Stars & Gripes (Part 2)
In Part One, I focussed on dead rubbers and travel costs as just two of the ways that fans had been hit hard as FIFA waged war on the very people that football is – allegedly – nothing without. But they are more indirect costs. Tickets, on the other hand, are where the game’s governing body could really begin to rake it in.
Mexploitation
If England needed any reminder that they weren’t in Kansas anymore, then welcome to Mexico City. While hotel prices fell markedly, the ticket prices went the other way. It’s quite difficult to breathe in the world’s eighth highest capital city. But it’s equally tough to catch your breath at some of these numbers.
To watch England play the co-hosts in the Azteca (sorry!) last Sunday night, the cheapest ticket available was 12 times the face value price (at around £2,600). The most expensive, for a ticket with a face value of $605 was, on the Friday before the game, $30,000. It should be noted that this was an England ‘fan’ who is relisting tickets at these prices. If you can’t beat em’ eh?
With the FIFA fees added, it reaches $34,500 (57 x face value). Just drink that in. If anyone is stupid enough to bite, FIFA make $4,500 from one fan selling one ticket for one match (and they also make the same amount from the person buying it). Just in fees alone.
At some stadiums, back in 2006, tickets had been pretty easy to come by. For the Switzerland/Togo match at the massive Westfalenstadion, they were being handed out next to the turnstiles for the princely sum of twenty euros just minutes before kick-off.
For other matches, more negotiation was needed. We couldn’t get tickets for England’s match in Stuttgart, but we didget them in Munich by first buying tickets for the host’s match with Sweden, then swapping them outside the Allianz Arena. I have kept the price I paid from my wife for twenty years, but it feels right to finally disclose it was €400. That and because she never reads any of these articles.
That felt like a lot at the time, and maybe still might now, but seems a mere pittance compared to the figures on the 2026 resale website. I justified the €400 as a ‘one-off’, and, in fairness, the tickets had belonged to sponsors and put us two rows behind Posh Spice in the area reserved for the WAGS who made such a great impression in Baden-Baden.
In the Golden Generation documentary on the BBC, when they focus on Posh just after Becks scores the winning goal, that’s me – or part of me anyway – just behind her. I recognised the cargo shorts watching it the other day. ‘Wow, those were great tickets’ said my wife when I pointed my knee out. ‘Especially as they were free’ I muttered and quickly changed the subject.
But I digress. $34,500 would take some justifying. Unless you’d won the lottery, and even maybe then. For a 90-minute game of football. Yet, even with these numbers being bandied about, it does at least mean we’d get to see the match, right?
Perhaps the worst story (so far anyway) of this World Cup was of a fan making the opposite journey to England fans. Sergio Montalvo paid $1,700 for tickets (from StubHub) so he and his Dad could see Messi play in Dallas on Father’s Day. Six thousand dollars in travel and accommodation costs later, he and his parents found themselves outside the stadium without the tickets after the seller was unable to deliver.
Despite being on the phone to the company until an hour before the game started, he and his family missed out. Industry insiders are calling it one of the ‘largest ticket collapses in history’ and mainly down to a practice called ‘speculative ticketing’, where sellers list tickets they do not have, hoping to source them closer to the event but backing out of the deal if and when they can’t. Even if the tickets are refunded, the travel costs aren’t and, of course, the would-be buyer doesn’t get to watch the game either.
StubHub declined to comment on the specifics but seemed to blame FIFA, who countered by blaming StubHub whilst also trotting out the broken record line about five million fans blah blah blah. In a less-than-complimentary assessment of either, the co-founder of Ticket Talk (who have already recorded over 600 complaints from this World Cup) said ‘I blame StubHub 100%’ but then added, ‘FIFA is no angel. Their ticket tech is absolutely terrible. It's like software out of 1999.’
The fans, during this game of blame, lost out completely
Too Far
It has felt like a competition within a competition to see how much money FIFA can make.
But it’s nothing new. Since 1974, when Joao Havelange said ‘I have a product to sell called football’ as he ousted FIFA’s then-President, Stanley Rous, with questionable tactics involving using fellow countryman Pele’s image rights and payments to African federations, it’s been ever thus. It’s hard to imagine, after the farce that handed the previous tournaments out to Russia and Qatar in what seemed like an exchange for brown paper envelopes, but it feels like they’ve really gone too far this time.
As FIFA take 30% from any ticket resale deals – charging both the buyer and seller – they are wholly complicit in the ruse that means that the actual ticket price is completely immaterial (and those prices were irresponsibly high as it was). But it’s one thing to have high ticket prices, and quite another to have fans who pay it, and still can’t get in.
Football is supposed to be a game for the people. Not just rich people.
It has never seemed further away from its roots that it does now.
When you see the Mexican waves, the smiling fans, celebrities having fun and the camera operators still – in 2026 FFS– seeking the pretty girls in the crowd to focus on, just remember that somewhere outside that stadium is a someone who’s dreams have been utterly crushed either by not being able to afford to attend, or worse still, having a ticket that still doesn’t grant them entry.
Someone made all these decisions. Head-to-head had never been used by FIFA before this World Cup. The travel chaos was entirely predictable from the first day of planning, and the ticket fiasco? Well. There aren’t really any words for that.
But whoever let it all happen, and you know who you are.
Shame on you.
