First Day of Ticket Sales

Here's a link to a yahoo sports article on the first day of World Cup ticket sales:

http://sports.yahoo.com/news/high-demand-world-cup-ticket-170543285--sow.html

Tickets! Tickets! Tickets!

Create an account on Fifa.com as soon as possible.  On August 20 - October 10 the application window for tickets opens.  At any time during that window you can apply for tickets, which will be drawn via random selection.  Per the site: 

Please note, Tickets are not allocated on a First Come First Served Basis and therefore it makes no difference whether you apply early, on 20th August 2013, or late, on 10th October 2013. Each correctly submitted application will have the same opportunity of being successful. The allocation process will involve a random selection draw for all over-subscribed Matches, Venue Specific, or Team Specific Tickets

That being said, starting October 11, 2013 they will begin assigning tickets to applicants, with everyone notified by November 5 as to whether or not they have received tickets.  If Sergio, Amy, Devin, Ryan, Tyler, and Keri all submit an application for the maximum number of tickets (4) or the Rio Venue Specific Tickets, hopefully between those six applications, one or two of them will result in tickets.  If we don't have any luck this round, there are several other ticket draws prior to June.  Additionally, if four or five of those applications result in tickets then I guess we need to find some more friends to go with us (no worries my dad has a group of 14 going from the east coast as well, not to mention family in Brazil) as we will have tickets coming out our a**es.  Please post a comment whenever you have created an account.  

Brazil is a big country! How big? It is the 5th largest country in the world in terms of both size and population.  Brazil is bigger than the continental US.  That being said, following teams from game to game and city to city (teams don't play in just one location) is like catching a game in Dallas, then Miami, then Boston...not so easy. Not so cheap.  That's why we are leaning towards staying in one place and catching the games there.  Belo Horizonte is about six hours by bus from Rio and Sao Paulo is about four hours by bus should there be a game we are interested in going to and can get tickets to (USA! USA!).

Ticket options

You have several options regarding tickets; this is what they are:

• Individual game tickets
• Team specific tickets (TST) - where you get tickets and follow a specific team for a predetermined number of games.
• Venue Specific tickets (VST) - where you get tickets to all the games (for the first round + 1) in a specific city

You can order a maximum of four tickets per person (more below).

This is what we are currently thinking of: buying...or at least attempting to buy, VST for Rio de Janeiro.  This would get us tickets to four Round 1 games and a round of 16 game, all played in Maracana Stadium.  The cheapest option for this package is $470 per ticket = $1880 for the set of four.  Obviously we would need to figure out how to divide up these tickets....that's for a much later post.  Check the link to the left for more ticketing info.

Here we go

It's about time to get the ball rolling on next year's World Cup.  Ticket prices and packages have been revealed, qualifying is under way, money is being saved and plans are being made.  Stayed tuned and share your thoughts as this little adventure (and me trying to figure out this damn blog) get going.