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[Awards Review]
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▶ Soccer Fans Can Buy Remaining Seats for Opening Game, Korea Match
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[2002/04/16 ]
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Seoul, April 16 (Yonhap) -- The Korean organizing committee for the 2002 World Cup (KOWOC) said Monday that soccer fans will be able to buy the remaining seats for popular matches like the opening game and the match between the Korea and Portugal squad in Incheon.
The organizing committee said that the remaining tickets will be sold online at (http://tickets.2002worldcupkorea.org), at the Post Office, and the branch offices of the Housing & Commercial Bank (H&CB) starting 9:30 a.m. Wednesday.
Nearly 266,000 seats are still available: 94,872 unsold tickets from the domestic market, 52,845 seats made available through exchanges, and 118,000 tickets returned from abroad after negotiations with FIFA.
Of the newly created seats, 20,859 come from exchanging Prestige Gold and Silver seats for normal tickets and 8,408 were once reserved for the Korea Football Association (KFA), the 10 respective host cities and local partners.
KOWOC said, however, the number of seats repossessed could change as organizations and FIFA partners have first rights to buy the tickets until Saturday.
Besides this 23,578 places were made by reducing the media area of the stadiums.
Kim Young-jip, director general of the Marketing Bureau, said that through this process, around 1,100 seats for the June 14 match between Korea and Portugal will be released.
Broken down by type of seats, 300 are seats coming from abroad, while the remaining are derived from 414 seats altered from the media sector and rearrangement of other seats.
The Korean soccer squad's two other matches in Busan and Daegu remains sold out.
The director general said the shortage of seats for the other Korean games was due to the KOWOC overselling seats two years ago based on construction blue prints that proved inaccurate.
'We've discovered through various friendly matches in the past months that some seats sold do not offer adequate views of the pitch,' Kim said, adding that because of these 'problems' any seats that became available had to be transferred to people who unknowingly bought advanced tickets for the seats with poor visibility.
In regards to the opening game, 1,500 seats were returned to Korea from abroad, while an additional 1,004 seats have been created by carrying out construction work on the booths reserved for the broadcast media.
Other key matches, that spectators can buy tickets for are the June 25 semi-final match (1,200 seats) in Seoul, and the quarter-final match to be held in Ulsan June 21 (400 seats). KOWOC said the number of seats could go up.
Ulsan intends to make an additional 1,120 seats originally reserved for the media available for ordinary spectators.
Meanwhile, notwithstanding the influx of seats from abroad and conversions, no tickets will be sold for any of the three preliminary games involving the Chinese soccer squad. KOWOC said that any seats made available will probably be given directly to Chinese football organizations.
yonngong@yna.co.kr |
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