Broadcasters have been able to mute the wailing of the vuvuzelas but there's another World Cup controversy that has been far harder for organisers to obscure: the mystery of the empty seats. The opening raft of matches have been as notable for patchy attendance as they have been for low scoring.
Supporters already in South Africa have found themselves unable to get in to supposedly sold-out games, only to see banks of unused seating showing on television pictures.
World football's organising body, Fifa, continues to insist that ticket sales for the tournament in South Africa are higher than any previous finals except for the USA '94.
In staging the first World Cup on African soil, Fifa had vowed to fill the stadium, and set up a four-tier pricing system to ensure that tickets would be affordable to ordinary South African football fans and priced attractively enough to lure Africans from the rest of the continent to make the trip. The South African government insisted that it would bus in schoolchildren, if necessary, to watch matches rather than see empty seats, but has so far been powerless to do anything about this as Fifa red tape has blocked the release of tickets.
A total of 3 million tickets were made available for the month-long tournament, and organisers are insisting that only one week in, it is too early to judge whether mistakes have been made with ticketing. "So far we are happy," said the Fifa spokesman Nicolas Maingot. "You need to look at the bigger picture. We now have the second-highest attendance average since USA in 1994. Of course, it's not nice to see empty seats at stadiums, and especially not at a World Cup".
