World Cup organisers are praying for an England defeat tonight after it was revealed that most of its security budget is already spent.
The French government set aside £10 million for policing the entire tournament, with the tournament organisers contributing £4 million.
"It is impossible to say now by how much the original budget will be exceeded," a French interior ministry spokesman said. "But it is clear that it will be exceeded by a substantial sum. Since England's match in Marseille and Germany's in Lens, the security operation for these teams' matches alone has had to be doubled."
Policing England has cost the French taxpayer almost four times as much as other teams, with the cost of extra officers for England's matches in Marseille, Toulouse and Lens calculated at £1.07 million, according to interior ministry figures.
By contrast, the total cost of policing three other games at the same venues - France v South Africa, South Africa v Denmark and Spain v Bulgaria - was only £253,500, the ministry said.
The number of officers has to be doubled when England are playing and, instead of the standard one-and-a-half days on duty, officers are booked for three full days to police England's estimated 25,000 fans.
The calculations are made assuming that each officer costs £65 per day. England's match against Columbia last Friday required 1,200 police in Lens, where the game was played, and 1,000 in Lille, the nearest large town where many fans stayed. On top of that came an additional 500 plainclothes officers on duty in both towns, and a heavy police presence in Calais.
In St Etienne, where England play Argentina in a potentially high risk match tonight, the regional prefect, Jean-Yves Audouin, has boosted the police operation to 1,500 from 900 for all the town's previous matches.
Mr Audouin yesterday reiterated his stance that there would be no alcohol ban in the town. "We have had no problems here before, so why should we have any now?" he asked. "If England get to the final, are you suggesting that all the bars in Paris should be shut down?"
He did, however, say that he would review the policy.
France had mobilised one of its largest security operations since the second world war for the World Cup, with over 6,000 officers a day originally planned to be on duty on match days.
But the interior minister, Jean-Pierre Chevenement, admitted yesterday that the scale of the challenge facing the French police had been gravely underestimated.
"We have had to deal with people who we were not familiar with," he said. "We have no experience of German and English hooligans. Everything had to go well inside the stadiums, and it has, but we have had to adapt ourselves to the fact that hooligans have let rip in the towns. That we did not expect, and that is new to us."
Security was very tight at the 1994 World Cup in the United States but there was very little trouble. By the end of the 52-match tournament, fewer than 100 people had been arrested.
This World Cup has seen a total of 700 arrests of people of all nationalities so far after 54 matches, Mr Chevenement said. About 80 have been brought in front of the French courts, and 42 have been sentenced to jail terms. Some 500 people have also been refused entry to France.