WORLD CUP ’94 / 50 Days and Counting : More Tickets on Sale : Soccer: About 450,000 to be available Sunday, including 60,000 for Rose Bowl.
About 450,000 tickets to individual games in the 1994 World Cup soccer tournament will go on sale Sunday morning, including about 60,000 tickets for matches at the Rose Bowl, The Times has learned.
The tickets, returned to the organizing committee by sponsors and nations that failed to qualify, will be available by telephone only and each buyer will be limited to a maximum of 10 per game.
This is the final allotment of tickets being individually sold for the 52-game tournament, to be played in nine U.S. cities between June 17 and July 17.
Official announcement of the sale will be made at a news conference in New York today.
Nine of the matches will not be part of the sale. Five of those are sold out: Italy-Ireland and Italy-Norway at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.; Argentina-Greece and Argentina-Nigeria at Foxboro Stadium in Foxboro, Mass., and Belgium-Netherlands at the Citrus Bowl in Orlando, Fla.
In addition, one semifinal, the third-place match and the final, all at the Rose Bowl, as well as the other semifinal at Giants Stadium, are not included in the individual-game sale. Tickets for those matches can be purchased only as part of multi-game premier packages.
Alan Rothenberg, the chairman of World Cup USA 1994 and president of the U.S. Soccer Federation, said Wednesday he is confident every match will be sold out. If so, the sale of between 3.5 and 3.6 million tickets will bring in about $275 million to the World Cup coffers, he said.
“Los Angeles and San Francisco have been selling like crazy,” Rothenberg said. “Of course, New York (Giants Stadium) would have been hot regardless of which teams it drew, and then it ended up with Italy and Ireland.
“New York has been a madhouse. There are a couple of games there that I wish Giants Stadium had two million seats. I think we’d sell them all.”
Rothenberg said ticket demand has been high at all nine cites.
“I don’t think we’re struggling anywhere,” he said. “My guess is that there’ll be a half a dozen games around the country that will take probably right up to game time to sell out completely.
“I think you can pinpoint a game here and a game there that don’t have glamour teams or aren’t in a city where there’s a clear ethnic connection, (but) I still remain confident that we will sell them all.”
The tickets, which will go on sale at 7 a.m. PDT on Sunday via World Cup Ticketing (1-800-769-1994), could be sold out quickly because not that many are available.
At the Rose Bowl, for example, Rothenberg said availability ranged from 10,000 to 20,000 per game. Seating capacity for the World Cup will be slightly more than 90,000.
“There are less than 10,000 (tickets) available for the round of 16,” he said “There are less than 10,000 available for the U.S.-Colombia game; there are somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 for the Colombia-Romania game, and probably between 15,000 and 20,000 for the Cameroon-Sweden and the U.S.-Romania games.”
More than 90% of the 720,000 seats available for the eight matches at the Rose Bowl have been sold.
Rothenberg said he does not believe there will be empty seats at World Cup matches, as was the case in Mexico in 1986 and in Italy in 1990, when all the tickets were sold but many went unused because they were sold before the competing teams were known.
“We’ve been working very hard to avoid that,” he said. “I’m really hopeful that we’ll not only have sold all the tickets but that we’ll actually have people in the seats.”
The tickets that go on sale Sunday include all price ranges ($25 to $475), Rothenberg said, adding that he was satisfied organizers had priced the World Cup appropriately.
“We definitely could have charged more all the way along the line,” he said. “It’s an art form, it’s not a science. Obviously, we wanted to price the tickets high enough so we can pay for the event--that was our priority--but at the same time not be unfair to the public.”
