The World Cup kicks off today, and about 180,000 tickets are reportedly available on the resale market. There are many games to be played after FIFA expanded the tournament from 32 to 48 teams, but this is also about the prices. In 1994, the last time the United States hosted, you could get into a match for around $50 or less. This time around, if you won a lottery to buy tickets, you likely paid 10 times that or more to get into the middle tiers of stadiums across North America. FIFA has created its own resale platform for tickets, where this putative nonprofit organization is taking a 30% cut of all transactions as prices soar even higher. It’s the triumph of American transactionalism over the world’s game.
Kids play with nothing but a ball in the back alleys of Lagos and Buenos Aires and Naples and Guadalajara, but this year’s tournament is a definitive statement that the game has become something else: a financial behemoth, a rich man’s plaything, at least if you want to be there to witness it in person. The competition beginning today is meant to be a festival of humanity, where teams from all across the globe come to one place to showcase how they play this game, and in the process tell a story about themselves on the biggest stage there is. But some people (even a referee!) have been barred from coming at all, and few would argue the United States is a welcoming place at present.
As you’ll read in our World Cup cheat sheet below, maybe that means you should just go down to Mexico to experience this thing. Or maybe we’ll soon forget about all the greed and the cynical politicking when the matches kick off, and those of us with a preexisting condition catch the bug once more. But I’m a football fanatic, and right now I’m feeling a bit bereft. I’m also a New Yorker with more pressing concerns: Knicks in five.
