Olympic football capacities cut (From Basildon Recorder)

Olympic football capacities cut

7:57am Wednesday 18th July 2012 in National Sport © Press Association 2013

London 2012 have revealed plans to reduce the capacity of some stadiums after tickets for the Olympics football tournament failed to sell out.

While a large quantity of tickets have been sold, organisers LOCOG said there are around one million football tickets left. This figure has been cut in half, however, by reducing capacity at stadiums, meaning 250,000 football tickets are currently available. In addition to this, a further 200,000 football tickets are due to go on sale after being returned by Olympics committees from around the world.

A spokesman for LOCOG said: "We are planning to reduce capacity across the venues by up to 500,000 tickets across the tournament. This will involve possibly not using a tier, or an area of a ground, in some of the venues. This can apply to men's and women's football, if necessary."

Overall around 700,000 Olympics tickets are yet to be sold, with 50,000 available for other sports as well as a soon-to-be-returned set of 200,000.

Despite the fact tickets remain available with just days remaining, London 2012 chairman Lord Coe insisted on Tuesday that ticket sales were "not in bad shape".

The former middle-distance runner said about 150,000 football tickets would also be available through the Ticketshare programme.

Lord Coe added: "They are in reduced-size venues, of course. We have scaled down the size of those venues.

"We've sold more football tickets than we've sold for anything else.

"We're not in bad shape on tickets. It was always going to be that football tickets were the challenge but I think we'll do pretty well."