The quadrennial soccer tournament, which is the world’s most watched sporting event, starts on June 11th, and games will be held in sixteen cities spread across the North American continent: eleven in the United States, three in Mexico, and two in Canada. Last year, FIFA, the governing body of world soccer, adopted dynamic pricing for tickets, which could be purchased through its online portal. It also launched its own secondary market, where fans could buy or resell tickets.
FIFA is a not-for-profit organization that is supposedly wholly devoted to developing soccer across the globe. In a letter to the Guardian, Bryan Swanson, FIFA’s media director, wrote that its new ticketing model was designed “to provide access to fans, while at the same time ensuring as much value as possible is retained for redistribution into the game around the world.” But fans have been suffering from sticker shock. When the initial prices were announced last October, some tickets for the first round of group games were listed at sixty dollars. But most tickets cost hundreds of dollars, and prices were even higher for the knockout stages of the tournament. Since then, prices for many games have been raised further, sparking widespread outrage. “It feels like an organization that is coming into a market and is not looking to cultivate repeat business,” Kahn said. “It looks like they are trying to find a way to squeeze out every dollar.”
The tickets come in four categories. At the start of this month, FIFA upped the price of the most expensive Category 1 tickets for the final to nearly eleven thousand dollars. It also raised the prices for Category 3 tickets, the cheapest ones generally available, to nearly six thousand dollars. Prices for games earlier in the competition vary widely, depending on location and who is playing. There’s no set price—that’s how dynamic pricing works. This lack of transparency is one of the things enraging fans, and it makes it tricky to make over-all comparisons. But Henry Bushnell, a reporter for the Athletic who has been diligently tracking the story for months, has pointed out that tickets “are multiple times more expensive than equivalent tickets to previous men’s World Cups.” Counting ticket sales, media rights, and other sources of revenue, FIFA has estimated that this year’s tournament could bring in as much as eleven billion dollars.
It isn’t just ticket prices that are irking fans. For most big stadium events, such as Giants games or Bruce Springsteen concerts, you buy specific seats. But, for this World Cup, fans were obliged to order tickets based on color-coded maps of the stadiums. When FIFA allocated individual seats at the start of this month, “many fans received unfavorable placements, in corners or behind a goal,” Bushnell reported a couple of weeks ago. “Some Category 1 ticket holders were placed in sections that, at one point, were color-coded as Category 2.” Seemingly, the aggrieved fans have no recourse. In the fine print on its ticket terms of use, FIFA says that its stadium maps are “for guidance purposes only.”
In soccer-mad Britain, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has expressed concerns that FIFA could “lose touch with the genuine supporters who make the game so special.” In Brussels, a soccer supporters’ group and a consumer group that represents fans from five countries registered an official complaint with the European Commission, charging FIFA with introducing “excessive” prices and “opaque and unfair purchasing conditions.” (FIFA responded that it had not formally received the complaint, and that it invests World Cup revenue back into soccer.) The complaint captured the feelings of many devoted soccer supporters. One of them is an old college friend of mine, Dan Corry, an English economist, who, since 1982, has attended eleven successive World Cups. This year, he’s planning to make it twelve. He’d like to attend an England game but, so far, the only ticket he has managed to get hold of is for Egypt versus New Zealand in Vancouver, Canada. He bought this ticket on the FIFA resale site for three hundred dollars, plus a fee of forty-five dollars. “Getting tickets is hard, the travel is hard, it’s all hard,” he said to me last week from London. “At other World Cups, the focus seems to be on making sure the fans have a good time. The ticket prices are reasonable, there are fan fests, and the host cities work out how to get fans to the grounds for free. It just doesn’t feel like this World Cup has the idea of making sure the fans have a good time at its center. There are all sorts of other agendas going on.”
