LOCOG Concedes Defeat in Bid to Sell Out Olympics Football

(ATR) With eight days until the first ball is kicked in the Olympic football tournaments, London 2012 organizers have removed 500,000 tickets from sale after admitting the six host stadia will not sell out.

LOCOG confirmed that seating capacities were being reduced at the five stadia outside London though not at Wembley itself, which will host the finals of the men's and women's tournaments on Aug. 9 and 11.

A total of 250,000 Olympic football tickets are still on sale, London 2012 chairman Sebastian Coe told this morning's media briefing at the Main Press Center on the Olympic Park.

Another 200,000 will go into a ticket share pool.

After saying for months that football would sell out, Coe appeared unconcerned about the lack of sales.

"We've sold more football tickets than anything else. We're not in bad shape on tickets. Football tickets at an Olympics are always a challenge," he said.

Team GB's women kickstart the program of the Olympics football competition when they play New Zealand at Cardiff's Millennium Stadium on July 25 - two days before the opening ceremony. Team GB's men play their first match on July 26.

"We've got 37, 38,000 tickets we've sold for Great Britain ladies versus New Zealand which I think benchmarks pretty well for instance with the women's FA cup final this year... an all-London affair at the Emirates [Arsenal's stadium] which sold about 5,000," Coe said.

"At this moment about 250,000 tickets remain for sale," he confirmed after revealing the withdrawal of tickets and those entering the ticket share pool.

Two weeks ago, 1.2 million were still available when Around the Ringsasked London 2012 CEO Paul Deighton about the slow sales.

At the time, Deighton put on a brave face when asked if he was worried about the possibility of unfilled venues blighting the football tournament. "It's customary that many of those tickets get taken up very late on. That's certainly the behavior of football fans to buy tickets late," he said.

"I’m relaxed about it," he added, "for the very simple reason that we’ve sold more tickets for football than anything else, we’ve just got a lot of matches because of course there’s a men’s and a women’s competition and they’re big venues – there are just a lot of tickets to sell."

The six venues spread across the UK are: St James’ Park, Newcastle; Old Trafford, Manchester; Hampden Park, Glasgow; the City of Coventry Stadium; the Millennium Stadium, Cardiff and London's Wembley Stadium.

Last Friday, FIFA announded the men's and women's squads for the Olympics. A total of 504 footballers – 288 men and 216 women – will compete in the football tournaments. The complete Olympic squad lists for the 16 men's and 12 women's teams are now available on FIFA.com.

With reporting from Mark Bisson in Rotterdam and Ed Hula III at the Main Press Center

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