AFP, Florianopolis :
A total of 2.3 million tickets have been sold for the World Cup’s 64 matches, FIFA revealed on Friday.
More than 500,000 tickets were sold in the latest random phase and a further 159,000 will be sold, again exclusively through FIFA, on a first-come, first-served basis between March 12 and April 1.
Those latter tickets will be for matches not including the June 12 opening Game in Sao Paulo and the July 13 final in Rio.
Also virtually sold out are the group matches between England and Italy, the United States and Portugal, the second phase games at Porto Alegre and Sao Paulo and the semi-final at Belo Horizonte.
Of the latest batch of sales, 60 percent were reserved for Brazilian fans, who have snapped up 57 percent of all tickets sold so far.
Brazilians have bagged 906,433 allocated tickets to date, with USA-based fans buying 125,465. Colombians have landed 60,231 ahead of 55,666 for Germany, 53,809 for Argentina, 51,222 for England and 40,446 for Australia.
“This shows the huge anticipation for the 2014 FIFA World Cup in all corners of the world and that we can expect an incredible atmosphere at all matches in the stadiums in June and July,” said FIFA marketing director Thierry Weil.
