FIFA says it is investigating why, more than 5,000 people with tickets skipped Uruguay’s 1-0 win over Egypt in the opening game at Yekaterinburg. FIFA says it allocated 32,278 tickets but the official attendance for the game was 27,015 but pockets of orange seats were clearly visible in the lower tiers of the stadium which has a 33,061 capacity.
A FIFA spokesman said: “The fact that the actual attendance is lower than the number of allocated tickets can be due to different factors, including ‘no shows’ on match day, which FIFA is currently investigating.”
Regional sports minister, Leonid Rapoport, also noted, “There were some bald spots and it wasn’t very pleasant.”
FIFA records show the last World Cup match with a smaller crowd was Paraguay’s 2-0 win over Slovakia in South Africa in 2010, which attracted 26,643 fans. Five days before that game, 23,871 attended a 1-1 draw between New Zealand and Slovakia, the smallest number recorded for any World Cup game this century. However, at the last World Cup in Brazil, no game had fewer than 37,000 people in the crowd.