DURBAN, South Africa -- FIFA president Sepp Blatter is confident the World Cup 2010 stadiums will be ready on time and said the workers building them will get a bonus if they don't go on strike again.
Local fans discovered on Saturday they will get cheap and even free tickets to the games.
In fact, the only people missing out on the eve of Sunday's World Cup draw appear to be the English.
Having already missed out on the European Championship, they now find it will be even harder to get to World Cup 2010.
After South Africa was chosen to host the 2010 championship, work on constructing or renovating 10 stadiums began so slowly that there were strong fears they might not be finished in time.
A strike earlier this month held up construction of the Moses Madhiba Stadium in Durban and union leaders threatened similar disruption at the other nine sites.
Blatter, who visited the Durban stadium on Saturday, said a bonus system had now resolved the dispute and he was convinced that all the grounds will be ready ahead of schedule.
"We are not only confident but we are sure that all the construction will be ready for the 2010 World Cup," Blatter told reporters on Saturday.
"To be transparent, we may not get everything right that we want to have ready for the Confederations Cup 2009, but there are enough stadiums available."
Local organizers also announced that many of the tickets sold for the 64 games will go on a cheap-price basis to local fans, most of whom cannot afford the regular World Cup rates. The cheapest at last year's championship in Germany cost $51 while up to 20 percent of the tickets sold for the group games in South Africa will be as low as $20.
Some will even be free. Organizers are working out a system of distributing 120,000 complimentary tickets, which also will only go to local fans.
Danny Jordaan, chief executive officer of the organizing committee who has been pushing South Africa's World Cup cause for more than a decade, said he hopes the cheap "category-four" tickets don't fall into the wrong hands through scalpers.
"If someone is sitting there with these tickets in an England shirt or a Belgian shirt that will be so because something has gone wrong," he said. "That will defeat the purpose of category-four tickets."
