In the Sun's version of popular mythology, German tourists get up extra early in order to plonk their towels on the sun-loungers right beside the pool before everyone else. The paper played on that stereotype yesterday when they gleefully reported how they had managed to display a giant St George Cross towel in Berlin's Olympic Stadium, the venue for the World Cup Final on July 9. With Wayne Rooney's 'metatarsal miracle' recovery having confounded medical wisdom (and Gary Neville's scepticism), optimists will hope that prank is prophetic.
However, there is one activity at which the English are even better-organised than mythical towel-laying German holiday-makers: the lucrative but shady business of buying and selling tickets for big football matches. Thus just outside the ticket centre at the stadium in Cologne there are four English guys who are trying to persuade those queuing up to collect tickets for the Sweden-England game here on June 20 to trade their seats for large sums of money. "I'll give you a thousand euros for one, guaranteed," said Josh, one of the quartet, boasting a Mancunian accent and the shorts, T-shirt and close-cropped hair favoured by many English hooligans.
Josh and his three accomplices - whose faces I recognise from seeing them go about their business outside Premier League, Champions League and FA Cup matches at places like Highbury, Old Trafford and Stamford Bridge - are there all day every day. "They have been here already for three or four days now," sighs an uniformed official inside the ticket centre. Given there are still 12 days to go before the probable Group B decider, that is serious forward planning.
One of Josh's mates holds a thick stack of little cards, like the ones that drop through your door advertising a local minicab company, which say "Wir kaufen WM Karten" - "We buy World Cup tickets" and give two German mobile numbers to call. Another is carrying cheaply-photocopied flyers bearing the words "Ich suche WM Ticket zum Kaufen" - "I am looking for World Cup ticket to buy", with a different local mobile number underneath. All the new arrivals in the queue are given one of each.
If the quartet are willing to stump up 1,000 euros for one seat, the mind boggles as to how much they will be charging ticketless England fans nearer kickoff on June 20. Sadly, no matter how high their prices, they will still sell every ticket they have acquired.
Happily the touts seem frustrated at the lack of takers for their big-money offers. Perhaps those lucky enough to have secured precious seats for the World Cup see the quartet for what they are: not unlucky genuine England fans desperate to see their team in action, but rather as opportunists preying on, and profiting from, a disgracefully unfair system of ticket distribution for the tournament which guarantees the fans of each team playing a match a mere 8% of the tickets - while sponsors get 16% and the corporate hospitality brigade another 11%. So much for Fifa protecting "the people's game". This low priority for loyal fans is a scandal which disfigures and devalues the World Cup. Fifa president Sepp Blatter should feel ashamed.
"If anyone sells them a ticket they are breaking the law, and if the people buying the tickets then sell any, they too are acting illegally," explains the official in the Cologne ticket centre. So can the authorities not do anything to thwart the touts' approaches? "They are standing on public property, so nothing can be done," she replied. This is a country which decided unilaterally (and unwisely) to require all 3.1 million people attending the World Cup to have to produce their passport and prove the name in it matches that on their ticket at random checks outside matches. Yet it apparently cannot organise a few police officers to arrest, or at least move on and disrupt, a handful of people who, are breaking the law and threatening the segregation arrangements at games. It's time for a little more of that famed Teutonic efficiency, surely?
Denis Campbell, The Observer's Sports News Correspondent, is part of the paper's team covering the World Cup in Germany.
