The total hasn’t entirely stopped rising yet, still clicking away towards a final tally. Still, Fifa has already announced that it surpassed its own lofty revenue projections for the 2026 World Cup, bringing in $15bn, significantly more than anticipated. It appears that a third of that total – $5bn – came from ticket sales and hospitality alone, per reporting from the Times.
That would mean direct income from the matchgoing fans came in five times as high in the United States, Canada and Mexico as it did at the last World Cup, in Qatar in 2022, when the total stood at $929m. While 2026’s expanded World Cup added 40 games to the schedule, the takings nevertheless went from an average of about $14.5m per match to about $48m. Which is to say that Fifa, and by extension its all-controlling president Gianni Infantino, was right.
Wrong, mind you, about what it believes anybody with a modicum of taste would think is cool and enjoyable. Like putting Robbie Williams in everything; or cramming Madonna, and BTS, and Shakira, and Justin Bieber, and Ted Lasso, and the Muppets into a World Cup final half-time show that catered to the appetites of the lobotomized; or setting up a pre-final speech on greatness by Tom Cruise. Wrong, too, about mandatory hydration breaks, and suspending red cards, and stretching the aforementioned, accursed half-time show to 27 minutes in violation of Fifa’s own rules.
But right about all the things Fifa cares about. Which can be neatly reduced to money. Right that exposing ticket sales – and even parking – to dynamic pricing, driving their prices far out of reach of your average fan, would pay off.
Right that it could annex the secondary ticket market and take a hefty cut of resales. Right that the PR hit of cozying up to Donald Trump – who was already deeply unpopular, especially among America’s left-leaning soccer crowd – would not be mortal and, in fact, would not even cost Fifa any money at all. That tolerating the excesses of the Trump government – the disgraceful treatment of the Iranian team, its bluster about potential ICE action around stadiums and its denial of visas to fans and journalists hoping to attend the tournament – would be worth it in order to safeguard the money gusher. (These things may all yet be investigated, among about a million other things, but Fifa’s money is made all the same.) Right, in the end, that the World Cup is too big to fail.
That the decadence and cravenness of the World Cup’s organizers will, in the end, be redeemed by the tournament itself. That the World Cup is unfuckupable. As things stand, it looks like Infantino may very well survive the fallout of his foolhardy and utterly tone-deaf attempt to quickly and unilaterally sell a chunk of the World Cup’s commercial rights to private equity.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
