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EURO applications top 500,000
Every single match at the finals has been massively oversubscribed after over 500,000 fans applied for UEFA EURO 2008 tickets via euro2008.com.
Huge demand
A total of 588,716 supporters from 142 countries submitted applications for tickets before the deadline at midnight on 31 March, ordering a total of 10,359,177 tickets. That is 18 times the demand for UEFA EURO 2004 tickets and almost as much as for tickets for the 2006 FIFA World Cup, where 10.8 million tickets were requested.
Individual tickets
Of the three types of tickets - Individual Match Tickets, Follow My Team Group and Follow My Team Tournament - the former have been the most popular, with 417,885 applicants requesting 8,467,919 such tickets for the 31 matches. The final in Vienna accounted for 651,141 ticket requests, with 561,565 for the semi-final in Basle and 502,081 for the semi in Vienna.
Dedicated supporters
The Follow My Team tickets proved to be particularly popular with supporters from Germany, Switzerland, England, the Netherlands and Austria. A total of 119,110 fans requested Follow My Team Group tickets - a total of 1,224,564 ticket applications - while 51,721 ordered Follow My Team Tournament tickets, accounting for a further 666,694 tickets.
Next steps
As predicted, all 31 final round games were oversubscribed at the end of the application process. The validity of applications will now be checked with 33 per cent of the total 1.05 million tickets being allocated by a random lottery in mid-April under the supervision of a notary. All users will be informed of the status of their applications by the end of April.
Phase abandoned
Because of the huge initial demand for tickets, the second phase of ticket sales - initially planned to allocate unsold tickets on a first come, first served basis in June 2007 - has now been abandoned. Fans may still be able to get tickets via national associations, who will receive an average of 19 per cent of tickets for all matches involving their team which may be sold to fans after the draw for the finals in December 2007.
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