England faced the prospect of playing their first match of the World Cup in a stadium with empty seats, with tickets still available as if Monday for their fixture against Iran. England was scheduled to play Iran in Doha’s Khalifa International Stadium, which has a capacity of 40,000 according to Fifa’s official guide. That makes Khalifa the smallest stadium for an England opening World Cup game since 1990, when they played Ireland in a sold-out Stadio Sant’Elia in Cagliari. Even so, it seems likely that tickets will remain unsold.
Estimates suggest that between 3,000 and 4,000 England supporters are expected to travel to Qatar during the group stages, although they have been thin on the ground around central Doha. Several England supporters, three wearing Newcastle United shirts, came to England’s training base on Friday morning in the hope of glimpsing the players, but were left disappointed.
As of 48 hours before the opening game of the tournament between Qatar and Ecuador at the Al Bayt Stadium north of Doha, there were tickets available for 14 of the group matches on the portal for non-Qatari customers. That included three of the home nations’ matches: England vs Iran, Wales vs USA and Wales vs Iran. Tickets are available via three methods. The first is FIFA's official sales portal, which lists seven games as having available tickets at the Category 1 price of 800 rials ($220). Fifa also offers a resale platform, where supporters with unwanted tickets can sell them at face value. On that resale platform, tickets are sold quickly and so only a snapshot is possible. Last Friday evening, it was possible to buy tickets for 14 matches on the resale platform at the 800 rial price-- they included Croatia vs Canada, Switzerland vs Cameroon and Ecuador vs Senegal. Finally, there is an official match ticketing center at the Doha Exhibition and Convention Center in West Bay, among Doha’s cluster of skyscrapers. Over the weekend, the ticketing center displayed a sign advertising tickets for three games, including England vs Iran-- again, these were priced at 800 rials.
Ashley Brown, the Football Supporters’ Association head of supporter engagement, told the BBC last month that he was certain that England supporters were not going to be traveling in similar numbers to previous World Cups due to well-documented factors: cost, timing and concerns about the tournament as a whole.
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