FIFA President Gianni Infantino speaks at the American Business Forum at the Kaseya Center in Miami on Nov. 5.CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP/Getty Images
We all have bucket lists – once-in-a-lifetime dream experiences we must have even if they cost the price of a Toyota Corolla or a Fendi handbag. Going to a soccer game, the world’s most popular sport, should not be one of them.
Anyone over age 50 can remember when dad and mom could take the family to a hockey, football, basketball or soccer game without remortgaging the house. Yes, the air was thin up in the cheap seats, the beer swill and the hot dogs soggy. But it was an affordable, fun night out, all the more so since the truly devoted fans – the guys and girls who followed their home team since the moment they could walk – were in the same section as you, roaring away in ecstasy or rage.
For pro sports, that era ended two or three decades ago when the teams became big businesses drunk on the income from ever-rising marketing and broadcast rights, skyboxes and 10-buck snacks. All but one – soccer (known everywhere but Canada and the U.S. by its more accurate term, football).
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Soccer prices, relatively speaking, were always relatively cheap. Even today, you can buy tickets for regular-season Serie A (Italy) or Bundesliga (Germany) games for €30 (about $50) or €40 euros as long as you can bear sitting among the crazies waving flags and shooting off smoke canisters.
Sadly, football – sorry, soccer – is now rising along the greed curve too and no one symbolizes the trend more than Gianni Infantino, the Swiss-Italian president of Zurich’s FIFA, the sport’s global governing body that is bringing us the 2026 World Cup, hosted by the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
Officially, FIFA is a non-profit body under Swiss law. Judging from the family budget-busting World Cup ticket prices, fans might suspect that FIFA has secretly converted to a private-equity fund.
The pricing came to light a week ago, when FIFA opened its main ticket ballot. Outrage erupted among fan associations and FIFA backed down, but not by much. The World Cup is still well on course to become a luxury event. The cheapest standard seat (known as a Category 4 ticket) for the final will start – start! – at US$4,185 and rise to more than double that for the best, non-VIP seats (Category 1).
The more Mr. Infantino alienates fans, the more his standing among the global elite seems to rise – your first clue that he is losing touch with spectators who gave soccer “the beautiful game” tag because of its simplicity, elegance and accessibility.
His bromance with Donald Trump is apparently going from strength to strength. He was a star guest at the U.S. President’s inauguration last January and showed up at a Gaza peace conference in Egypt in October, as if he had been transformed into a diplomat. In obvious breach of FIFA’s impartiality – its statutes declare that the organization must remain “neutral in matters of politics and religion” – he handed Mr. Trump FIFA’s inaugural peace prize on Dec. 5 even as the U.S. military was blasting alleged Venezuelan drug runners out of the water and a U.S. naval armada was steaming south to enforce a blockade against the country.
Mr. Infantino, right, awards U.S. President Donald Trump the FIFA Peace Prize on Dec. 5.Chris Carlson/The Associated Press
Ticket prices for the 2026 World Cup have risen across the board, in good part because FIFA for the first time is using dynamic pricing – that is, prices based on supply and demand at any one moment (like airline pricing), as opposed to fixed prices. Given the popularity of the World Cup, the prices have generally gone in one direction – up.
General-admission tickets for the group stage are about three times higher than those of the 2022 Cup in Qatar. Football Supporters Europe (FSE) calculated last week that a fan would need to spend at least US$6,900 to follow his or her team from the opening game to the final, almost five times the cost of the previous Cup. In a Dec. 11 statement, FSE said it was “astonished by the extortionate ticket prices imposed by FIFA.”
FIFA responded. This week, it announced that US$60 tickets would go on sale. But the Associated Press reported that the new entry tier would mean that maybe 400 to 750 of the cheapie tickets would be given to each team, insignificant compared to, say, the 82,500-seat capacity of the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, where the final will be held on July 19. In other words, FIFA’s revenue model was barely scratched.
FIFA had no need to roll out abusive prices. The stadiums are bigger than ever, the marketing and broadcast rights fatter than ever, and the 2026 Cup has been expanded to 48 countries from 32, meaning a total of 104 games will be played, up from 64. FIFA’s three-year budget, to 2026, predicted a 72-per-cent rise in revenues, to about US$13-billion over the previous tally. Yes, much of the extra loot will be invested in soccer development around the world, but no, that is not excuse enough to charge beluga caviar ticket prices.
Above all, the pricing damages the sport by angering and alienating its most devoted fans. Mr. Infantino risks turning global football into an elite spectator event, the opposite of a game that has indulged the fantasies and passions of average families for generations should be.