Why FIFA’s 2026 World Cup is such a rip-off

The details are a bit foggy now but the best gift I have ever received was for my 16th birthday in October 1988: a quarter-season ticket for the Detroit Pistons.

It was from my parents and it cost about $250 — I think I had to mow the lawn a few times as a contribution. For that sum, I got a seat for about 10 regular-season games in the second tier of the Pistons’ brand-new home, the Palace of Auburn Hills. It also guaranteed a ticket for one game in every round of the play-offs, should the Pistons get that far, although I cannot remember if that was included in the initial price or it was a right to buy a ticket at face value.

What I do recall — very vividly — is that the Pistons did reach the play-offs and I watched them blitz the hated Boston Celtics in round one, sweep the Milwaukee Bucks in the conference semi-final, beat up Michael Jordan in the conference finals, and then right the wrong of the stolen 1988 championship by larrupin’ the Los Angeles Lakers in the finals.

I went to the first game of the finals and saw a 109-97 victory for Isiah Thomas and the Bad Boys. The ticket cost $25. I know because it is in a frame on the wall above my desk and I am looking at it right now.

If we use the U.S. consumer price index, that is $67 in today’s money. Last year, according to ticketing platform TickPick, the average price for a ticket to the NBA Finals between the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Indiana Pacers was $1,147 — 17 times the inflation-adjusted price I paid 36 years before. And the 2025 price was 25 per cent down on the previous season, when the Celtics played the Dallas Mavericks in a battle of big-market teams.

Seventeen times.

If you are thinking the Pistons made a mistake and undercharged me, or a zero has faded from the ticket stub, there are other tickets in the same picture frame. Apparently, I spent an August afternoon in the bleachers at Tiger Stadium for $4, and I went to several Lions, Michigan and Red Wings games in the late 1980s for $20 or less. Actually, the Lions might have been ripping me off.

America, what has happened?

How did we — well, you, as my family returned to the UK before I could see the Pistons go back-to-back in 1990 — get from there to a place where face-value tickets for this summer’s World Cup final cost almost $11,000?

I have heard FIFA president Gianni Infantino’s excuse — “we are in the market in which entertainment is the most developed in the world, so we have to apply market rates” — but what have you got to say for yourselves?

When my colleague Henry Bushnell wrote about this topic in December, he identified the main economic factors that first attracted FIFA to the “most developed” entertainment market in the world.

Henry’s piece explained that the price of everything in the U.S. has doubled since 2000 but the cost of live sport has increased at double that rate, thanks to ticket resale apps, the surging wealth of America’s highest earners and the relative scarcity of premium sport in a large country.

Some of you expanded on these points in the comments section.

“If you care enough, save up and pay for a ticket,” was one contribution. “They’re World Cup games, not a social welfare project, and the tickets should go for whatever the market will bear,” was another.

One subscriber asked: “Are all passionate fans dirt poor?” before answering his own question with the following admonishment: “Maybe they should have focused more on their careers and less on sports fandom.”

While another, leaning into a current social-media debate, wrote “it’s fascinating how elusive the basic concept of supply and demand is to the European mind”, which is fascinating when you consider that the phrase was coined and popularised by British economists more than 250 years ago.

What is fascinating to this European mind is that the average price for a Super Bowl ticket has increased from $700 in 2006 to nearly $10,000 this year but fans have not taken up their torches and pitchforks and marched on NFL HQ. Basic inflation over the last 20 years is about 64 per cent. Even after converting the 2006 price to today’s equivalent, Super Bowl inflation is running at close to 800 per cent.

OK, I admit the reader comments cited above were not representative of the overall debate, as the majority of you seem to agree that watching sport has got very expensive in the U.S. — too expensive, in fact, for many Americans.

There was less agreement, though, on how, when and why this happened. So I asked another British economic migrant to the U.S. who remembers the late 1980s.

“First, player salaries have exploded,” said Peter Moore, who came to California to sell sportswear but ended up running Sega, Microsoft’s Xbox business and EA Sports before becoming Liverpool FC’s chief executive in 2017. Santa Barbara Sky FC, his new team, will join the USL Championship next year.

“Free agency, global media exposure and enormous television contracts have transformed elite athletes into worldwide brands. Payrolls in all the pro sports leagues are exponentially higher than they once were. Those costs inevitably flow downstream to the consumer.

“Second, the stadium experience has changed. Decades ago, many venues were relatively simple places to watch a game. Today’s stadiums are billion-dollar entertainment complexes filled with premium seating, luxury suites, massive video boards, hospitality areas, technology infrastructure and year-round commercial development.”

For me, those “simple places” were the Pontiac Silverdome and Tiger Stadium; for Moore, they were the Coliseum and Angel Stadium. He has swapped them for the Allegiant and SoFi — expensive places to run.

“Another major factor is media economics,” he continued. “Ironically, the more valuable sports became on television, the more live attendance became positioned as a premium experience.

“Teams realised that being in the building was no longer just about watching the game. It became about exclusivity, atmosphere, status and entertainment. That shifted pricing models dramatically.”

Dr Alan Fyall is an expert on hospitality and tourism at the University of Central Florida. He is another Englishman in America.

“There are lots of differences between fans in the UK and U.S., but one of the biggest is that when Americans go to see a game, they expect more,” said Fyall.

“They have a glass-half-full attitude to what the day should be, starting with the tailgate experience, into the pre-game entertainment, half-time show, food, drink, merch, the works. British fans do not expect as much and many of them know the game might not be that entertaining!

“But that leads to another difference: American fans are more fickle. Most of them don’t understand why you would carry on supporting a bad team. The American market is more demanding. There is an unwritten rule here: I’ll pay but you better entertain me.

“Americans look at buying a ticket for a big game in the same way that a European might think about a city break, music festival or some other bucket-list item.

“Scarcity is another factor. If you look at the most popular sport in the U.S., football, most NFL teams only have eight or nine home games a season, so they are willing to spend more per game than a British football fan who has twice as many home games per season.”

All of these are solid points but many of them could be said of the Bundesliga, English Premier League or La Liga. Europe’s sporting heroes are global names with big salaries, our stadiums have improved, our expectations have risen.

“Dynamic pricing has also changed the landscape,” explains Moore.

“Teams now price tickets similarly to airlines or hotels,” he said. “Big opponents, rivalry games, weekends and play-off races drive prices higher in real time based on demand. Technology has made pricing more aggressive and sophisticated.”

Fyall agrees.

“The ticket-resale companies have a lot to answer for,” he said. “While they have definitely made it easier for people to buy tickets, they have had an inflationary effect on the market.”

Reselling, scalping, touting — call it what you will — is not a new thing. Entrepreneurial folk have been speculating in tickets for popular events since the 1700s and for most of that time, they have stood outside the relevant venue, trying to buy low and sell high.

In most U.S. states, it was against the law for decades, although it was rarely a police priority as most people viewed it as a victimless crime and occasionally quite useful.

That ambiguity was fine until about 20 years ago, when the first online ticket resale platforms appeared, which made something that was already hard to police almost impossible to prevent. So, one by one, the states moved from banning scalping to regulating it.

It did not take long for the teams and venues to realise what had changed. Major League Baseball’s Colorado Rockies were the first pro sports team to introduce the concept of variable pricing, or categorisation, when they started charging fans an extra $8 for weekend games against good teams in the late 1990s.

Fast forward a decade and the San Francisco Giants realised they could go one step further by setting a price range for their hardest-to-sell tickets and letting supply and demand work its magic. It sounds quite restrained now but the Giants’ first dynamic-pricing algorithm moved up and down in 50-cent steps in a range between $5 and $50.

But like the proverbial frog happily splashing about in tepid water, the American consumer did not notice that the temperature was gradually rising.

Lindsay Owens is an economist who works for consumer rights group Groundwork Collaborative. Her first book, Gouged, is out later this year.

“The price of watching live sport — and live music — has exploded over the last decade for three main reasons: monopoly, dynamic pricing and scarcity,” she said.

“Of the top 100 arenas in the world, 68 are in the U.S. and Ticketmaster controls 53 of them. That is a remarkable level of control over the market and it has enabled them to pile on junk fees every time someone buys a ticket.”

If you’re wondering if Owens’ claim of monopoly is a little strong, in April, a federal jury in New York found Live Nation, Ticketmaster’s parent company, guilty of operating as a monopoly and overcharging customers.

“Then you add dynamic pricing to the equation, which has turned the buying of tickets into an auction,” Owens continued. “We used to wait in a line until the ticket office put up a ‘sold out’ sign. Now we keep bidding on our phones.

“And, finally, we have seen sports franchises engineer scarcity by actually reducing the number of available tickets. Rather than expand access, they have built new stadiums, or renovated existing venues, to reduce overall seating capacity while increasing the number of luxury suites and skyboxes. By creating greater scarcity and catering to wealthier fans, teams have been able to drive up ticket prices across the board.”

Owens pointed out that MLB’s Atlanta Braves, Florida Marlins, Minnesota Twins and New York Yankees have all built new homes with at least 8,000 fewer seats than their old homes, while research indicates that the typical NFL stadium has shrunk from 72,000 seats to more like 65,000.

So, we have stadiums getting smaller at the same time as America has got bigger. When I left the U.S. in 1989, its population was just under 250million. My, how you’ve grown. The population is now just under 350million, a 40 per cent increase.

The “big four” leagues have all added expansion teams over the last 40 years, and Major League Soccer has joined the party, but none has gone beyond 32 teams yet, which seems remarkable to someone like me who comes from a far smaller country with 150-plus professional soccer teams alone.

Do you know what else seems remarkable? That Americans are not as mad as hell about these prices. Or am I missing something?

“I definitely think you’re missing it,” said Bailey Brown, president of the Independent Supporters Council (ISC), a collective that promotes soccer supporters’ culture and advocates for fair treatment for its 140 members across the U.S. and Canada.

“I don’t know anyone who isn’t talking about how insane the World Cup pricing is and how we won’t pay it. Typical U.S. soccer fans think the prices are stupid. As parents often say to their kids: ‘I’m not mad… I’m just disappointed’.

“I think many people are hoping that prices come down as we get closer to the games, especially if the tickets aren’t selling. But, honestly, I do feel like it’s a form of protest to just not go, and watch it on TV.”

Fyall is another to tell me I am wrong to think Americans do not care just because they are not organising mass walkouts or refusing to spend any additional money in stadiums, as British fans have done recently. Americans protest by withdrawing their credit cards completely.

“There is anger here but I don’t think it’s the same level of outrage, as Americans have grown used to these prices,” he said.

“The majority of fans, who cannot afford these tickets, will just say: ‘That’s OK, I’ll watch it at home on my big TV, with my own beers and snacks, or, if I want company, I’ll go to a bar and watch it’.”

Brown, Fyall, Moore and Owens also all made the point that you do not need a second mortgage to watch live sport in the U.S., if you are willing to shop around.

“America has got very expensive, particularly since Covid,” said Fyall.

“There’s no getting around that. Hotels, restaurants, flights… everything is much more expensive than it was. But you can still see live sport without breaking the bank, at least in terms of most American salaries.

“I go to Orlando City games and I’ll probably spend a total of $100 on the ticket, food, drink and parking. Maybe I’ve been here too long but I think that’s decent value.”

Owens raised the example of the baseball-meets-Broadway show that is a Savannah Bananas game as the exhibition team’s tickets are distributed via a lottery, with prices starting at $35, with no fees, and they have even launched their own secondary marketplace for fans to buy unneeded tickets at face value.

Brown also pointed out that the ISC has successfully lobbied MLS to cap the prices away fans are charged, which is a policy its English equivalent, the Football Supporters Association, has secured, too.

And, just to underline this point, the resale sites tell me that if I was in Philadelphia today, as opposed to later this month when I arrive for the World Cup, I could see the Phillies play for as little as $29. Not bad.

So, maybe a better question is what is FIFA playing at?

“FIFA may have overestimated the North American fanbase and thought that they would be able to charge prices we have never seen before, that we would just accept it and pay,” said Brown.

In a recent article for political magazine The American Prospect, Owens and her colleague Nia Law wrote: “At a moment when more than two-thirds of voters say essentials are becoming less affordable and nearly half are drawing down savings just to get by, attending the World is simply out of reach.

“In Los Angeles, the cheapest tickets to the opener would cost the average local family the equivalent of nearly seven months of (Affordable Care Act) premiums. For a fan travelling to LA from neighbouring Nevada, the combined price of parking and the cheapest ticket to a quarterfinal would rival the rent of a studio apartment back home.

“The irony is hard to miss: in chasing maximum revenue, FIFA risks shrinking the very audience that made the World Cup seemingly priceless.”

It is a view echoed across the political spectrum.

Speaking to my colleague Adam Crafton last year, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani said: “As a lifelong soccer fan, I have grown up with memories of the World Cup, whether watching on TV or being there myself. I went in 2010 to South Africa. I know what this tournament represents, which is the most popular tournament in the world, and also what it could be, which is a celebration of the world’s game.

“Yet these kinds of (ticketing) policies from FIFA are ones that threaten to price out the very people that make this game so special.”

If you prefer something from the end of the rainbow, the New York Post recently asked Donald Trump about the prices for the USMNT’s opener against Paraguay in LA.

“I would certainly like to be there, but I wouldn’t pay it either, to be honest with you,” the U.S. president said.

Moore, who lives in Montecito, California, now but has never forgotten his Liverpudlian roots, puts it like this.

“Maximising revenue may satisfy short-term business objectives but the true value of sports has always come from belonging, identity and community connection — as a Scouser, I know that all too well,” he said.

“Fans are not simply customers. The smartest organisations understand that they are custodians of the culture that makes sport matter in the first place.”

To wrap up, I want to return to where we started, with me, a sports-mad teen in the Detroit suburbs in the late 1980s.

My best pal David also bought a Pistons quarter-season ticket for the 1988-89 season. He thinks he paid for his with money he had earned as a camp counsellor the previous summer.

When I asked him about the cost of live sport in the U.S. now, he reiterated much of the above, saying top-end sport has become a “luxury good” for “people who only have a mild interest in the game”. He reminded me that where we sat at The Palace was a proper cross-section of society and everyone was a diehard fan.

He lives in Atlanta now but was a soccer player, fan and coach long before it was fashionable in the U.S., and is exactly the type of person I would expect to be attending at least a couple of World Cup games this summer.

“For the price of a ticket to see Morocco play Haiti in Atlanta, I could go vacation in Morocco and watch the game from there,” he said, before adding that he would most likely be watching on TV.