BARCELONA ’92 OLYMPICS / DAY 7 : Seats Are Plentiful, but Fans Can’t Sit : Attendance: Cameras show an embarrassing number of vacancies from unused tickets. Arrests of those selling tickets exacerbate matters.

A ticket mess that underlies all those empty seats at Olympic events is giving planners here a double case of embarrassment, but help may be on the way.

Officially, attendance has been higher than it was four years ago in Seoul. But cameras don’t lie. One event after another in the opening week has unfolded to yawning rows of seats in stadiums and arenas that in many cases were reported sold out months ago.

That might be no more than puzzling to television viewers, but it’s an international embarrassment to organizers. And, critically, it’s an increasing source of anger to fans who come in hopes of seeing an event but are turned away, even though there is plenty of room.

Police had to be called one night to cool off about two dozen ticketless young Italians, barred from seeing their volleyball team play Spain before hundreds of empty seats. At a field hockey game during the week, there were about 2,000 empty seats, but nobody in a big crowd of would-be gate-crashers made it in.

The ticket mess is complicated by Spanish police, who fall without mercy on anybody trying to sell tickets in the street.

The Barcelona Olympic Organizing Committee says tickets may not be resold. There is no Spanish law against it, but Barcelona police make the point by zealously enforcing an ordinance against street peddling without a license.

At week’s end, the U.S. Consulate said it was receiving a surprising number of calls from Americans who were rousted by police. A few might have been scalpers, consulate officials said, but most seemed to be fans trying to sell off extra tickets the way it is done outside every stadium in America.

Typically, police confiscate the tickets--about 3,000 so far--assuring more empty seats.

The root of the problem, Mayor Pasqual Maragall, president of the Organizing Committee, said Friday, is that sponsors and national delegations who control the tickets are not distributing them. Or can’t give them away. A lot of outdoor events lose appeal in temperatures near 100 degrees.

“There are sold-out stadiums where people don’t go. (Water) polo at three in the afternoon, for example. That’s torture,” Maragall said.

Red-faced from complaints, officials said at midweek that a system was being devised that would allow spectators without tickets to fill the seats of those who couldn’t be bothered to come. No charge.

Within 24 hours, though, that decision was reversed. Security specialists apparently said it might trigger disorder to let crowds in at the last minute. Lawyers wondered if organizers had the legal right to dispose a second time of seats they had already sold once.

“A cure worse than the illness,” one official said.

Back to square one.

But wait.

Time has come to rethink the rethink, Maragall said Friday.

“We don’t want to break our contracts with the people who bought the tickets, but we are trying to adjust. Local managers at venues are being given a lot of leeway. They are being told to find solutions . . . perhaps to give people the right of access, but not to a seat. We’ll work it out,” the mayor said.