First Round Ticket Draw Complete

FIFA's partner MATCH has completed the random selection for tickets on Wednesday, April 15. If you haven't heard yet, you should know within a week whether you've won tickets. This is the first of four ticket sales phases.

From the ticket application web page, "All successfully submitted Ticket Applications will be entered into the Random Selection Draw that will take place on the 15th April 2009. All applicants will receive an email communication confirming the outcome of their application (successful, partially successful or unsuccessful) within approximately three (3) days of the completion of the Random Selection Draw process."

But in the article linked above, they state, "Between today and the end of April 2009, all applicants will be informed via e-mail or SMS whether they were completely or partially successful or whether they were unsuccessful in securing all the tickets they applied for." So give it until Thursday of next week.

I have not heard from them yet about my own application for USA TST-4 category 3 tickets.

Interestingly, US residents were drawn for 69,000 tickets, the highest number aside from South Africa residents. England was a distant second with 39,000. Sadly, this doesn't mean that 69,000 people were requesting tickets to follow the USA team. No statistics were given but I suspect many of them were either foreigners following their home country team or poseurs following England or some other European team.

Perhaps the most interesting statistic was that England was the team with the most TST requests at 229,000, but there were only about 9,000 available. That places the odds at getting England TSTs at about 4%, or one in 25. From an Independent Online (IOL) report, there were a total of 556,000 tickets awarded and requests for 1.8 million.

Other stats that may affect your odds of winning, from an earlier announcement about ticket requests, are that more than 50% of all requests were for TST packages and the most popular category was category 3.