"There is no world event that is beyond the capacity of Australia to organise superbly," Howard told reporters on Friday.

National Australia Bank, a Socceroos sponsor, has had to fend off media reports that it had become a party-pooper by thinking about installing software to stop its 30,000 employees from visiting Cup-related Web sites.

"There's certainly significant excitement around here for the Australian team," NAB spokesman Jonathan Rose said.

"There's a responsibility on employees not to abuse having Internet but there's nothing to stop them having a look at a World Cup site at their leisure," he said.

Others even see an upside to all the soccer celebrations, with Commonwealth Bank of Australia economist Joseph Capurso saying there is a rough relationship between consumer confidence and the Socceroos' world ranking.

"Sporting successes do seem to have some flow-on effect to consumer confidence," Capurso said in a research paper.

"While there is obviously a big element of tongue-in-cheek in all of this, it cannot be denied that winning the America's Cup in 1983 and awarding Sydney the Olympics in 1993, to cite two examples, gave a sizeable boost to sentiment at those times."

Even the humblest of workers have caught World Cup fever.

Stuart Bell sat huddled in his lonely ticket booth at the Sydney Harbour ferry pier at Manly, watching a portable TV at his feet as Ecuador led Costa Rica just before midnight on Thursday.

"A couple of the blokes bought it from around the corner for this," Bell said. "It's night-time, so ..."

(With additional reporting by Andy Callus in Sydney and Michelle Nichols in Canberra)