http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8483925.stm Err, the UK have the second highest foreign demand for tickets. I think FIFA should realise that their expectations were too high. Its not surprising demand is lower than that was for Germany, Korea/Japan. France etc. They have superior infrastructure. It seems the main problem is the lack of flights. Also why are FIFA complaining? If you want English fans to travel in larger numbers, allocate them tickets to games they are in or likely to be in. Whilst they haven't sold out at the moment, they will closer to the world cup. edit: Actually weren't there problems in Korea/Japan as well? I seem to remember them giving tickets away to school kids.
Huge demand in Japan for tickets for all games. It was very tough to get tickets out there. In Korea lots of games were half empty but Brazil, China and the hosts (obviously) had massive demand.
The English have sold 23,000 tickets out of 29,000. This is just for their FA allocation - there are at least double that sold via FIFA. Out of the 6,000 they are short 3,000 of 3,500 of these are for the 3rd place game which nobody cares about. So you are 2,500 tickets short for 7 games in total - pretty good and just about sold out. There are tons of people that don't bother with the English FA associaiton process because you have to pay to join and traditionally your chances of getting tickets for something like this is minimal unless you see a lot of home and away games. So my two cents worth is that England is pretty much sold out and if they are given a higher allocaiton then they will sell more. I remember standing in line at Anfield as a kid skipping off school so I could get tickets for European nights etc. But now I wouldn't bother and would say - it's not worth it (I know the ticket process has changed but I am using it this for comparison). But if someone made it easier for me to get tickets then I would go for it. If England fans can get tickets some will decide in another 2 months "I think I'm up for that".