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Americans are breaking the bank to attend the FIFA World Cup.
This year’s tournament is historically expensive for fans looking to support their favorite teams in person. Tickets for group stage matches routinely cost more than $1,000 in the months before tournament kickoff, reportedly even drawing the ire of President Donald Trump.
Ticket problems don’t end there. A number of states have launched investigations into whether FIFA misled fans over the location and quality of seats they bought to attend matches. Many fans who bought tickets on resale sites have fallen victim to ghost ticketing, in which resellers flog tickets they don’t actually have.
To get a better sense of it all, Blue Light News talked to Florian Ederer, a professor of markets, public policy and law at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business — and a soccer super fan. He’s written extensively about World Cup ticket pricing and access during the tournament, and hopped on the phone the day before his beloved Austria takes on Spain in a knockout match Thursday.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Why are World Cup tickets so expensive this year?
Well, there are several factors in this. Number one is that this is the biggest sports event in the world. There’s tremendous demand for it. It only happens every four years. FIFA basically has a monopoly on this biggest sports event, there’s nothing that sort of can supplant it. You can’t start a rival league or anything of that sort. Secondly, the event is being held in the United States and in Canada and in Mexico, in particular the U.S. and Canada. These are some of the richest countries in the world, they have also very, very, very large populations, and Mexico does too.
You also talk about another phenomenon, that FIFA has realized this is an opportunity to maximize profits.
It has also adopted two additional things. One is price discrimination, which is that all the group stage matches of previous World Cups were all priced exactly the same. And here, FIFA has taken the approach, well, England vs. Croatia is a more interesting match than Algeria vs. Jordan, and so we’re going to set prices higher for England Croatia than for Algeria Jordan.
They’ve also introduced dynamic pricing, so the price that I get charged for buying a ticket, even if it’s the same ticket for the same game, is going to be different depending on when I buy. Basically like buying a ticket for an airline.
The third tactic that FIFA has engaged in — in addition to price discrimination, dynamic pricing — is that they’ve also done some very opaque supply management, where they’ve not made it clear at all as to how many tickets are actually available at any given time, and they’ve created a little bit this artificial scarcity where they want to keep fans in the dark as to whether they should buy now at higher prices, or just wait until the very end, and maybe get a good deal close to the start of a game.
Then there’s ghost ticketing and other practices out on the secondary market that sometimes leave fans outside a World Cup stadium arena with no tickets, even though they spent the money on a resale platform.
This is something that I think is separate from FIFA. I think the problem there is that the platforms have not used sufficient fines and punishment for resellers that are not fulfilling these promised transactions. The reason they are not fulfilling those transactions is because they resold those tickets for a potentially very interesting match already three months before, and then the prices increase even further, and then the temptation is, of course, to not deliver on that transaction, and instead resell it on another platform for even higher markups. And this is, of course, when these platforms should step in and say, look, you know, somebody was deceived here. We need to institute fines to keep those non-reputable sellers off our platforms.
Are there any steps the federal government could take to make things easier for consumers next time around?
I think there should be much clearer guidance that gives consumers information about how many seats are actually available and what are the prices, and then I think that’s an issue of just consumer transparency and lack of deception that can absolutely pass with legislation. Similarly, with those ghost tickets, I think you should be able to hold the platform liable for these issues, rather than just any particular seller, and the platforms should have to compensate these buyers for other charges that they incurred. If I’m buying a vacation to Dallas to see Austria vs. Argentina, then I’m not just buying the ticket on a platform, but I’m making everything else reliant on that ticket.
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FIFA President Gianni Infantino has defended the high cost of attendance in recent months, telling an audience at the Milken Institute Global Conference in California in May that the organization was applying “market rates” to its tickets.
“We have to look at the market — we are in the market in which entertainment is the most developed in the world. So we have to apply market rates,” Infantino said. “In the U.S. it is permitted to resell tickets as well. So if you were to sell tickets at the price which is too low, these tickets will be resold at a much higher price.”
Dangerously hot temperatures are blanketing the central and eastern United States as the soccer tournament enters its knockout rounds, putting tens of millions of people at risk.
Roughly a quarter of all matches since the start of the games are expected to be played in hazardous heat, according to an analysis by World Weather Attribution, which models how climate change influences extreme weather events. It also warns that the wet bulb global temperature — a measure of temperature, humidity and factors affecting heat stress in the human body — could rise high enough to justify postponing some games. Sticky, hot weather is not unusual in North America during summer. But extreme heat has intensified since the U.S. last hosted the World Cup in 1994.
“Around half of human-caused climate change has occurred since the World Cup was last hosted in North America in 1994. As a result, the climate that the tournament is being played in today has fundamentally shifted in just 32 years,” Joyce Kimutai, an extreme weather and climate change researcher at Imperial College London and lead author of the WWA study, said in an email.
Players aren’t the only ones that are affected. Fans often spend hours in stifling heat while attending outdoor celebrations or watch festivals. Stadium workers are also at risk. Organizers have attempted to reduce the threat by installing cooling stations and scheduling some games at off-peak heat hours. But the current heat wave could hit the games hard.
The National Weather Service estimates that more than 175 million people will endure temperatures this week that put them at major or extreme risk of heat-related health impacts. Some of the places facing the greatest dangers include World Cup host cities like Philadelphia, New York and Atlanta, where street parties filled with sweaty crowds and free-flowing alcohol put fans at greater risk of heat illness.
“A whole bunch of warm bodies standing close to each other does make it more difficult to cool down,” said Kristie Ebi, a scientist at the University of Washington who specializes in climate change and public health. “And alcohol of course is not a fluid one drinks for hydration. It tends to dehydrate people.”
Some host cities, like Kansas City, are bracing for this week’s heat after enjoying cooler-than-average temperatures during the tournament. Others, like Miami, have been sweltering since the games began.
“Pretty much every game in Miami has been played under oppressively hot and humid conditions,” said Tom DiLiberto, media director at Climate Central, which reports on the impacts of climate change and has been tracking its effects on the World Cup games.
Three games at Miami’s open-air stadium have been held at 6 p.m., when the sun is near its hottest point of the day. Climate Central estimates that there is a “high likelihood” that heat could impact player performance at all seven matches in Miami’s stadium and that climate change is increasing the odds of such heat by up to 20 percentage points.
Officials in Miami-Dade County say they’ve been tailoring their heat protocols since the World Cup began, adding new interventions as they experience the matches. The county’s emergency management department has added additional hydration stations near the stadium and elsewhere in the city, as well as cooling and misting stations, after observing a lot of people in need of relief. Officials have also tailored the languages on signs directing international visitors to cooling stations.
“We’ve learned from each of these matches,” said Jesse Spearo, assistant director of Miami-Dade’s department of emergency management. “Each one has changed a little bit.”
Other host cities have turned to Miami for advice. “Weather has always been kind of a big talking point with this group because Miami is always hot,” Spearo said. “We have been coordinating with them … saying this is what we’ve been doing for people, this is what we’ve learned, this is what you should be emphasizing to fans.”
Public health agencies that track heat-related hospitalizations in host cities say they haven’t seen statistical spikes directly linked to the World Cup. But fan celebrations have offered cautionary tales: 110 heat-related medical incidents were reported at a Houston fan festival on the World Cup’s opening day, FOX Weather reported. And Miami-Dade’s fire rescue teams have reported an uptick in heat-related illnesses among people requiring medical transport, Spearo said.
The extreme temperatures this week could put host cities under strain.
State and county emergency management agencies in most host cities affected by the heat wave did not respond to requests for comment on their heat action plans. A spokesperson for the Dallas emergency management office referred questions to the city’s FIFA organizing committee, which referred questions to FIFA.
A FIFA spokesperson said climate-related risks “are assessed as part of overall tournament planning and managed in close coordination with the host cities, stadium authorities and national agencies.” It’s working with medical experts and national meteorological and emergency management authorities on contingency plans, the spokesperson said.
Ebi, the public health expert, said the biggest challenges around the collision of extreme heat and international sporting events often revolve around communication strategies.
“The protections that need to be in place for periods of high temperatures are the same for all human beings,” she said. “What’s different is how do you reach people who may not be watching the news? How do you reach people who may not have English as a first language?
As public health experts worry about spectators in this week’s heat, some scientists also worry that FIFA isn’t doing enough to protect its players.
It’s “absolutely ridiculous” for FIFA to be hosting games at 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. in a place like Miami, said Douglas Casa, a kinesiology professor at the University of Connecticut and head of the Korey Stringer Institute, which researches ways to prevent athlete deaths from things like extreme heat.
“We can anticipate the risks, and there’s a lot of strategies you can have in place to absolutely minimize the risks,” he said, pointing to holding games later in the day, extending hydration breaks when temperatures are high and having aggressive cooling strategies during halftime.
Casa signed onto a May letter to FIFA with more than 20 climate and public health experts that called FIFA’s current guidelines on heat stress mitigation “inadequate” and “impossible to justify,” saying they could put players at risk of heat injury.
FIFA’s heat guidelines for players only mandate cooling breaks if the wet bulb global temperature, or WBGT, exceeds 32 degrees Celsius (89.6 degrees F). It leaves the decision to cancel or suspend a match to the organizers.
That doesn’t line up with guidance from the global players’ union known as FIFPRO, which recommends breaks once the WBGT exceeds 26 degrees and says matches should be delayed if the WBGT temperatures top 28 degrees.
“FIFPRO believes that FIFA’s guidelines do not do enough to protect the health and performance of players,” the organization says on its website.
“FIFA continues to monitor conditions in real time, integrating Wet Bulb Globe Temperature and Heat Index surveillance, and stands ready to apply established contingency protocols should extreme weather events occur,” the FIFA spokesperson said. “Outdoor matches during the hottest parts of the day have been strategically limited, kick-off times adjusted in certain markets, and matches expected in warmer windows prioritised for covered stadiums where possible.”
When Qatar hosted the last men’s World Cup in 2022, FIFA moved the matches to November to avoid the hottest time of year. But summers elsewhere are quickly becoming a concern as climate change accelerates.
Temperatures are forecast to be close to 100 degrees on Saturday when Paraguay takes on France in Philadelphia. Even Toronto, which isn’t used to such extreme heat, is expected to see temperatures in the 90s for its Thursday game.
It also doesn’t end with this year’s matches, said DiLiberto from Climate Central. The next men’s World Cup in 2030 will be in Morocco, Spain and Portugal — areas that saw a major heatwave this month and have much less access to air conditioning.
“If you take these sorts of huge events and put them in incredibly hot conditions in places without air conditioning, you can expect to see a whole host of other health issues,” DiLiberto said.
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