Geneva: FIFA President Sepp Blatter on Sunday criticised ticketing arrangements for the forthcoming World Cup finals in Germany, saying the Germans still had to prove they could hold a successful competition.
"In Germany, they'll have to make an effort if they want to repeat what happened in South Korea in 2002 or France in 1998," the head of world football's governing body said in a newspaper interview.
"They'll first have to prove that the World Cup will be as good as the expectations," he told the Swiss newspaper NZZ am Sonntag.
Underlining qualms about a lottery-style draw for tickets buyers, Blatter said countless meetings with the German football federation on the issue were not getting anywhere.
"It would probably have been better if we had taken over the ticket sales ourselves. The Germans chose a system that I really don't understand," he added.
FIFA would handle ticketing arrangements for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa again, Blatter added.
The German organisers of the 2006 World Cup finals said after a third batch of sales last month that 84 percent of match tickets -- 2.6 million tickets -- had already been sold, with demand outstripping supply.
Black market tickets surfaced on online auction sites with prices for the knockout stages hiked up by thousands of euros.
FIFA is hoping to generate about 1.7 billion euros (two billion dollars) in revenue from the this summer's World Cup, mainly from television rights and sponsors, and its biggest ever profit from the event, about 110 million euros.
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