by Adriana Hamacher

OP/ED:"There were so many mess-ups from the beginning," says Costa Vlassis, who queued at the Checkers supermarket in Johannesburg’s Sandton City from 1 a.m. on Friday, but had seen only a handful of tickets sold by 2 p.m. "FIFA keeps on promising that the ticket situation will improve. But the system keeps crashing," he said, speaking to the Los Angeles Times.

FIFA, world soccer's governing body, had announced a day earlier that the last 800 tickets for the final and about 160,000 tickets across all 64 matches remained available on Friday through all sales channels, with a huge demand expected from South African fans. But Friday saw the latest in a string of ticketing problems as the IT systems supporting the sale of tickets crashed, fighting broke out among those queuing, police had to be called to bring things under control and thousands of frustrated fans waited all day but walked away with no tickets.

FIFA General Secretary Jerome Valcke apologized over the system crash, which mirrored similar problems in earlier over-the-counter sales and followed FIFA promises that it wouldn't happen again. So why was it allowed to happen again?  ICT specialist Prof Barry Dwolatzky has come to the conclusion that it was a concerted decision, by FIFA, not to spend the money to improve the system:

“I’m willing to concede that the 15 April crash may have taken FIFA’s IT service provider by surprise,” He says, writing on South African ICT website, The Software Engineer. “It was never envisaged that “over the counter” ticket sales would be provided for. But what about the “crash” on May 28th? I would expect that information collected from the 15th April would have been analysed and appropriate changes made to the system. In software engineering terms I cannot accept that the system “crashed” on May 28.”

With his knowledge of the ICT world and its systems, Dwolatzky believes there is no way that FIFA’s experienced service providers, Eurotech Global Sports, contracted by FIFA’s ticketing agents, MATCH, could have been responsible for such a calamity.  He alleges that FIFA were provided with solutions after the first system failure on April 15, but failed to authorise their implementation:

“My theory is that the solution came with a price tag, and MATCH and/or FIFA looked at the price and decided it wasn’t worth fixing. Why should they make such a decision? Well, firstly the tickets have still been sold. The hype and negative publicity surrounding some poor unfortunate soccer fanatics coming to blows at ticketing centers certainly hit the headlines around the world. The net result was that people went on-line and bought tickets.”

“Secondly, do FIFA really care about people queuing for tickets in South Africa? There is ample evidence that we South Africans are not all that important in FIFA’s global vision. Jérôme Valcke’s apologies and promises to sort things out cost FIFA nothing. Investing in technical solutions to solve the problems with the IT systems comes off someone’s bottom line”.