Fifa Ticket Centre

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Cape Town - When Cape Town businessman Tom Donaldson went to collect his 28 World Cup tickets, he found that they weren't quite what he had asked for.

Instead of the category four tickets he had asked for, he had been allocated 28 wheelchair seats.

And it took him and his wife an agonising six weeks, plus a dozen visits to the FIFA ticketing office in Cape Town, to get them changed.

At one point, he said, FIFA offered him instead 24 tickets in other categories, at almost twice the cost of the R8 540 he had already paid for the seats he wanted.

The 24 did not include the Cape Town semi-final, for which he had for a year believed he had four seats.

In the end it was his wife Avril, who he says has a more forceful personality than he does, who secured the rectification this week.

"The ticketing centre has now handed over 24 of the tickets, and has promised the remaining four within days," he said on Friday.

"It's an enormous relief. I'm over the moon."

Complexity

Part of the reason for his angst was that some of the tickets were meant for his son, a former professional footballer, his son's wife, and three friends.

They had already paid $20 000 (about R151 904) in air tickets to fly out from the United States for the tournament, on the basis that Donaldson had the tickets in the bag.

Donaldson said he placed his request for the tickets during phase one of the ticket sales 15 months ago, and received confirmation a month later that he had been allocated 28 "WC" tickets.

It was only when he went to collect them last month that he realised the "WC" meant wheelchair, not World Cup.

Donaldson, a soccer fan with five world cups under his belt, said he had never seen "such complexity" in ticket sales as he had encountered in South Africa.

"Who dreamed up this nonsense?" he asked. "It's mind-blowing."

He said the head of the Cape Town ticketing office had, in the last few visits, been "incredibly helpful".

"People like him shouldn't have to contend with this bullshit that was created by FIFA," he said. "It's just not good enough."

One of the ironies for Donaldson was that while he was trying desperately to get rid of the wheelchair tickets, Disabled People SA were complaining in Parliament that none of the cup venues offered enough seating for the disabled.

Wheelchair tickets in fact allow two people in: the disabled person, and an attendant.

But you have to be wheelchair-bound to use them.