The 2026 FIFA World Cup begins one month from today. And right now it’s shaping up to be one of the greatest busts of all time. Over a million tickets to games are still available. And the hotels that had expected a windfall are not seeing it yet. It looks like a whole lot of soccer fans have decided to sit this one out.
I spent yesterday in New York City with my children and grandchildren. My son and daughter-in-law have jobs that tie into tourism and events, including sports events. Tourism is way down; people aren’t traveling. I take it people are backing off of plane travel lately. And hotels are not getting the reservations for the FIFA games they expected, including for the final match on July 19. Some companies had hoped to cash in by reserving blocks of luxury hotel rooms and arranging special amenities, like hospitality suites, for the deep-pocket ticket holders. Now those companies are trying to get out of their contracts with the hotels because not enough people are buying their packages.
Part of the problem is FIFA, which way overpriced the tickets. I’m reading lots of North American soccer fans who were really exited about going bailed out when they learned that even a nosebleed seat would set them back a few hundred dollars. One fellow found that even with the cheapest tickets, taking his whole family of four children to a game would have cost him $1,600. Taking his whole family to the U.S. opening game would have cost him $6,700, minimum. Category 1 tickets are being offered for as high as $32,970. It’s also being said that FIFA’s seating categories are hard to understand, so that ticket buyers may be confused about what seats they are buying.
Soccer fans also have been frustrated by the way the tickets have been sold. I understand that for a time you couldn’t just buy tickets. You had to enter a lottery for a chance at winning a time slot to buy a ticket. It appears FIFA has been deliberately making tickets hard to get — creating artificial scarcity — to justify the prices. See World Cup ticket prices for ‘Dallas Stadium’ games top $1,000 as FIFA accused of creating artificial scarcity, dated just two days ago. But see also World Cup ticket resale prices are falling, including for USA opener vs. Paraguay. There could very well be a ticket fire sale at the last minute to fill up seats. FIFA insists that ticket sales have been great, of course.
And then there’s the Trump factor. CNN did a story last month about soccer super-fans overseas who go to every World Cup but are boycotting this one. All the news stories about ICE have them spooked. CNN interviewed a German super-fan who has traveled to every World Cup since 2006. He said he always felt safe in every country. But this guy is half Korean and is afraid of ICE.
“You see the ICE people going around and just pulling people from the streets just because they look foreign and you don’t get the feeling that anybody would protect me, you know?” he says.
CNN also reports that lots of people overseas have been organizing boycotts, although only of the games to be held in the U.S.A. And this is mostly about disgust with Trump. Some overseas soccer fans have vowed to not even watch on television. And “Trump’s travel ban on 39 countries — mostly non-White, African or Muslim-majority countries — also excludes huge groups of international soccer fans.”
When FIFA awarded Trump its bogus peace prize last year, it may have assumed this would help fire up enthusiasm for their games. But are MAGAts soccer fans? The hard core, probably not. Soccer is still a game for foreigners to them. Latinos do tend to be soccer fans, but they may fear that ICE is going to be deployed around the stadiums waiting to snatch people away.
Between now and the first game it may be that most of the seats will fill up, but right now the 2026 World Cup is looking like a massive fail.
The way I look at business practices in the US of A is that if there is a visible or tangible product output by a business activity, it is a lucky coincidence of that activity instead of the goal. So, if a company produces, say, spreadsheet software, the real product is money for the C-suite, not a functional spreadsheet. So, Ford decided that an $80k SUV was a more profitable to market because it could sell 1 of those instead of 5 hatchbacks. It does not matter that there is a market for transportation, it matters that the shareholders need profits. It is a happy coincidence that FIFA makes soccer games because its real product is oligarch prestige. Sheesh, it is easier and more profitable to conduct a crypto scam and a prestige event than to engineer a sedan that gets good mileage or organize uplifting entertainment for the working classes. The zeitgeist is to skip the consumer and real world and go straight to the profit. So, it does not matter if the Straight of Homuz is open, it matters that number go up.
FIFA may be able to make payroll without selling all the seats. But if there are lots of empty seats at the games it's going to damage their brand. And it's also going to make other countries think twice before agreeing to host future games. The whole point for the hosts is to bring in a bunch of dollars from attendees. All the hotels and restaurants and vendors and other businesses that were counting on FIFA profits are being let down. So why would anyone want to host FIFA games in the future? Morocco, Portugal, and Spain have already been designated to host the 2030 games, but I bet they're going to insist FIFA doesn't pull some of the same crap it did this time, or there will be no games.
Typically, the producer (FIFA, in this case, MLB/NBA/NFL in other contexts) is protected, if only by insurance contracts intended to protect against natural disasters. The stadium owners, the hotels, etc., they are the ones who take it the worst.
One thing I think is kind-of funny is that I've heard a lot of the US uses "surge pricing" models, where they don't sell tickets for a set price, but a price determined by algorithm, so if the tickets are more popular, they go up in price. Well, those algorithms have endpoints built into them – they make sure the algorithm won't set prices too low for a sufficiently popular tour. No matter how slow tickets were selling to Taylor Swift, they wouldn't sell for less than $X, where $X is how much your average swiftie would pay for nosebleed seats.
Well, that's exactly the kind of algorithm that could really get messed up right now. Now, a smart person would start discounting, but, today, they'd rather use an AI algorithm which guarantees them that people in Asia, suffering gas and LNG shortages, as well as jet fuel shortages because of Trump, at risk of a beat-down and detention because of Trump, and probably starting to suffer from a regional recession because of Trump, will decide they don't want to go to the United Stats of Trump.
And that algorithm just might not be set to discount at all. This is the effing world effing cup!!!
Now, algorithmic pricing is just another example of artificial <strike>stupidity</strike> intelligence. AI creates Dunning Kruger victims faster than it creates anything else. A rich friend might try to help bail out a hotel friend, and try to buy a cheap world cup party; an algorithm might then boost the hotel's price, assuming it's become a hot spot. A person will never make that mistake; as they say, to err is human, to really eff things up takes a computer.
I'm sorry if the USA world cup sucks, for soccer fans, but I'm not at all sorry if, as expected, DJT could eff up a Nerf ball rock fight.
If empty seats at the World Cup become a story, it's going to reflect badly on Orange Julius.
So, in other words, are you all saying the product is not soccer but success measured in profits… even though a number in the black is subsidized by princes?
I don't know what subsidizing princes you are referring to, but you appear to be making the issue more complicated than it is. Clear your head and focus:
The World Cup, like the Superbowl or the Olympic Games, is a big attraction that lots of people want to see. People will even travel long distances and spend a lot of money to see these events in person. The cities hosting these events are not being paid to do so, but they will compete with other cities for the honor because they expect lots of people to show up and stay in local hotels and eat in local restaurants and buy lots of stuff in their cities. And this generates a lot of profit for local businesses and a lot of revenue for the cities. So it's a good thing.
Are you with me so far?
If you own a business in a city with a stadium in which World Cup games will be played, you've probably given a lot of thought to what impact this event will have on your business. If you have a business that will likely cater to the soccer fans who are expected to come to the games, you probably have been preparing for extra business by adding inventory and maybe hiring some extra people. So for a lot of businesses it's going to really suck if the turnout for the games is lower than expected. I feel bad for them.
What my son and daughter in law told me is that some big businesses — a major soft drink brand was mentioned — had planned a kind of promotional tie-in to the World Cup by selling hotel packages that include a lot of extra amenities. I haven't seen these advertised in the U.S., so it's probably something being marketed in other countries with soccer fans. So these companies had contracts with the hotels and the vendors that provide the amenities. But it's a month out and the packages aren't selling, and now these companies are trying to get out of the contracts. This is an indicator that something is going very wrong with these games.
And, as I explained in the post, FIFA has so overpriced the tickets that many hard-core soccer fans in the U.S. who would love to come to games aren't buying tickets, either. Plus Trump's travel ban has also locked out a lot of people who are big soccer fans who might normally have traveled here. Plus lots of people are afraid to come to the U.S. because they're afraid of ICE, plus lots of people in Europe and possibly elsewhere are boycotting the games because they are pissed at Trump. And so now all those local businesses who had thought they'd be selling lots of beer and ice cream and whatever to hoards of soccer fans may lose money. And many if not most of these would be small local businesses, not big corporations. And it's very sad and ultimately the fault of Trump and FIFA.
That's the whole story. Please don't drag anything else into it.
Oopsies, I am not trying to be a dick, and apologies, but I think that "big sports" is becoming/became another big money grift to funnel public goods to the oligarchs and FIFA is just another propaganda outlet to justify the dominance of the traditional and new moneyed aristocracy.
No more from me, but I think the story that Kash Patel in the US Hockey locker room is the overall story that we are looking at.
Any complex thing can be corrupted, but I don't mind big sports A major league team is an asset to a city in many ways, although I also understand that using taxpayer dollars to build big sports stadiums usually doesn't pay off. But that's how big sports stadiums have been built in the U.S., going back at least to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, constructed in 1923. If you want a stadium that will be used by lots of people for lots of things, I don't see getting around public funding for it.
At the same time, I keep reading that the FIFA organization (headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland) has been involved in several corruption scandals in recent years, and if the 2026 games are as big a bust as they are shaping up to be, a housecleaning may be in order.
"I think the story that Kash Patel in the US Hockey locker room is the overall story that we are looking at."
That's an entirely separate story from what may be going wrong with the World Cup. Just because they both involve sports doesn't change that.
Maybe as a promotional gimmick, FIFA can give out peace prizes to all ticket purchasers.
Kansas City has a lot of the FIFA events. Having lived there for well over a decade and still hearing from people who have problems there with even convention or hospital stays, let's just say ticket prices will be but one of the challenges visitors will face. Keeping one's personal property secure is one problem to really watch out for there by my experience. I write this as politely as I can while giving honest warning.
For me, the ticket pricing alone is a fleecing too rich. My Aurther Bryant's BBQ sauce bottle is still over half full and more is available by mail order. That is living large enough for me. I'll send an ole that way if I get in the mood.
I haven't been to Kansas City since some time in the early to mid 1970s, as I remember. It wasn't exactly an international travel destination back then, so perhaps it hasn't changed much. 🙂
FIFA has had corruption problems for years now (like Olympics, but worse); it would be great if the mess here in this year's World Cup helps expose that.
OTOH, the more likely result is that FIFA will blame Trump and the USA for everything that goes here, and they will have a good case.
I love soccer ("real football"). It's the absolute best exercise for young people (running around outside for an hour!). But I always thought it was a bad idea for the USA to host the World Cup. It felt like we saw that the rest of the world was having too much fun with something, so we had to grab it from them. (To be fair, that wasn't hard, as the FIFA bureaucracy loves the smell of $).
A smarter, more benevolent Empire would have had the sense to allow the rest of the world the comfort of being better at something than we are.
Going OT: I was doing some mental housecleaning and had to reconcile a serious ethical discrepancy. To start off with, I am non-violent, in the MLK philosophy. I am not bound to obedience – civil disobedience is lawbreaking by definition. It's my opinion that you don't bring a gun to a demonstration. The First Amendment (Freedom of Speech) doesn't mix well with the Second Amendment. MAGA likes to brandish weapons in public at opponents, which I find offensive, though within constitutional bounds. IMO, so would the intervention of real cops to check the ID of anyone doing open carry at a counter-demonstration, coupled with detention behind bars for a few hours.
So where's the conflict? I will rejoice when DJT dies, and that would include if he was assassinated by Seal Team Six at the direction of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I did NOT say I want to assassinate anyone, participate in political violence, or that I offer support and comfort to anyone who had. I'm saying I had to lay my firm belief in non-violence next to my lack of opposition to improving the ethical gene pool by removing swimmers who are peeing in it.
On what basis do I find DJT morally bankrupt to the point that the death penalty doesn't require a unanimous jury decision? I offer two victims by name and the evidence associated with those names. Alex Pretti and Renee Good. I'm not saying Trump ordered the killings. I know Trump participated in defaming the victims while the bodies were still warm. I know the investigation was a cover-up that excluded Minnesota law enforcement and that the DOJ continues to oppose the release of evidence. But the most damning fact is that the killers are all still on active duty with no reprimand. That makes these extrajudicial executions personally sanctioned by the president. In my ethical framework, Trump has set the rules, and though he does not like it, he's made himself a legitimate (not legal) target.
I'm not saying the law has changed, but if I were sitting on the jury, I could not bring back a guilty verdict for removing DJT by any means up to and including the same violence he's brought against US citizens.
I welcome comments, especially dissenting analysis. Perhaps a pure pacifist, which I'm not, can explain how law and order enjoys some superior status over justice. DJT is less than halfway through his legal term of office. There's every reason to take seriously Trump's threat to assume an unconstitutional third term. Is there a line, and if he hasn't crossed it, what more is required?
Hitler's fascism brought untold suffering and destruction, eventually costing hundreds of millions of lives. What if he'd been removed before he had that much power, before he inflicted that much human tragedy? Is my morality twisted or straight to suggest a man deserves the benefit of the doubt and the protection of the law until there is no doubt and the man himself is operating in violation of the law, bringing murder and misery to the world?
Hindsight has that nasty habit of being chronically tardy. Hitler looked "shiny" to some influential Americans until the ugly and stupid side of social Darwinism emerged.
We simply failed to educate for Democracy, one of the prime reasons of educational philosophy for public education. All administrators take that course. Unfortunately, they generally consider it a nuisance rather than needed wisdom. Now we see the expensive consequences of their error we hope.
Germany taught us about this pitfall, yet we stepped into it failing to learn from the mistakes of others. The illusion of education is not enough to really educate for democracy. We see that by who gets nominated and elected. People unfit to dog-sit much less govern. People not even close to being both smart enough and educated enough to do the job. People that "looked OK" on TV. That comes from voters inadequately educated to be citizens of a democracy.
It is failure at the school district level. Failure to inoculate certain memes from spreading, as they have infecting us today. I'm sure the RFK meme opposes such inoculation. He thinks his meme is a dominant one. So too other memes like those Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondie and the like promote.
These memes and many more have gone viral as they say in meme theory. If you read meme theory is says education's job is to prevent weak memes from going viral. It is but a theory. But, according to meme theory, education has obviously failed.
Isn't it coincidental that Social Darwinism and meme theory both rely on the theory of evolution. Then again, it could well have been determined.
We saved an ounce of prevention, and we shall pay at least a pound of cure.
OT, saw a cartoon where Bibi is dragging Donald along, holding his hand, pulling him along like a child:
Donald: Bibi, this war is so borrring. Can we stop?
Bibi: Let's get you some paint for your reflecting pool.
Just like placating / distracting a whining child…
OT – Wow –LeavingMAGA.org
It takes a little while to load. I often thought about starting a Recovering Republican website, but since I was a never a Republican in the first place, the idea went nowhere. All I had to do was wait. Wait for the time when the whole thing implodes.
Ha, just saw that they're going to do a "Half-Time Show" during the final game (first time ever!!!), presumably because "Soccer should be more like the NFL".
At least the headline act will be Shakira, who has a real history of doing Futbol songs. I'm gloriously ignorant of about modern Pop Music; all I know about Shakira is that she's blonde (maybe bottle?), gorgeous, Brazilian, and had a Big Hit Song about Hips, so she's OK by me.