“Like the whole country, everyone involved with the team and at The FA has been massively disappointed by the World Cup performance,” Club England managing director Adrian Bevington said. “We fully understand the fans and the wider public anger and frustration. We appreciate that thousands of people spent huge amounts of money to travel to South Africa and understandably feel very let down. We have a responsibility to put immediate and long term plans in place to give England a genuine chance of success in tournaments to come.”

Asked what he thought of the initiative, Mark Perryman from the England Fans Supporters' Club said: “You won't find a fan who'd turn down a free ticket to see England at Wembley but, at £15 per head, it's a bargain.”

At the same time, Hungarian football fans are still keen on their choice of sport, in spite of the traditionally poor performance of the Hungarian football. The website of sport newspaper Nemzeti Sport generated 250% increase in advertisement revenues during the World Cup compared to the same period of last year, Nemzeti Sport Online (NSO) said in a press release.

Not only the number of downloads but the average time spent on the site have increased during the football world cup, NSO says, noting that visitors spent 12 minutes on average viewing the site.

The NSO launched a databank prior the world cup, which, together with real-time reporting on the games, attributed to the success of the site, the company claims.

The mobile version of NSO has also been a favorite of football fans, as the mobile site registered a record number, 12,000, visitors during the Netherlands-Slovakia and the Brazil-Chile games on June 28.

The record day in terms of visitor number was June 21, when 174,467 visitors viewed the page and 1,322,160 downloads were registered – it was the day of the Portugal-North Korea and the Spain-Honduras games.

More than 125,000 people visited the site on the day of the final, generating nearly 900,000 downloads.

“The number of visitors and downloads prove that we succeeded in meeting our target, even without a live broadcast and that our content elements were very popular with our visitors,” said NSO editor Tamás Sz. Nagy. “The high number of downloads and feedbacks from our readers assure us that sport fans regard NSO as a credible and up-to-date source of information.” (BBJ)