Interesting Information About Germany 2006.

FIFA's fight against ambush marketing produced some funny facts. Funny fact #1 is the prohibition of sponsor's names other than the main sponsors remaining around the stadiums. Be it water taps or be it ATMs, there must not be any other company’s name visible in that area, nicknamed "precincts".

Funny fact #2: when entering the stadium to view the matches, T-shirts or other clothes with a logo of a brand of one of the main sponsor’s competitors must not be worn. Security staff is allowed to collect these things and hand them back to the owners after the match. So in case you might see many topless people in the World Cup stadiums, this is the reason: They didn’t read the instructions sent along with the tickets that contain this paragraph.

Additionally, FIFA has ensured that all of their employees and sponsors benefit from a special very low tax rate, introduced only for the time of the World Cup. Actually this is an illegal process in Germany, nevertheless FIFA has the power to take hold. Being neither fish nor fowl, FIFA is neither a company nor a club. Still, FIFA is doing everything there is to maximize their profit.

When a World Cup match takes place, no other event may proceed in a strictly defined area around the stadium on that day. Concert organisers of Berlin who usually arrange concerts close to the Olympiastadion already tried to sue FIFA for this regulation, but were repelled by the courts immediately.

The only two examples where FIFA did not succeed in restricting the participants‘ rights are: The first one is the afore mentioned usage of German expressions like World Cup when advertising. The second intended restriction that will not be implemented is the dictation of how and with which specific words the media must report of the World Cup. That also would have included the prohibition of spreading photographs of match scenes of World Cup matches sooner than 90 minutes after the end of the matches. Luckily, both will not be the case.