2006 World Cup and the Sad Old Rock Stars

Look...it's quite simple. The last SuperBowl had Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson's right breast. Next years' World Cup has, by contrast, Brian Eno and, um, Peter Gabriel. Yup, the guy that left Roxy Music when they started to learn to write songs thirty years ago. And Peter Gabriel who was the guy that sang with Genesis. No, not that guy...the other one. Who ? Exactly.

Neither of these pretentious old saddoes is exactly ideal for writing a World Cup football anthem - they'll probably come up with an analogy between 'The Idiot' (not the Iggy Pop song..the story by Dostoevsky) and Ronaldinho. I'm going to start crying now....feel free to join me.

I love football...footie...soccer...call it what you will, but the Americans always outclass us when it comes to putting on a show and it's just embarassing. The 2006 World Cup will be the most televised event ever and we get Brian Eno. Wake me when it's over.

More World Cup Ticket Complaints

This is getting to be beyond a joke. Not content with allowing MasterCard to be the only credit card that is accepted when buying World Cup tickets, now people are being charged just because they've applied for standby tickets.

"...applicants have to pay in advance without knowing whether they will get a ticket and are automatically charged a five euro ($5.89) service fee whether successful or not..." The German Consumer Association have noted.

This whole thing is - to use the technical term - a fcuking shambles. If the idea was to prevent football fans from watching the 2006 World Cup Finals, then it's succeeding extremely well. You can, of course, still purchase tickets via SoccerTravel in the USA, as well as companies like TicketCity and RazorGator but you'll have to pay a premium.

Nevertheless, FIFA have made a complete mess of allocating tickets for next year's World Cup football finals and it's about time that someone with a little bit of marketing nous took a good hard look at it.