"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 North America, the tournament that should have been soccer's long-awaited breakthrough in the United States has instead become a case study in how to alienate the people who actually love the sport. The cheapest available tickets have jumped from $55 in Qatar to $560 here — nearly a tenfold increase. Group-stage suites start at $40,000. Seats for the MetLife final are listed on FIFA's own resale platform for up to $2.3 million each. The attorneys general of New York and New Jersey have subpoenaed FIFA, investigating suspected artificial scarcity designed to inflate those resale prices further.
FIFA president Gianni Infantino's response? "We have to look at the market." Even Donald Trump, no stranger to premium pricing, admitted he "wouldn't pay it either, to be honest."
Pricing Out the People Who Made the Tournament
The 2022 Qatar final — Argentina vs France, Messi vs Mbappé, arguably the greatest game ever played — drew 1.5 billion viewers. That was the moment FIFA had been building toward for decades. A chance to finally crack the American market, backed by legitimate proof that soccer could deliver something no other sport could.
Instead of building on that, FIFA expanded the tournament from 32 to 48 teams and 104 matches, handed direct control of ticketing to itself, implemented dynamic pricing, and layered on a halftime show at the final featuring Madonna, Shakira, and BTS. Players will wear collectible trading card patches. Cooling breaks will carry advertising. Nothing has been left unmonetised.
The people being locked out aren't apathetic Americans who never cared about soccer. 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 English-language U.S. audience for a club match ever. American soccer fans exist, they're engaged, and they were already coming. FIFA decided they needed to be reshaped anyway.
"This idea of 'Americanizing' soccer isn't really coming from American fans. It's coming from FIFA," said Atlanta-based soccer journalist Felipe Cárdenas. "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 are not at all interested in the World Cup. Nearly six in ten said they don't expect to watch a single match. Only 2 percent said they'd spend $600 or more on a ticket. In Boston, Philadelphia, and Seattle, hotel demand has trailed a typical summer season. Host cities are warning they may not recover the hundreds of millions spent on security and infrastructure — even as FIFA projects $11 billion in total tournament revenue.
What This Does to the Football Itself
The commercial damage is visible. The sporting damage runs deeper.
Elite players arriving at this tournament will have played up to 70 matches in a single club season. The 48-team format stretches the schedule further and spreads it across three countries — the United States, Canada, and Mexico — adding logistical strain on top of physical exhaustion. "Players are arriving with too many games on their legs, there's very little time to prepare, the temperatures will be intense," said Jorge Luis Pinto, the Colombian coach who guided Costa Rica to one of the tournament's great upsets in 2014, eliminating England, Italy, and Uruguay.
Former U.S. forward Clint Dempsey put it more bluntly: "It's almost like it doesn't start until the round of 32."
This will almost certainly be the last World Cup for both Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. The next generation — Mbappé, Lamine Yamal — carry the weight of replacing them in a sport that Simon Chadwick, professor at Emlyon Business School and author of The Business of the FIFA World Cup, describes as now fully industrialised. "Pep Guardiola at Manchester City had 32 data analysts," Chadwick noted. "What we now have is a heavily commercialized and industrialized version of soccer, built around what market data supposedly says consumers want."
FIFA is set to generate around $3.9 billion from broadcasting rights alone — a 30 percent increase on Qatar 2022. Broadcasting, not ticket revenue, is the financial engine. Which means the empty seats don't hurt the bottom line the way they hurt the atmosphere. One corporate suite client, financially, is worth dozens of priced-out supporters.
- Cheapest widely available tickets in 2026: $560 — up from $55 in Qatar 2022
- Final tickets listed on FIFA's official resale platform: up to $2.3 million each
- Group-stage suite prices: from $40,000; semifinal suites up to $300,000
- Projected FIFA revenue from 2026: $11 billion total, $3.9 billion from broadcast rights alone
- U.S. public interest in the tournament: 54% say they are not at all interested (YouGov, May 2025)
There are political dimensions too. Trump's immigration crackdown has barred fans from Haiti and Iran — both qualified nations — from entering the United States. Haiti qualified for the first time in over 50 years. Their fans can't come. Infantino, who attended Trump's inauguration and invented a FIFA Peace Prize specifically to hand to him, has said nothing meaningful about it. FIFA's own statutes require all qualified nations be welcomed by the host. They weren't.
"The danger is that this alienates traditional supporters, the same ones that made the game what it is," Chadwick said.
FIFA isn't asking that question. The 2026 World Cup will almost certainly set an all-time record for commercial revenue. Whether anyone remembers what it felt like to watch it is a different matter entirely.
