Rent a room - The alternative to expensive hotels
As an alternative to hotel accommodation, why not simply rent a room for the night?  Immobilien Scout 24 is probably Germany's largest online estate agency and property letting broker.  Over the last few months, they've been encouraging their landlord clients to offer spare rooms and flats for short-term rent (as short as one night) to fans visiting Germany for the World Cup. 

To facilitate this, they've developed a special World Cup section on their website, which is largely in English.

Find private landlords
All you have to do is click on the town you're interested in (a map shows all of the 12 venues) and then enter search criteria, such as distance from the ground, the type of accommodation (room, apartment, house etc.), the first date you need it for and, if you want, a price range.

After you click 'Display offers', you'll be shown a list of the available properties ... and here's where a little bit of German comes in handy, as some of the listings are partially still in German (see tips below).

You then click on any property listed that takes your fancy and fill in a simple form to request more information (or in some cases click a link to the letting company's website, or 'Homepage' in German).

Most of the rooms, flats or houses include bed linen.  However, this is something that would be worth checking with the landlord when agreeing the price.  Payment is direct with the landlord on site.  In fact, once Immobilien Scout 24 has done its bit as broker and put you in touch with the landlord, you're free to negotiate whatever deal you can ... so it could work out a lot better than paying through the nose if hotel rooms are hard to come by!

Tips for understanding the site
Here are a few tips to help with the bits that are not in English, or that otherwise look a bit odd to non-German eyes:

Bedroom numbers are shown as '1,0', '2,0' etc..  Remember that the Germans use a comma as a decimal point, so that means '1.0', '2.0' etc.  Exactly how you can have 'point something' of a bedroom, I'm not sure ... maybe a bed-cum-sitting room is '0.5' of a bedroom!

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