as qualifying for the event itself.

Start making your plans now, advises Chris Gibbons.

Marcio Santos has just headed Brazil's equaliser against England and the stadium erupts in a riot of green and gold flags and banners. As the drums come alive with a throbbing samba beat, you could easily be in the Maracana Stadium in Rio de Janeiro.

But this is RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C. , in the US of A and, with 54,118 in the house, it's the first time soccer has sold out in a stadium that is hallowed ground to the Redskins. Three days earlier, almost 35,000 turned up on a Thursday afternoon to watch the Germans, with typical Teutonic tenacity, turn a 3-0 halftime deficit against the erratically brilliant Brazilians into a creditable 3-3 draw on their way to winning the four-nation US Cup in June.

Make no mistake, while the average American couldn't care less about the game in a country where there is no professional soccer league worth talking about, the 1994 World Cup, which will be held in the US from June 17 to July 17, will probably be the most successful ever.

The stadiums and facilities in the nine host cities are superb and given the huge interest among America's ethnic groups, the fact that an estimated 16 million Americans now play the game, and the American panache for hype and promotion, it has the makings of a spectacular - and hugely profitable - event.

Soccer is still a hard sell in a nation obsessed by baseball, basketball and the NFL - especially to the media - but early cynicism in other soccer countries about a World Cup playing to half empty stadiums seems unfounded.

The worldwide TV audience for the 1990 World Cup in Italy was a staggering 26.7 billion, yet no major US network deal has been signed. ABC's coverage of the June US Cup game between Germany and the US was the first time a US game had been carried live on national TV. The Americans' 2-0 humbling of England in the same tournament didn't even rate a line in many leading newspapers.

"Our mission,'' declares a World Cup brochure, "is to present the greatest World Cup in history and to leave a legacy for soccer in the United States.

"Yours is to enjoy it.'' Providing you can get a ticket, of course. More than 3.6 million tickets - a World Cup record - will be sold for USA '94. More than two million of them will be sold to the general public in the US and most of them were snapped up within hours in June when tickets for the group and first round games went on sale at the nine stadiums.

Tickets for the remaining games - the quarter finals, semi-finals and thefinal - will go on sale in October or November through what organisers call a "computerised equal access system'' - a fancy name for a lottery, more about which later.

Following the draw for the 24 qualified teams in Las Vegas on December 19 this year, Team Series packages will also be available to enable fans to follow their favourite team. Any remaining individual game tickets will be available from February, 1994.

Stadium ticket prices are set up in gold, silver and bronze categories, with gold being the best seats. Prices range from $25 for a first round bronze ticket to $475 for a gold seat at the final but the situation is complicated by the fact that tickets are initially only being sold in Stadium Series packages.

This means that if you want to watch a game being staged in Giants Stadium, New Jersey, for example, you have to buy the series package for the five games being played there - costing from $140 for a bronze series to $355 for a gold series.

At the time of writing, the World Cup ticketing office in New York reports that only Detroit had tickets left - gold packages at $270 - and described the chances of getting one of the 102,000 tickets for the final in LA's Rose Bowl as "very slim''.

All nine venues, with the exception of the Pontiac Silverdome in Detroit -the first indoor stadium used in World Cup history - will stage four first round games and a second round game. Detroit will host four first round games.

Quarter-final venues will be Stanford Stadium in San Francisco, Foxboro Stadium in Boston, the Cotton Bowl in Dallas and Giants Stadium. The latter will also host one semi-final with the Rose Bowl in LA hosting the other, as well as the third place game and final.

Because of the Stadium Series set-up, local travel agents such as Meyer Agencies are concentrating on putting together West Coast packages taking in the quarter-final in San Francisco, then the semi-final, third place play-off and final in Los Angeles. Getting tickets has even been difficult for travel agents. Carl Paiva of Meyer Agencies says his company had to send organisers an audited company report before they were permitted to become authorised World Cup tour operators.

Meyer are currently working on a package that includes airfare, tickets to all four games in San Francisco and Los Angeles, including the final, hotels, meals and transfers. The all-inclusive price is expected to be around $4,000.

Paiva says he also hoping to arrange packages taking in the four group games and second round game at the Citrus Bowl in Orlando, and an East Coast tour taking in the quarter-final and semi-final at Giants Stadium.

"There is an enormous amount of interest in the World Cup in Bermuda,'' says Paiva, who has at least one group of 90 local soccer fans on his waiting list.

At the time of writing, Meyer were waiting on ticket confirmation before releasing package prices.

Half the fun of a World Cup, say some past campaign veterans, is simply to turn up and follow some of the more colourful smaller nations through the early group games. Given the expanded nature of the modern World Cup with 24teams and 52 games, the early matches are rarely sold out, especially those involving small nations.

However, if you don't buy into a package, your chances of getting tickets to the later round games are slim at best.

First, you must send a stamped addressed business-size envelope to World Cup USA 94, Department T, PO Box 1994, Los Angeles, California, 90051-1994. This will bring you a ticket order form. Once that is returned to LA, you are then at the mercy of the "computerised equal access system''. Get lucky and you might get a ticket.

Still, you've probably got a better chance of being there than England. For further World Cup ticket details and information, call the Public Information hotline on 310-277-9494.

Brazilian fans in party, mood during the US Cup at RFK Stadium, Washington.

SEPTEMBER 1993 RG MAGAZINE