By David Owen
June 15 – Intense interest in the 2014 World Cup has ratcheted up official hospitality sales to record levels with two years still to go before kick-off.
Match Hospitality, exclusive rights holder of the FIFA hospitality programme, has disclosed that it achieved record sales of $262 million (£169 million/€207 million) for the tournament, which will be staged in Brazil, the nation that gave the world samba soccer, by June 12.
The company said it had “powered past” projected sales targets, “having already concluded deals equal to the total revenue generated by the hospitality programme for the 2010 FIFA World Cup”.
Hospitality sales for the 2010 competition, held in South Africa, were hit by the global economic crisis and its impact on finance companies, some of whom had been good customers of the hospitality industry.
A Match executive told insideworldfootball after the tournament that in total over 140,000 people had bought hospitality packages, compared with between 225,000 and 230,000 in Germany in 2006.
Nonetheless, the executive said, it was “still the second-largest hospitality programme ever in sports, after the 2006 World Cup”.
This time around, Match says that the total number of packages sold across all categories is already “close to 90,000”.
Jaime Byrom, executive chairman of Match Hospitality, said the company was “absolutely thrilled by the overwhelming demand”.
He described international demand as “remarkable considering that the qualifying competitions are still in their early stages or yet to start”.
Pascal Portes, chief operating officer, said Match was “delighted to have passed our first major threshold as early as two years before the FIFA World Cup in Brazil”.
Match has built up a network of sales agents to market the hospitality programme on its behalf, covering more than 80 countries.
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