The French are getting ready for the World Cup party with dancing, music and lots of riot police

By WENDELL STEAVENSON /LONDON

ith less than a month to go before the kickoff for the 1998 World Cup, France is gearing up for a party. A $10 million "football festival" in Paris is planned to open the tournament on June 9, before players representing 32 countries square off in 10 cities of the host nation. A pre-Cup crowd of 100,000 people is expected to join four parades of musicians and dancers as they boogie over to the Place de la Concorde.

But as the celebrations are beamed around the world, the French Organizing Committee (C.F.O.) will be trying to avoid the equivalent of scoring in its own goal. The C.F.O. and FIFA, the governing body of world soccer, have been besieged for months by criticism of everything from ticket-allocation policies to planned heavy-handed policing to the suitability of selling survival knives emblazoned with the World Cup logo. Only some rousing action on the field is likely to erase the memory of the bureaucratic confusion. Says Michel Platini, France's most famous football star and co-president of the committee: "No one ever remembers anything about the committee--they remember goals by Maradona, Pele and others."

That's all very well, say fans, if you've got a ticket to see those brilliant plays. But the committee's ticket policy, reserving 60% of seats for French residents, has roused anger in the rest of Europe. Last month the C.F.O. released a small number of tickets to fans from outside France, triggering a massive telephone headache as millions of callers continuously redialed a ticket hotline only to listen to a busy signal. If the outrage of British, Dutch and Belgian tabloids could be shrugged off, a proposed lawsuit--sponsored by Karel Van Miert, the European Union's commissioner for competition--that challenges the legality of the committee's allocation will be less easy to ignore. Meanwhile, a thriving black market in tickets has arisen. The segregation of fans by nationality inside stadiums, which the French organizers have tried to enforce, could be radically compromised.

Memories of hooliganism have been the prime inspiration for policing the event. French law-enforcement officials have been talking feverishly for months with other European forces--notably the British--to monitor fans known to be violent and to study tactics for avoiding mass confrontations. About 5,000 trained stewards will be deployed within the venues to keep ruffians at bay, and plainclothes police will circulate through crowds looking for troublemakers. About 15,000 extra police officers will patrol venues and cities that are host to World Cup matches. Magistrates will be on hand 24 hours a day, even within the stadiums, to process arrested fans.

The organizers are confident that the show of force will be an effective deterrent, but the C.F.O. has less control than it would like over the 10 venues. Both Paris and Toulouse, for example, have plans to erect giant video screens in public squares on which the games will be shown live to allow fans without tickets to share in the atmosphere. Franck Josek, a mayoral spokesman in northerly Lens, where England will meet Colombia in the final match of its qualifying group, warns soberly that the ploy risks "generating problems." The municipal authorities in Paris and Toulouse do not seem to agree.

But then Lens, a town of 35,000 inhabitants with a grand passion for football, has also refused to toe the committee's line in other ways. It has ignored Cup organizers' attempts to remove fencing in the stadium intended to prevent fans from invading the pitch in celebration. Similar fencing has been involved in some of football's worst crowd disasters--in 1989 in Britain there were 96 deaths from suffocation as a result of being crushed against such fencing, and 84 others died in the Guatemala stadium tragedy of 1996. The municipality argues that it would simply be too expensive for a small town to bear the cost of removing it for the short duration of the World Cup.

Along with obstreperous fans, there are other problems to face, including the possibility of paralyzing labor strikes and the much more remote prospect of terrorist attacks. "We are perfectly aware of the inconvenience we can cause," warns a truck-driver representative from the Union Force Ouvriere, in an open letter. So, presumably, are any would-be terrorists. Sweeps for operatives of Algeria's G.I.A. Islamic terrorists by French police halted a series of bomb attacks in 1995 and 1996. But with a virtual civil war in Algeria, security officials warn that revived networks and renewed attacks are a constant source of concern. "Islamists, Corsicans or Basques--every group that has engaged in violent activity in the past 15 or 20 years worries us," says a ranking police official. All that, however, is merely danger in the abstract. The reality is that France is about to have the biggest party of the summer.

--Reported by Bruce Crumley /Paris