

• “Some touts selling large numbers of tickets stamped with the name of a sponsor claim to be working with that company to offload seats for which they have no use.”

For the first round of the knockout stages, World Cup tickets are being sold from 132 euros to 50 euros officially.

The Observer said, “Any Fifa inquiry could start by looking into what was happening last weekend at the Hilton Hotel in Cologne, where Michael Essien and the rest of his Ghana team-mates were staying before their match against the Czech Republic. In the hours before kick-off, two men who were with the Ghana FA party were selling tickets stamped with the Ghanaian FA's name to fans, including Czechs and English, for €250 each. With the original price of the tickets ranging from €35 to €100, they were making a killing.”

It went on to add that on Thursday, outside the Frankenstadion in Nuremberg where Ghana recorded the victory over the US that gave them a dream match against Brazil, “an Observer journalist [James Root] talked to members of a delegation from the Ghanaian government who were in Germany to study the organisation of the World Cup to help them to prepare for hosting the African Nations Cup in 2008.”

Moments later, according to the Observer, the police moved in to “question one of their colleagues, who was selling tickets, and then took him away. That did not deter the group of English and Ghanaian touts gathered nearby, who continued selling, especially to ticketless Americans eager to watch the match.” However, the Local Organisation Committee, which was represented by Kofi Amoah in Germany, according to Mr Abbey, was not even issued a group of tickets as an organisation to either sell or use. “We did not even allocate tickets to them. They bought their tickets just like everyone else, individually.”

Mr Abbey also said their checks with the Ghanaian embassy in Berlin has drawn a blank on any official of the Ghanaian delegation being arrested as alleged by the Observer story.

“It’s highly unfortunate that the said official has not been named. Nobody has been arrested or questioned from our camp. We think the ethics of the journalism profession demand that before indicting the GFA or LOC, or any other organisation for that matter, at least speak to a representative of that body.” He continued with his criticism of the story, “A paper with the reputation of the Observer should be doing far, far better than this.”

The charge against the GFA is serious. Fifa executive committee member Ismail Bhamjee was sent home from the World Cup in disgrace after offering to sell 12 England fans €100 tickets for the Trinidad & Tobago game at three times their face value.

Observer Sport says it has come across many examples of that at other matches, with English people picking up tickets originally issued by Fifa, under strict conditions of sale, to the FAs of Brazil, France, Japan and Ivory Coast.

One Observer reader, according to the report, who does not want to be identified, paid well over the odds for a seat at the Italy-Ghana match that came from the 'Fifa - adidas' allocation and one for Portugal-Angola that had originally been allocated to 'Fifa - McDonald's'.
The Black Stars are being sponsored by Puma.
Fifa and the German 2006 organising committee insist that the ticketing system is working as well as can be expected. “We've done all we can. You can never completely rule out a black market,” said World Cup spokesman Gerd Graus, while Fifa have said that there will be a better distribution system in South Africa in 2010.
Mr Abbey added his voice to it, “We cannot be held responsible for tickets sold on after they have left our custody through sales. For our part, everything has been impeccably done. We are even cautious about selling bulk tickets except to the recognised Ghana Union here in Germany, after receiving the necessary data of their membership.

“But, we are also aware that due to the decision by the German embassy in Ghana to refuse a lot of our compatriots, who had purchased tickets, visas, some felt inclined to pass on the tickets. But, that is a matter for the German authorities who made the acquisition of a visa a prerequisite for a visa application.”

The GFA boss, Mr Nyantekyi, further disclosed to The Statesman that out of an allocation of 3,000 tickets per match to Ghana for the group stages of the tournament, 60 percent were sold in Ghana.

They were not sold directly, though. Payments were made at local banks across the country, with receipts of payment made to the Regional FA for collection of tickets by the individuals. A similar system was used in the United Kingdom, the United States and other European countries.

The situation is, however, different for the knockout stages. Ghana and Brazil FAs have between Saturday and Monday to sell their respective allocations. Ghana, which received about 3,200 tickets (or vouchers for tickets), has three selling points: the Maritim Hotel, Würzburg (where the team is camped), the Renaissance Hotel, Bochum, near Dortmund, (where the team would move to Monday for the Tuesday game) and the embassy at Berlin.

For the general sales of tickets at the competition, the boast is that ticket sales are better than expected, that stadiums are 99 percent full and that the average attendance is 51,500, the highest since the 1994 World Cup in the US, where the grounds were bigger.