Eduardo Marin drove a painted bus from Germany to Russia in 2018 to watch Mexico play. Now the World Cup is in his own country, and he's not going to a single game. The bus is gathering dust. Tickets to Mexico's opener against South Africa were selling for up to $5,000 — roughly what Marin spent on three matches plus the entire Russia trip.
That contrast says everything about what this tournament has become.
Priced out of their own party
Mexico hasn't hosted a World Cup since 1986. Forty years of waiting, and the return has been met less with celebration than with a slow, spreading sense of exclusion. Marin's frustration isn't unique — it's the dominant mood among working-class Mexican fans who thought hosting the tournament meant getting to experience it.
At the Azteca for the opener, fans reported paying between $3,000 and $5,000 per ticket. Mexico's median monthly salary sits around $500. Do the math. That's nearly ten months of wages for a seat in the stadium.
FIFA's official line: prices are in line with other major sporting events. Mexico's government: there are free public screenings. Neither answer lands particularly well with Ricardo Arafat Garcia Tagle, a 42-year-old graphic animator from the working-class Coapa neighborhood who put it plainly: "Of the three countries — Mexico, the United States and Canada — this is the football nation." Mexico got 13 of 104 matches. The rest went north.
The licensing maze killing local atmosphere
It's not just stadiums. Watching at home now requires a paid subscription for most matches — a shift from past tournaments broadcast freely on national television. TelevisaUnivision is making 32 games available for free, including all Mexico fixtures and the final, but that leaves dozens of group stage matches behind a paywall for fans who can least afford it.
For bars and restaurants, the squeeze is just as tight. Luis Bernot, manager of Salon Casino — a historic cantina in Mexico City's Doctores neighborhood — spent weeks redesigning promotional materials after FIFA rules prohibited using terms like "World Cup" or related imagery. The bar's banner now reads "Soccer is lived and drunk" next to a flag-covered ball. Technically compliant. Barely.
Commercial broadcast licenses range from 4,000 to 22,000 Mexican pesos depending on venue size — around $233 to $1,280. For a small neighborhood bar already operating on thin margins, that's not a trivial decision. Some simply aren't showing the games. At Las Delicias de la Obrera, manager Julio Mendoza couldn't afford the commercial package. On a Saturday evening, while Haiti played Scotland, the TV was running a telenovela instead.
Around Monterrey, authorities built walls along roads leading to the stadium and airport to hide poorer neighborhoods from visiting fans. San Juanita Barrera, 71, a resident of one of those neighborhoods, didn't mince it: "They don't want anyone to see us."
"It used to be for the people," Marin said. He compared today's World Cup to Formula One — a spectacle engineered for a different crowd entirely. He's not wrong to notice the drift. The question is whether FIFA or anyone else in a position to change it actually cares.
