In struggle for Cup seats, fans and sponsors face off
By Doreen Carvajal International Herald Tribune
SUNDAY, MAY 28, 2006
PARIS When armed robbers attacked a French city hall this month, they were desperately looking for valuable treasure - tickets to the UEFA Champions League final, pitting the triumphant Spanish team, FC Barcelona, against Arsenal of England.
Prime sports tickets are scarce, and even more precious for corporate sponsors that are exploiting stadium seats at the World Cup and the Olympic Games as currency to promote products like MasterCard credit cards, McDonald's burgers, Fuji film and Toshiba computers.
"The key trend is to limit the number of tickets to the general public, therefore making the sponsorship worth more," said Matt McDowell, marketing manager in Britain for Toshiba, which is sponsoring the World Cup in Germany.
"It's very effective because it's a supply-and-demand situation," he said. "If the only way people in the U.K. can see the World Cup in person is by taking part in Toshiba promotions, it adds a lot more to the event for us."
This is a competitive game, though, that is raising thorny issues - from a spreading backlash among fans who feel shoved aside by business interests to an emerging ethical and legal debate about whether journalists or government officials should accept business junkets and desirable tickets.
On the night of Barcelona's victory just outside Paris, top executives at Heineken, the brewer that sponsors the Champions League and European club rugby, gave business clients and journalists free lodging at a luxurious château and tickets for which fans were paying scalpers as much as €4,000, or $5,100.
On the bus ride over to the game, Theo van Vugt, a Dutch reporter for the trade magazine Marketing, said he had calculated the value of Heineken's public relations event: "It was all paid. My ticket was €180, and the hotel was €375 a night."
Toshiba is also dangling invitations to business clients, contest winners and journalists, who are offered free tickets along with a tour of the company's technology command center for the 12 stadiums of World Cup competition.
This year, 15 multinational companies have paid more than €700 million in total to sponsor the World Cup, which begins June 9. Benefits to the companies include exclusive rights to use the World Cup name and to buy an allotment of tickets that they can distribute or promote as contest prizes.
About 490,000 World Cup tickets were set aside for sponsors - about 16 percent of the total 3.07 million game tickets - but companies purchased 380,000, according to FIFA, the governing body of world soccer. In addition, about 347,000 tickets, or about 11 percent of the total, are reserved for high- end packages for sky box deals through iSe-Hospitality in Switzerland, which offers ticket, catering, parking and hospitality services.
The total number of tickets issued has been edging upward since 1998, when 2.7 million tickets were sold for the World Cup in France, rising to three million in 2002 for the games in South Korea and Japan.
Most of the tickets purchased by company sponsors are used for promotions and contests, according to a FIFA statement, "enabling football fans all over the world the opportunity to experience the 2006 FIFA World Cup."
That is cold comfort for groups like the Football Supporters Federation in England. The group is organizing an electronic petition drive to gather one million names worldwide, to put pressure on FIFA to reduce the corporate hold on stadium seating.
"Our ambition is to have an impact on future tournaments as much as this one," said Kevin Miles, the group's international coordinator. "We want to reflect the anger about the way that tickets have been distributed and then the vastly inflated prices on the black market."
He said the group was concerned not about how sponsors used their tickets but about their generous share. His group argues in its petition that FIFA could "dramatically reduce the number of tickets being traded on the black market, improve the atmosphere in their stadiums and return the 'people's game' to its genuine supporters by ensuring a far greater proportion of tickets for fans, not sponsors."
In Germany, home of the World Cup this year, the relative scarcity and value of game tickets have raised legal concerns about government officials who accept them from companies.
Some public officials in Berlin were already ordering their staff to return tickets supplied by FIFA to top layers of German government. "This was not a reaction to any type of conflict of interest," said one official who declined to be identified. "We believe that given the number of fans scrambling for tickets, we should apply and pay like anyone else."
But the district attorney's office in Karlsruhe, Germany, said this month that it was investigating politicians who had accepted tickets from companies.
In the Karlsruhe case, the authorities are investigating Utz Claassen, chairman of the German energy company EnBW, which is one of six national sponsors of the games. According to Rainer Bogs, a spokesman for the district attorney's office, the investigation reviewed 15 cases of politicians who were offered tickets with eight accepting, including a finance minister from the region of Baden-Württemberg.
"Sponsors are not allowed to grant advantages to public representatives with whom they have possible official ties," Bogs said, noting that violators could be penalized by a fine or as long as three years in prison.
EnBW, which had purchased about 12,000 tickets as part of its World Cup sponsorship, maintained that there was nothing wrong with the corporate practice of distributing tickets.
"Our procedure was legal, is legal and remains legal," Hermann Schierwater, a company spokesman, said. "We will not change anything on our practice."
For journalists who accept scarce and valuable sports tickets along with a company pitch, ethical considerations come into play. Can a journalist write a skeptical, independent story about a company from which he or she has accepted lodging and tickets?
Aidan White, general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists, based in Brussels, says that accepting the gift violates the group's basic code of conduct, barring "acceptance of a bribe in any form in consideration of either publication or suppression."
"I think it's inappropriate to hold media events and then give what is a tremendous gift to journalists lucky enough to be talking to MasterCard or Coca-Cola," he said. "Suddenly they get access to tickets while ordinary punters can't get inside and they're willing to pay good, hard-earned money."
Most sponsoring companies view the practice of arranging press junkets to a game quite differently, because they say journalists are not obligated to write about their companies, although the companies hope they will.
Public relations is just part of a broader strategy to exploit sports sponsorships to "raise brand awareness and brand equity," according to Peter van Campen, group commerce director for Heineken. "We don't do this just to have our brand across a board. When you sponsor, you have to activate it across all medias, via advertising, the Internet, promotions and public relations."
Van Vugt, who accepted Heineken's soccer tickets, said the game was incidental to the beer company's media event. He got to meet top executives, who ordinarily are difficult to reach.
"They try to convince me that there is a story in it and I'm free to accept it or not," he said. "They have a risk that they get nothing."
McDowell, Toshiba's marketing manager, said his company realized that it could not force journalists to write anything.
"If the event showed them what we're capable of and they don't write about it immediately, fair enough," he said. "We just hope when an article comes up associated with our industry, that they give us a call and ask for comment."
With 25,000 World Cup tickets to distribute, Toshiba generally reaps positive reactions from distributors, clients and contest winners, McDowell said.
About the only people who turn the company down, he added, are people who are offered tickets without a full package of hospitality.
PARIS When armed robbers attacked a French city hall this month, they were desperately looking for valuable treasure - tickets to the UEFA Champions League final, pitting the triumphant Spanish team, FC Barcelona, against Arsenal of England.
Prime sports tickets are scarce, and even more precious for corporate sponsors that are exploiting stadium seats at the World Cup and the Olympic Games as currency to promote products like MasterCard credit cards, McDonald's burgers, Fuji film and Toshiba computers.
"The key trend is to limit the number of tickets to the general public, therefore making the sponsorship worth more," said Matt McDowell, marketing manager in Britain for Toshiba, which is sponsoring the World Cup in Germany.
"It's very effective because it's a supply-and-demand situation," he said. "If the only way people in the U.K. can see the World Cup in person is by taking part in Toshiba promotions, it adds a lot more to the event for us."
This is a competitive game, though, that is raising thorny issues - from a spreading backlash among fans who feel shoved aside by business interests to an emerging ethical and legal debate about whether journalists or government officials should accept business junkets and desirable tickets.
On the night of Barcelona's victory just outside Paris, top executives at Heineken, the brewer that sponsors the Champions League and European club rugby, gave business clients and journalists free lodging at a luxurious château and tickets for which fans were paying scalpers as much as €4,000, or $5,100.
On the bus ride over to the game, Theo van Vugt, a Dutch reporter for the trade magazine Marketing, said he had calculated the value of Heineken's public relations event: "It was all paid. My ticket was €180, and the hotel was €375 a night."
Toshiba is also dangling invitations to business clients, contest winners and journalists, who are offered free tickets along with a tour of the company's technology command center for the 12 stadiums of World Cup competition.
This year, 15 multinational companies have paid more than €700 million in total to sponsor the World Cup, which begins June 9. Benefits to the companies include exclusive rights to use the World Cup name and to buy an allotment of tickets that they can distribute or promote as contest prizes.
About 490,000 World Cup tickets were set aside for sponsors - about 16 percent of the total 3.07 million game tickets - but companies purchased 380,000, according to FIFA, the governing body of world soccer. In addition, about 347,000 tickets, or about 11 percent of the total, are reserved for high- end packages for sky box deals through iSe-Hospitality in Switzerland, which offers ticket, catering, parking and hospitality services.
The total number of tickets issued has been edging upward since 1998, when 2.7 million tickets were sold for the World Cup in France, rising to three million in 2002 for the games in South Korea and Japan.
Most of the tickets purchased by company sponsors are used for promotions and contests, according to a FIFA statement, "enabling football fans all over the world the opportunity to experience the 2006 FIFA World Cup."
That is cold comfort for groups like the Football Supporters Federation in England. The group is organizing an electronic petition drive to gather one million names worldwide, to put pressure on FIFA to reduce the corporate hold on stadium seating.
"Our ambition is to have an impact on future tournaments as much as this one," said Kevin Miles, the group's international coordinator. "We want to reflect the anger about the way that tickets have been distributed and then the vastly inflated prices on the black market."
He said the group was concerned not about how sponsors used their tickets but about their generous share. His group argues in its petition that FIFA could "dramatically reduce the number of tickets being traded on the black market, improve the atmosphere in their stadiums and return the 'people's game' to its genuine supporters by ensuring a far greater proportion of tickets for fans, not sponsors."
In Germany, home of the World Cup this year, the relative scarcity and value of game tickets have raised legal concerns about government officials who accept them from companies.
Some public officials in Berlin were already ordering their staff to return tickets supplied by FIFA to top layers of German government. "This was not a reaction to any type of conflict of interest," said one official who declined to be identified. "We believe that given the number of fans scrambling for tickets, we should apply and pay like anyone else."
But the district attorney's office in Karlsruhe, Germany, said this month that it was investigating politicians who had accepted tickets from companies.
In the Karlsruhe case, the authorities are investigating Utz Claassen, chairman of the German energy company EnBW, which is one of six national sponsors of the games. According to Rainer Bogs, a spokesman for the district attorney's office, the investigation reviewed 15 cases of politicians who were offered tickets with eight accepting, including a finance minister from the region of Baden-Württemberg.
"Sponsors are not allowed to grant advantages to public representatives with whom they have possible official ties," Bogs said, noting that violators could be penalized by a fine or as long as three years in prison.
EnBW, which had purchased about 12,000 tickets as part of its World Cup sponsorship, maintained that there was nothing wrong with the corporate practice of distributing tickets.
"Our procedure was legal, is legal and remains legal," Hermann Schierwater, a company spokesman, said. "We will not change anything on our practice."
For journalists who accept scarce and valuable sports tickets along with a company pitch, ethical considerations come into play. Can a journalist write a skeptical, independent story about a company from which he or she has accepted lodging and tickets?
Aidan White, general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists, based in Brussels, says that accepting the gift violates the group's basic code of conduct, barring "acceptance of a bribe in any form in consideration of either publication or suppression."
"I think it's inappropriate to hold media events and then give what is a tremendous gift to journalists lucky enough to be talking to MasterCard or Coca-Cola," he said. "Suddenly they get access to tickets while ordinary punters can't get inside and they're willing to pay good, hard-earned money."
Most sponsoring companies view the practice of arranging press junkets to a game quite differently, because they say journalists are not obligated to write about their companies, although the companies hope they will.
Public relations is just part of a broader strategy to exploit sports sponsorships to "raise brand awareness and brand equity," according to Peter van Campen, group commerce director for Heineken. "We don't do this just to have our brand across a board. When you sponsor, you have to activate it across all medias, via advertising, the Internet, promotions and public relations."
Van Vugt, who accepted Heineken's soccer tickets, said the game was incidental to the beer company's media event. He got to meet top executives, who ordinarily are difficult to reach.
"They try to convince me that there is a story in it and I'm free to accept it or not," he said. "They have a risk that they get nothing."
McDowell, Toshiba's marketing manager, said his company realized that it could not force journalists to write anything.
"If the event showed them what we're capable of and they don't write about it immediately, fair enough," he said. "We just hope when an article comes up associated with our industry, that they give us a call and ask for comment."
With 25,000 World Cup tickets to distribute, Toshiba generally reaps positive reactions from distributors, clients and contest winners, McDowell said.
About the only people who turn the company down, he added, are people who are offered tickets without a full package of hospitality.
[World Cup 2006][World Cup Jerseys]
