England fans make their presence felt against Paraguay

A combined total of 14,000 tickets for England's three group games were issued to the FA, which has 25,000 members.

Thousands of sponsors' tickets for the opening game with Paraguay were handed back to Fifa, but went on general sale instead of being passed to Soho Square.

FA media officer Andrin Cooper said: "It's very frustrating."

He told the Evening Standard newspaper: "We have been pushing Fifa for more tickets for the last four months and they have always said 'no'.

"We also asked them to inform us that, should there be any extra tickets, they would share that information with us so we could let our members know, but they said they couldn't do that either.

"We would have been grateful for any extra tickets but we logistically needed sufficient time to follow our procedure. We have always said that we will only sell tickets to members and that security checks will be carried out.

"That all takes time and it would be grossly unfair to abandon that procedure at this point."

German organisers responsible for ticket policy insisted it was normal for returned tickets to go on general sale and they could not make an exception for the FA.

A spokesman said: "We have always said we would do this, it's completely normal. These are tickets that anybody can buy."

Not all the seats for the Dutch game were taken

Earlier this week Fifa's Andreas Herren told BBC Sport he was happy with the arrangements, even though there were at least 30,000 England fans in the 48,000 crowd for the match against Paraguay, despite an official allocation of just 5,000.

He likened the situation to "being on a waiting list for a ticket at an airport" and added that 99% of all tickets had now been sold.

That information conflicted with the hundreds of empty seats for the game between Holland and Serbia & Montenegro.

Organising committee spokesman Gerd Graus said: "We are investigating who had these tickets and why they did not hand them back."