World Cup ticket cash sales over 100,000 inside a day in South Africa

Despite technical problems at the registers , more than 100,000 World Cup tickets were sold in the first 24 hours after cash sales began in South Africa yesterday. Twenty-nine of the tournament's 64 matches are now sold out, including the final, both semi-finals and every fixture taking place in the coastal cities of Cape Town and Durban, but the likely number of foreign fans travelling to the event has halved according to the chief organiser, Danny Jordaan. There were scuffles and computer glitches in the nine host cities where tickets went on sale yesterday, with police resorting to pepper spray to break up one fight in Pretoria and a pensioner dying of a heart attack in the queue in Cape Town. Match, Fifa's travel agent arm, has since apologised for the problems, but tournament organisers were nevertheless encouraged by the strong sales figures. "[The response was] tremendous," said Jordaan. "[South Africans] reacted with huge enthusiasm and some of them spent 15 hours waiting for a ticket." Jordaan specified that of the 101,000 tickets sold so far in the final phase, roughly 12,000 were international sales, and the rest were in South Africa. Only seven of the 64 matches still had tickets available in the special 140 rand (£12.30) category available only to South Africans. All matches of the national team Bafana Bafana and most games with the other five African squads were sold out. He added that he had not seen South Africans line up in such a way since the 1994 election when they voted in Nelson Mandela in the polls that ended apartheid. "It was a wonderful experience to see," he said. "We are very happy with the way things are going. We will see more at the end of the month." Jordaan said estimates for the number of foreign fans coming for the World Cup, hit by the global economic slump, high air fares and accommodation costs, had been revised to around 200,000, compared to the original forecast of 450,000, and encouraged locals to take advantage of the extra tickets available to them. There were queues again on Friday outside ticket offices and some fans returned after waiting for hours yesterday but the atmosphere was much calmer and the computer system was functioning better, witnesses said. "Of course we cannot compare with Germany because it sits in the middle of Europe," added Jordaan. "South Africa is a long haul destination so we expect fans to come in and stay for a long period and therefore the [economic] impact will be greater."