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Opinion
For all those people stressing about tickets for the FIFA Women’s World Cup, you needn’t have stressed too much. Aside from the opening game at Stadium Australia which is a complete sell-out, and of course the World Cup Final a month later at the same venue, Tuesday’s ticket release put the smiles back on the faces of every football fan who thought they had missed out.
It’s a clever formula that FIFA have perfected over the years: demand born from a lack of availability of tickets, and then when that demand reaches its fiercest and hope is all but lost, the rest of the tickets are released into the market and hey presto, tickets are snapped up, seats are sold and we’ve got a well-attended tournament on our hands.
Logging in to the ticketing website, not long after Tuesday’s midday opening time, the dreaded waiting room queue was surprisingly short. Over the years, many fans would have spent hours and hours on multiple devices waiting for the FIFA minutes to tick slowly by, like away fans at Old Trafford entering Fergie time.
Many mums and dads would have had that similar experience praying to get in to Ticketek to buy Taylor Swift tickets just recently, but this time there was only a brief wait that almost caught the casual user out and sent them back to the end of the queue.
The list of available games, so often very short and deceptively luring you in only to show wheelchair tickets, was complete with all games, and only a handful were showing as Low Availability. There are tickets for everyone.
What’s more, the FIFA ticket resale site, where holders of tickets can offload their original but now unwanted purchases, has plenty of seats available for most of the games. The exception being, of course, that opening night at Accor Stadium between the Matildas and Ireland, which seems to be the benchmark for announcements around ticket sales.
Matildas captain Sam Kerr. (Photo by Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)
Using a half-closed eye and attempting to decipher which games are truly popular amongst the 64 matches of the World Cup is quite tricky. It would appear that Brazil games are sought-after; there are only category 1 tickets left, which suggests a great atmosphere as Australia’s Brazilian population swells the followers from South America.
Of course the remaining group games involving the Matildas understandably have higher demand than any other team, but oddly enough China v England in Adelaide is showing as sold out, which would be quite something, and the group games in Sydney and Melbourne are showing limited availability.
So, what price are we paying for these tickets? Again for some reason using Taylor Swift as a yardstick, surely we’d be paying hundreds of dollars for a ticket to see the best women’s teams from around the world come together. But that’s not the case.
The games are terrifically priced to the local fans. For the lowest category of adult ticket to a group game, you would be paying $20. Yes, 20 Australian dollars. The price of a couple of schooners at Sydney’s Opera Bar. There are more expensive games: the two opening day fixtures are $30, or $80 for the most expensive Category 1 ticket, and that pricing doesn’t get any more onerous until the Final, where tickets range from $40 to $120 depending on how fancy you think you are.
There has been a great deal of conjecture and angst regarding the allocation of those Category 1 tickets too, especially at Stadium Australia. The early adopters who got their tickets in the Visa pre-sale in October last year when the opening game was scheduled to be at Sydney Football Stadium have been shafted with seats right up at the back of the stands.
Online chats are littered with people claiming that they can’t walk that far, they have a fear of heights, their kids would not cope with being that high in the stand. There was even talk of the ACCC being involved.
The frustration is understandable, too – if you’ve ever been blessed with a seat in the top tier at Homebush, the 600s as it is now lovingly known to many angry Matildas fans, the view is abysmal. A goalkeeper kicks up-field and you have to wait a couple of seconds to see the ball again, and the action is so far away, you’ve got little chance of knowing who just scored the winning goal.
Thankfully, the advent of digital tickets will prevent the paper aeroplane swarm that often plagues these events. It’s the atmosphere that will win you over, and if the football served up on the night is good, the crowd will respond, and you’ll feel like a god watching down on the action below. It will be electric wherever you are sitting.
That Visa pre-sale on 6th October last year, even prior to the Socceroos’ finest moments in Qatar, when the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup was still nine months away, was a talking point too. The tickets were incredibly cheap. Two stadium super passes for the Sydney stadiums and a home-team pass, for a family of four, and the cost was around $1000.
That’s 13 games, with a double-up for the Ireland game. Again, that’s around $20 a ticket for a whole festival of live football, including the World Cup Final! Absolutely incredible value.
Rumours later emerged that FIFA made a slight miscalculation in the pricing, but by then it was too late. Only the most sceptical amongst us would join the dots and work out why those presale tickets ended up in the clouds.
Now that tickets have started to be delivered to mobile apps, the fun starts. There are hundreds of valid questions of how to transfer tickets, why a kids ticket is sometimes in a different section to the adults, how we gift unwanted tickets to our friends, how can we upgrade a kids ticket to an adult, and so on.
But there will be no ticket resolution kiosks for this World Cup, you will be expected to have your ticket ready to go on your mobile phone as you approach the stadium.
(Photo by Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images)
Bluetooth technology will activate the ticket and you will scan your phone at the gate to gain access. Make sure your phone has plenty of battery, and that you know how to navigate around your mobile device to find your ticket. If you thought you were old and out of touch with technology, now’s your chance to prove everyone wrong and reconnect with your inner geek.
If you did secure tickets for the opening game in Australia, enjoy your night. It’s going to be extra special, a turning point in women’s football in Australia. If not, get yourself to one of hundreds of live sites around the country that will be hoping to capture the same scenes played out during the men’s World Cup.
Apparently football’s governing body has tried to restrict non-sanctioned live sites from showing the games too. As if that was ever going to stop a bunch of Aussies getting together in a park to shout at a big screen. No chance!
And whatever you do, if you live near a host city, check the FIFA ticketing website and grab a bargain ticket to a random game. It could be the best-ever game of football that you have ever seen, and every game is a history-maker as Australia and New Zealand host the best World Cup event ever.
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