There is no exception, those affected included fans from Tokyo to people from the suburbs of Sao Paulo. Thousands of fans to their dismay found that they will not get tickets for which they paid well in advance from travel agents. While some realised this before boarding the flight many faced the reality after arriving in france.

``I am disappointed and irritated and angry, but for the moment I am mostly numb,'' a Hiyachi, a Japanese fan said after arriving in Paris. She had come all the way from Tokyo to see Japan's performance in the World Cup. Her travel agents said they cannot do anything about the tickets as they did not receive them from the organisers.

She is not alone there are 12,000 Japanese fans who have been denied their rightful tickets.

Japanesemedia representatives in Paris said their compatriots were still in a state of complete disbelief but had done little to protest unlike their Brazilian friends.

Hundreds of Brazilians held an impromptu march in a hotel in Paris last night. The disappointed fans were among those who did not receive tickets they had ordered for Wednesday's game between Brazil and Scotland.

Several hundred Scottish fans also were left in the lurch, and as many as 40,000 English soccer supporters paid for tickets they did not receive.

German media reports said that thousands of their fans had been affected by the ticket mystery, what it called the greatest World Cup scandal of all time. Over 1,500 Germans jammed phone lines to a travel agency in Dusseldorf who agreed to supply tickets to them after receiving the payment.

A German travel agent said he cancelled organised trips to Germany's matches with Yugoslavia and the US. And that the potential damages could reach into several millions of marks, after he was not giventhe tickets by the accredited agents.

You can imagine something is not working, said a spokeswoman for the French World Cup Organising Committee, Segolene Valentin.

``There are lot of travel agents that sold tickets they didn't have, never had and knew they would not have.''

While it is hard to trace the vanished tickets, an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 Dutch fans will have to miss their team's opening World Cup match because travel agents have over sold tickets.

``I have the impression that three times as many tickets have been sold as there are seats in the stadium,'' a Dutch Soccer Association spokesman said.

Former Dutch international, Rene Van de Kerkhof threatened legal action against Fifa. The player-turned-tour-operator paid for 550 tickets which were to be distributed to winners of the Dutch lottery's special World Cup draw.

On Thursday, a Belgian ticket agent approved by Fifa, told him the tickets had been sold to five different buyers.

``The whole thing will cost me more than US $200,000 or more, because I have already paid for hotels and transport,'' Kerkhof told journalists in Paris.

Earlier the ticket allocation by the World Cup Organising Committee irked the European Commission which said France should have distributed the tickets equally to all the states rather than allotting majority of them to French fans. Following criticism, France agreed to sell some tickets over phone on a first come first serve basis in April which jammed the telephone lines in Holland.

World Cup Organising Committee members, who did not want to be identified, said that 17 travel agents were approved by the organisers to sell 138,000 tickets, just over five per cent ofthe total.