"Football needs fans, not just spectators." Ronan Evain, director of Football Supporters Europe, said it plainly. FIFA, apparently, disagrees.
With the 2026 World Cup kicking off June 11 across the United States, Canada and Mexico, the sport's governing body has turned what should have been a landmark moment for soccer in North America into something that has managed to alienate supporters before a single ball has been kicked. Expanded to 48 teams and 104 matches. Tickets that jumped from $55 in Qatar to $560 for comparable seats — nearly tenfold. A halftime show at the final featuring Madonna, Shakira and BTS. Dynamic pricing. Corporate suites selling for up to $300,000 a pop.
This is what FIFA built. Whether it resembles a World Cup is another matter.
Priced out of the sport they built
The ticketing model is where the damage is most visible. FIFA took direct control of ticket sales for the first time, scrapping the local organiser system and introducing dynamic pricing and an authorised resale platform that charges fees of around 30 percent per transaction. Attorneys general of New York and New Jersey have subpoenaed FIFA, investigating suspected artificial scarcity — the possibility that supply was deliberately managed to inflate prices on FIFA's own platform. FIFA declined to comment.
The cheapest available seats in widely accessible categories are listed at $560. Seats for the MetLife Stadium final have appeared on FIFA's official resale platform for anywhere between $8,500 and $2.3 million. Some resale listings have gone higher still. Even Donald Trump, FIFA president Gianni Infantino's close ally and the recipient of FIFA's newly invented Peace Prize, admitted he "wouldn't pay it either, to be honest."
For most supporters, attending means a $1,000 ticket plus a $400 flight plus a hotel room that has doubled or tripled in price plus $175 stadium parking. In Boston, Philadelphia and Seattle, hotel demand has trailed a typical summer season. Host cities are warning they may not recoup the hundreds of millions spent on security and infrastructure. FIFA, meanwhile, is projected to generate $11 billion from the tournament.
FSE and consumer group Euroconsumers filed a formal complaint in March, alleging FIFA abused its market position to impose excessive pricing. In December, FSE had called it a "monumental betrayal." The numbers back them up.
Who this tournament was actually built for
Infantino's defence is that FIFA operates in "the most developed entertainment market in the world" and that artificially low prices would simply push transactions to third-party resellers anyway. There is a logic to it. There is also a logic to the broadcasting numbers: $3.9 billion in rights fees alone, up roughly 30 percent from Qatar. One corporate suite client, the economics suggest, is worth dozens of priced-out supporters.
What FIFA missed — or chose to ignore — is that American soccer audiences were already there. Champions League matches on CBS averaged 1.71 million U.S. viewers this season, up 39 percent year-on-year. The PSG vs Arsenal final drew 3.09 million — the largest U.S. English-language audience ever for a club match. These weren't casual observers who needed a halftime show to stay interested. They were already invested.
"This idea of 'Americanising' soccer isn't really coming from American fans. It's coming from FIFA," said Felipe Cárdenas, a soccer journalist who has covered the sport's growth in the U.S. for years. "The American soccer fans didn't need halftime shows, dynamic pricing or collectible patches to appeal to them. They were already invested into the game, but they are now being locked out."
A May YouGov survey found 54 percent of Americans were not at all interested in the World Cup. Nearly six in ten said they did not expect to watch a single match. Only 2 percent said they would spend $600 or more on a ticket.
Beyond pricing, the tournament carries additional barriers. Trump's immigration crackdown resulted in full travel bans for fans from Haiti and Iran — both qualified nations — while Côte d'Ivoire and Senegal faced partial restrictions. Haiti had qualified for the first time in over 50 years. Most Haitian fans will be unable to watch their team play in person. FIFA, which maintained its no-politics stance throughout, looked the other way — even as its own statutes require all qualified nations to be welcomed by the host.
The sport itself is paying a price
The commercial architecture is only part of the problem. The expanded 48-team format has drawn sharp criticism from people who actually understand the game. "I personally think it's kind of taken a little bit of the excitement and quality away from the tournament, and it's almost like it doesn't start until the round of 32," former USMNT forward Clint Dempsey said.
Colombian coach Jorge Luis Pinto, who guided Costa Rica to one of the tournament's greatest-ever upsets in 2014 — eliminating England, Italy and Uruguay — pointed to the physical cost. "Players are arriving with too many games on their legs, there's very little time to prepare, the temperatures will be intense and having the tournament spread across three countries only adds to the physical and logistical demands," he told Newsweek.
Elite players can now play up to 70 matches in a season before the World Cup even begins. By the time the tournament arrives, the players on the sport's biggest stage are running on fumes.
This will almost certainly be the last World Cup for both Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. The 2022 final — 1.5 billion viewers, arguably the greatest match ever played — showed exactly what the tournament can be. The question FIFA isn't asking is whether the conditions that produced Messi and Ronaldo still exist in a sport now built around data analysts, squad rotation and broadcast-optimised scheduling.
"The danger is that this alienates traditional supporters, the same ones that made the game what it is," said Simon Chadwick, professor at Emlyon Business School and author of The Business of the FIFA World Cup. "What we now have is a heavily commercialized and industrialized version of soccer, built around what market data supposedly says consumers want."
FIFA's own Club World Cup this summer offered a preview: vast sections of empty seats across 11 U.S. host cities, prices slashed to around $13 for the Chelsea vs Fluminense semifinal in a desperate attempt to fill MetLife Stadium. Infantino declared it "the most successful club competition in the world." The empty seats told a different story.
The 2026 World Cup will almost certainly be the most commercially lucrative sporting event ever staged. Whether anyone in the stands will feel the atmosphere that made the sport worth commercialising in the first place is a different question entirely.
