Five days late and a few million dollars short. If FIFA’s ticketing climbdown on Tuesday proved anything, it is that you simply cannot budget for the absurdities of Gianni Infantino’s mind.
While his underlings at FIFA trumpeted their humanitarian strides – in other words, the belated release of a handful of World Cup tickets that won’t require a mortgage to purchase – the rest of us were left to ponder comparisons.
Here’s one: the carjacker who returned to the scene of a crime and left a few coins on the pavement for a taxi.
To trawl through the great FIFA ticketing bungle is to conclude for the umpteenth time that football’s grandest stage is controlled by charlatans, vandals and highwaymen in suits. As the saying goes, at least Dick Turpin wore a mask.
It has been six days since FIFA revealed the exorbitant costs that will be necessary for fans to attend matches at a World Cup that had already been bloated beyond competitive credibility to satisfy corporate greed. As we know by now, the price for anyone accompanying each step of the way to the final would exceed £5,000.
Evidently, the complaints about such larceny were able to penetrate the tin ears of FIFA. On Tuesday, they disclosed a new price bracket. They had listened. They had acted. They were working for the people of the people’s game. And so followed the big reveal from their latest gathering in the people’s hotspot of Qatar: cheapest tickets for each game would be set at £45.
Which, ostensibly, is a bargain. Get the final and you’re laughing at the broke guy sat next to you who paid full whack. Except, the odds don’t fancy your chances. Because the FIFA price cap comes with one of its own – these tickets will only comprise 10 per cent of the tiny allocation available to the national association of each country for a given fixture.
In short, that means around 400 such tickets will be available for £45 to fans of England, Scotland or whoever else per group match. Shorter still, it means only 1.6 percent of fans from both nations in a fixture will have got in for £45. The rest will have been fleeced. So we can see this for what it is – an optic. A screen. A method of saying prices range from £45 rather than being hamstrung by a number that reveals the swindle.
On matters of FIFA, it is always worth bouncing their actions off the bottom line – they forecast revenues of around £6.7billion across their work in 2026, one third of which will be generated by ticketing and hospitality, mostly from the World Cup. They expect to make a surplus of £3.85bn.
Of course, our Football Association have their own private thoughts about the needlessly large slice of those extras that will be harvested from fans in the US next summer.
They had planned to talk to FIFA after the original pricing was issued. But they clapped Infantino into another term of office in 2023, so this is partially on them. Just as it is on the other 209 of the 211 delegates who welcomed him to stay in his presidency.
The only objector was Norway – if they want to moan about the racketeering and plundering and the Saudi World Cup and the toadying up to Trump, they can. The rest had their chance and sided with the highwayman. They went with the flow. This is what they got.
