By Natalia Siniawski and Miguel Lo Bianco<\/p>\n
GUADALAJARA, Mexico, June 11 (Reuters) – FIFA reported an attendance of 44,985 for \u200cThursday’s World Cup match between South Korea and the \u200cCzech Republic in Guadalajara, but swathes of empty seats around the stadium renewed \u200bconcerns over ticket pricing and demand for the expanded tournament.<\/p>\n
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While more than 80,000 squeezed into the Azteca stadium to watch the opener between co-hosts Mexico and South Africa, the optics of unoccupied rows \u200cat the 46,000-seat stadium \u2060in Guadalajara, a city with a deep-rooted football culture, have intensified criticism of FIFA’s commercial strategy \u2060for the first 48-team World Cup.<\/p>\n
Some fans at the stadium blamed the high ticket prices for the rows of empty seats and \u200bcriticised FIFA \u200bfor their pricing model.<\/p>\n
Reuters has \u200bcontacted FIFA for comment.<\/p>\n
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FIFA President \u200cGianni Infantino on Wednesday defended FIFA’s ticket pricing following criticism from supporters who argued the cost of attending matches had become prohibitive. He said ticket prices were on a par with other major sporting events.<\/p>\n
FIFA has sold more than 6 million tickets \u200cfor the tournament and previously highlighted \u200bstrong interest from across the Americas, \u200bwith Infantino saying demand \u200bhad exceeded expectations by “a factor of 10 or \u200cmore”.<\/p>\n
However, groups such as Football Supporters \u200bEurope (FSE) had warned \u200bthat “extortionate” pricing would exclude ordinary fans. According to FSE, ticket prices for this tournament have jumped fivefold compared to \u200bthe 2022 World \u200cCup in Qatar.<\/p>\n
South Korea beat the Czechs 2-1 in the \u200bGroup A match.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Natalia Siniawski and Miguel lo \u200bBianco; Editing by Peter Rutherford)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Natalia Siniawski and Miguel Lo Bianco GUADALAJARA, Mexico, June 11 (Reuters) – FIFA reported an attendance of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":731617,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[263402,49,48,263401,3274,561,5685,18262,82,7333,13009],"class_list":["post-731616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-azteca-stadium","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-empty-seats","tag-fifa","tag-soccer","tag-south-africa","tag-south-korea","tag-sports","tag-ticket-prices","tag-world-cup"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=731616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731616\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/731617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=731616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=731616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=731616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}