🔍 The Cost of the World Cup's High Prices

And so, now, we come to the crunch. Almost. We are approaching the crunch. It’s just around the next turn. We are crunch-adjacent. If there is one thing that everyone in English football believes, as something close to a matter of faith, it is that the two weeks over the holiday period are the most decisive part of the season. 

Fans, managers, players, scriptwriters, even the people who are actually the protagonists of the whole story – the referees – regard this as the league’s (lactic) acid test, the point at which we learn which teams have the depth and the resilience to go the distance. It is now, with five months to play, that we first get a glimpse of how the table might shake out in the end. 

Ordinarily, obviously, this is a lie. Well, not a lie. It’s a clever bit of marketing. Traditionally, most of Europe’s major leagues hibernated over the festive season; the Premier League, alone, played on and through, an essentially infinite reserve of eyeballs drawn to what was suddenly the only show in town.

This time around, though, there is more than a grain of truth in it. Arsenal has four games in 14 days with just a hint of trouble hanging over its head. Aston Villa has an arduous schedule that will go a long way to determining if Unai Emery’s team is a legitimate contender. The promise at Chelsea and Manchester United is real but it is also fragile; it will, over the next fortnight, be reinforced or shattered. 

We’ll be out the other side by the time this newsletter returns from its own winter break: I'm having a couple of weeks off (in the sense that I will be watching football, but not having public opinions on it), but I'll be back in the New Year. By that time, the world – well, the Premier League table – may look very different.

Introducing the Soccer’s Coming Home Collection! Hoodies, crewnecks and scarves, all anchored by our limited-edition kits, provided by New Balance, paying tribute to the original, decade-old Men in Blazers kits and inspired by some of those classic USA designs.

Gianni Infantino’s dream, he told us, was to take the greatest show on Earth and make it available to the world. It’s been eight years since everyone’s favorite quadruple threat – actor, influencer, compere, FIFA president – unveiled the signature policy of his tenure, the idea that would underscore his legacy: his vision for a bigger, better, bolder World Cup. 

His justification for expanding the men’s tournament was unashamedly populist. Infantino is not stupid. He knew that a majority of fans, particularly in the powerful and annoyingly voluble nations of western Europe, would be inclined to resist the change. He knew that he would be accused of diluting the quality of the tournament in favor of turning an ever-greater profit.

Ever the politically savvy operator, then, Infantino played the moral card. “Football is more than Europe and South America,” he said. By expanding the number of Asian, African and Central American teams that could qualify, he told us, he was empowering the rest of the globe. “It is a chance to qualify,” he said. “It is a chance to participate in a big event.” 

That logic might hold for the teams but it does not, it would appear, apply to the fans. FIFA made that abundantly clear last week, when it unveiled a ticket-pricing policy for the World Cup that essentially served to lock the vast majority of fans out of the tournament.

The cheapest ticket for a group-stage game came in at $140. By the time of the quarterfinals, that had risen to $535. Prices for the final started at $4,185 and went from there. Despite promises from the three host nations, when they put together their bid for the tournament back in 2018, that they would control ticket prices, it turned out that this would be the most expensive World Cup in history. Tickets would, it turned out, cost three times as much as they did in Qatar, and they had not exactly been cheap there.

At this point, we should address the disconnect here. These prices are likely more eye-catching outside the United States than they are inside. Super Bowl tickets regularly run to thousands of dollars. Regular-season games in the major leagues can – although, as a man who paid about $30 to get into Yankee Stadium in the summer, do not always – cost hundreds, or more. 

And yes, if this is approached purely as a matter of supply and demand, then they make sense. FIFA had received more than five million ticket enquiries inside the first 24 hours after the latest ballot opened; a few days later, that number had reached 20 million. Infantino’s boast that the World Cup would provide “104 Super Bowls” is not true – Austria against Jordan is not a Super Bowl, and pretending it is diminishes us all – but it is the largest sporting event on the planet. More people want to go than will be able to, whatever the cost.

Reducing it to raw economics, though, is to misunderstand the product. There is a moral argument to be made about pricing: this is a global tournament, and as such it should be accessible to as many people as possible, whether they are in North America or not.

Yes, FIFA has to pitch prices in line with local expectations or risk undermining its own prestige. (If something feels cheap, people might believe it is.) Yes, FIFA relies on the men’s World Cup for much of its income, and as such has an incentive to maximize its earnings. But it must balance those imperatives with the need to make sure, for example, that a single ticket does not cost more than a monthly wage in some of the competing nations. 

Current projections suggest that FIFA stands to earn somewhere between $11 billion and $14 billion from this tournament. The organization itself says it will reinvest around 90% of that in the game, which is a noble intention and not something we should suggest is designed to ensure Infantino gets re-elected. Even so, reducing that profit by a hundred million, even, to allow people to attend the tournament without going into thousands of dollars of debt is probably a price worth paying. 

Possibly more compelling, though, is the more pragmatic rationale: inflating ticket prices beyond the reach of most fans will make the World Cup a much less attractive television spectacle. The fans in the stadium, after all, are not merely observers. They are participants in the drama, the Greek chorus that provides the emotional soundtrack to events on the field. 

It struck me, while watching NBC’s coverage of the Premier League from a Boston hotel room last week, that American broadcasters seem to amp up the crowd noise a little more than their British counterparts. That is a significant part of what has sold football to an ever-growing portion of the American public: the passion, the atmosphere, the raucousness. 

By pricing fans out of the stadiums – by choosing to make the World Cup a luxury event, rather than a mass-participation one – FIFA jeopardizes that. World Cup atmospheres, in truth, tend to be a little more reticent, a dash more muffled than those that surround club games: a greater proportion of the crowd is there to watch; the games are, by definition, less of a ritual. 

Without at least a representative sample of engaged fans, though, the risk is that they become so sanitized that they begin to reduce the spectacle, that the games themselves come to seem like an ersatz version of the real thing. And that, in turn, strips the World Cup of just a little of its stardust, to downgrade the standing that makes it such a valuable television product. 

That is why, despite the ever-growing presence of American owners in the Premier League, the ticket prices have risen only slowly in the most popular league in the world; reluctantly, at times, they have come to understand that it is not in their long-term interests to make football completely unaffordable to its most traditional constituency.

It would be nice to think that FIFA’s climbdown on Tuesday was evidence they had come to the same realization. They have, they proudly announced, introduced a new price tier: some tickets will be made available specifically to the most dedicated fans of the competing nations at the much more reasonable price of $60 for every game, including the final. 

Perhaps this was proof that FIFA knows what it is that makes their tournament so appealing. Or perhaps not: in most cases, only a few hundred fans will qualify for those tickets, a tiny fraction of those who will be in the stadium. It is a token gesture, the work of a body that on some fundamental level does not understand the sport it governs.

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It goes without saying that Wilfried Nancy should not, at this stage, be under even a single pascal of pressure. He has been Celtic manager for barely 10 days. He has taken charge of just three games. He may not actually know the names of all of his players. He has not, most likely, had the chance to discover Grumpy Pedro’s, one of Glasgow’s unalloyed delights.

Sadly, that is often not how football works, and it is certainly not how football in Glasgow works. Nancy has, in short order, lost to Hearts – now six points clear at the top of the table – and to Roma and, most embarrassingly of all, lost to St Mirren, a team that operates on a fraction of Celtic’s budget, in the final of Scotland’s equivalent to the Carabao Cup.

None of this would go down well at the best of times at Celtic, where standards are impeccably high, but these are not the best of times. A simmering fury has come to surround the club over the last year or so, the fans chafing against what they perceive as a sense of institutional drift, a hierarchy that is happy to do no more than just enough.

Nancy is not to blame for any of that: his appointment could, in fact, easily be read as an encouraging sign of both adventure and ambition. But it does mean that patience, and understanding, are in particularly short supply at the moment. So short, in fact, that it is possible Nancy may never fully restore confidence. First impressions matter in Glasgow, and at Celtic. He may not recover from his.

Rog and Rory break down Mo Salah’s historic, record-breaking achievement after Liverpool’s 2-0 win over Brighton. They also discuss where this match leaves Liverpool and Arne Slot in dealing with Salah’s AFCON departure and his future at the club. Plus, top-of-the-table Arsenal leave it late against the Premier League’s last-placed team and have us worried about their title charge. The duo also talk about Chelsea’s win over Everton and manager Enzo Maresca’s curious post-game comments.

Watch on YouTube or listen here.

There are plenty of standout games in the Premier League’s “hectic Christmas schedule” – they should really trademark that – over the next couple of weeks, but the most interesting thread involves Aston Villa. Emery’s team’s games against Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal will tell us a lot about each of those sides; they will tell us even more about Villa itself (you can view their full TV schedule here). 

Seeing as this is a newsletter that prides itself on a degree of worldliness, though, the perfect appetizer for all of that hot Premier League action may well come from Spain. Barcelona goes to Villarreal this Sunday (10:15 a.m. ET, ESPN+) for a game that is more significant than it might appear: if the Yellow Submarine sinks Hansi Flick’s side, and then wins its two games in hand, Villarreal goes top. Just one to keep an eye on.

I’ve been sitting on this question for a while, because it warranted a degree of reflection. “The story of the runner-up has always intrigued me in football, basketball and other professional sports,” wrote Walid Neaz.

“What if Newcastle didn’t let that title go in 1995/96, or Hector Cuper led Valencia to the Champions League in 2000 and 2001? There’s the Dutch team in the 1974 and 1978 World Cups, and West Germany in 1982 and 1986, before finally triumphing in 1990. Do you have any thoughts on the teams that fell at the very end?”

There are others to add to this list, Walid, of football’s greatest nearly teams, principally Bayer Leverkusen in 2002, a side that contrived to lose the Bundesliga, the German cup and the Champions League at the final hurdle, earning the nickname Neverkusen in the process. Every country has something similar, in fact: Hearts in Scotland in 1986, Deportivo La Coruña in Spain in 1994.

But I find it interesting – and heartening, to be honest – that all of those teams are remembered in such different ways. Some of them, yes, are immortalized as chokers. Some have come to be seen, a little more kindly, as avatars of the worst kind of luck.

But – and this may be a stretch – I think that Dutch team, the one that lost in 1974 and 1978, is remembered much more fondly, and much more often, than either of the sides that beat them to the World Cup. The same could be said of Kevin Keegan’s Newcastle, which has had a far greater cultural half-life than its actual achievements might have warranted. That is quite heartening, because it suggests that glory can take more than one form, that there can be points for artistic impression, and that there is more than one way – in the end – to win.

That’s all for this week, and for the next couple of weeks – we’ll be taking a short break over the festive period. This is a big time of year for those of us who swear loyalty to Terry and his Chocolate Oranges, and each of them must be eaten with time-consuming solemnity. 

So seeing as we are at that time of year, let me say thank you so much for all your emails – [email protected] – over the last few months; it’s been a lot of fun building this community with you. Please keep your ideas, your thoughts and your questions coming.

And, more than anything, thanks for reading. I hope you have a peaceful, enjoyable, restorative couple of weeks, and that however and whatever you choose to celebrate, it is all garnished by watching plenty of football.

All the best,
Rory

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