Football World Cup 

About Us

On The Ball:

Travel Places have a wealth of experience in handling high profile international sporting events, (our previous successes include the 2006 Commonwealth Games, 2008 Olympic Games and the 2008/09 Volvo Ocean Race), as well as our ongoing operation of Formula 1, A1GP and other smaller international sporting competitions.

We are well placed to handle the travel management for media clients and also football supporters looking to attend England and other national teams' matches in South Africa.

We will be working closely with the airline sponsor for the tournament, Emirates, offering a range of packages for supporters, plus specially negotiated rates with other scheduled carriers for clients travelling on business who will want the most direct routes and choice of services.  We will also be able to provide hotel accommodation and car hire for all our clients.

About the 2010 FIFA World Cup:

The 2010 FIFA World Cup will be the 19th FIFA World Cup, an international tournament for football, that is scheduled to take place between 11 June and 11 July 2010 in South Africa. It will be the first time that the tournament has been hosted by a nation in the Confederation of African Football, leaving the Oceania Football Confederation as the only FIFA Confederation never to have hosted the event.

Five new stadiums are to be built for the tournament (three new match venues and two new practice grounds), and five of the existing venues are to be upgraded. Construction costs are expected to be 8.4 billion Rand. In addition to the stadiums being built and upgraded, South Africa is also planning to improve its current public transport infrastructure within the various cities, with projects such as the Gautrain and the new Bus Rapid Transit system (BRT) titled Rea Vaya. Danny Jordaan, the president of the 2010 World Cup organising committee has said that he expects all stadiums for the tournament to be completed by October 2009.

The country is also going to implement special measures to ensure the safety and security of local and international tourists attending the matches in accordance with standard FIFA requirements.

Tournament Format:

The current format of the tournament involves 32 teams competing for the title at venues within the host nation(s) over a period of about a month - this phase is often called the World Cup Finals. A qualification phase, which currently takes place over the preceding three years, is used to determine which teams qualify for the tournament together with the host nation(s).

There are two stages: a group stage followed by a knockout stage. In the group stage, teams compete within eight groups of four teams each. Eight teams are seeded (including the hosts, with the other teams selected using a formula based on both the FIFA World Rankings and performances in recent World Cups) and drawn to separate groups. The other teams are assigned to different "pots", usually based on geographical criteria, and teams in each pot are drawn at random to the eight groups. Since 1998, constraints have been applied to the draw to ensure that no group contains more than two European teams or more than one team from any other confederation.

Each group plays a round-robin tournament, guaranteeing that every team will play at least three matches. The last round of matches of each group is scheduled at the same time to preserve fairness among all four teams. The top two teams from each group advance to the knockout stage. Points are used to rank the teams within a group.

Since 1994, three points have been awarded for a win, one for a draw and none for a loss (prior to this, winners received two points rather than three). If two or more teams end up with the same number of points, tiebreakers are used: first is goal difference, then total goals scored, then head-to-head results, and finally drawing of lots (i.e. determining team positions at random).

The knockout stage is a single-elimination tournament in which teams play each other in one-off matches, with extra time and penalty shootouts used to decide the winner if necessary.

It begins with the "round of 16" (or the second round) in which the winner of each group plays against the runner-up of another group. This is followed by the quarter-finals, the semi-finals, the third-place match (contested by the losing semi-finalists), and the final.

Please call Dave Freeman on 01903 832888, or you can email your request to us.

Top of page I Home Page