Americans appear set to be by far the most numerous group of foreign fans coming to South Africa for the 2010 Soccer World Cup, Parliament's sports and recreation portfolio committee heard today.
This is according to the number of tickets sold up to the end of football governing body Fifa's third sales phase, which ended on January 22.
Briefing MPs, Local Organising Committee CFO Farouk Seedat said 107 576 tickets for the event had been sold to the general public in the United States. The second-highest number of sales was in the United Kingdom (63,835) followed by Germany (29,733) and Australia
(26,488).
By comparison, public ticket sales in South Africa's "top two" neighbouring countries, Mozambique and Botswana, were 1474 and 1257 respectively.
To date, a total of 2.1 million tickets had been sold for the event. Seedat said 311,271 tickets were still available for sale to the general public.
In the current sales phase four -- which opened on February 9 and runs to April 7 -- a total of 194,349 ticket sales had been "confirmed" to date.
