Astronomical World Cup ticket prices might have been a huge issue for English fans this week, but you wouldn’t have guessed that from the Football Association board meeting. Sources say they weren’t even discussed. The guidance in one weekly missive instead just stated: “Fifa set the prices, we aren’t involved, we don’t get to approve them, and we only received them just prior to the announcement. We are aware that many of our fans and fan groups are unhappy with the pricing, and have asked us to relay their concerns to Fifa. We will do that.”
To which an obvious response is, what about the FA’s own concerns? What about their anger about this? What about the fact they had ample warning about these prices for months? Where’s the lobbying? These are just pre-sales. There is time for pressure to work and Fifa to reverse this.
Sources within the Football Supporters’ Association [FSA] are already unnerved by the lack of public statement, and have warned the FA that “silence isn’t an option”.
The English body are hardly alone in this, even if they do hold a unique power as one of the biggest federations in the world, with all of the symbolic historic weight as the federation that set the sport’s rules.
Many national associations privately declared themselves “shocked” by the prices on Thursday, but that hasn’t yet translated into any action. The German federation, the DFB, were also embarrassingly meek as they spoke of how they “would have preferred more affordable tickets”.
Stirring stuff from the federation that represents the most mobilised fans in the world.
At this point, it’s hard not to wonder when action might actually come; what might finally prompt some sort of jolt in football’s stagnant but self-servingly aloof status quo.
This is after all only the latest Fifa misstep, in a frankly astonishing two weeks even by their modern standards.
There was first the Cristiano Ronaldo decision, which raised questions over sporting integrity. There was then the video justifying Donald Trump’s “peace prize”, which amounted to misuse of the sport for political propaganda, against Fifa’s own statutes.
And now this, a grand rip-off of those who actually make the sport, in what Football Supporters Europe [FSE] have described as “a monumental betrayal”.
But it’s even more than that. As much as it seems a basic case of fans being ripped off, it goes to much deeper levels, in two ways.
One is that it sums up the whole problem with modern football in one simple issue. That is the escalating tension over whether it is just some other commodity to be bought and sold with no concern for anything else, or it’s actually more important than that.
The World Cup itself is emphatic evidence of the latter. These are not just “entertainment events” like a Taylor Swift concert, that Fifa appear to have used as some kind of benchmark for the US market.
World Cup matches form some of the greatest days in countries’ histories. They’re special. Some fans wait their entire lives for this, spending tens of thousands following their teams in anticipation of this moment.
This is what football culture is. This is what Fifa should be recognising.
It is instead far from the first time that the Gianni Infantino leadership has displayed a complete misunderstanding of their own game.
That’s even as the issues with these tickets should be so obvious.
Firstly, the shift away from standard pricing across all group matches – with the FSE describing “vague criteria” such as “perceived attractiveness” of a fixture – is new, and a deviation from every previous World Cup. The lowest category 4 tickets will also not be available to the hardcore fans through “Participating Members Association allocation”, but instead subject to the open market and dynamic pricing. These are choices, that are all the more surprising when a not-for-profit registered charity like Fifa was anticipating record revenue of $11bn even before this. These choices also represent a deviation from the bid book for this very tournament in 2018, which was also based on the old system.
Inflation in the US has never got above 8 per cent in that time. Thursday’s prices represent – on average – inflation of 174 per cent from the 2018 projected prices. It’s unjustifiable, leading to tickets that are five times more than the last World Cup. The FSA have calculated that England fans would have to pay a minimum of $7,020 (£5,248) to follow the team to the final, and that’s before travel and accommodation. Supporters are also expected to pay all of this money in February, with money only returned if the team are knocked out – minus an admin fee. Disabled supporters who are normally allowed companions are meanwhile charged twice.
Some arguments have been made about having to be guided by the local US market.
Why?
Fifa were not guided by the local market in South Africa or Brazil, or any previous World Cup.
It must be stressed that all of this was a top-down initiative from the Infantino hierarchy, that sources say was “put together by a small circle”, and that even the Fifa Council had no idea of.
But, if they didn’t know, what exactly are they doing to justify their $300,000 remuneration? Why aren’t they speaking up now? This is as core a football issue as you can get. Debbie Hewitt, the FA chair, is better placed than anyone as Fifa vice-president.
But then this is the second way that this entire story goes to a deeper level. It fully exposes the broken manner in which football power works, and in a way that directly affects fans.
The Infantino leadership will argue that all of this – right up to the calendar chaos caused by the Club World Cup – boosts Fifa revenue, which goes back to the member associations though the Fifa Forward programme. But this is the exact same programme that has been criticised as merely a clientelistic vote-returning mechanism, and that in a game already awash with money. So what it mostly does is strengthen Infantino’s position.
And that is already in a system where there is no second party. There is no outlet for dissent, a problem only sharpened by the manner in which speaking out is often punished by political ostracisation or a difficulty in securing major events – like World Cups. Years on, and football is still governed by the same old politics. No wonder Fifa can say the voters are not complaining.
Sources within the FA will argue that they have a duty to try and bring tournaments to England, which is why the bid for the 2035 Women’s World Cup requires political delicacy.
But they are the only bidders.
What’s more, they have even more of a duty to their support base, and how they actually experience the game.
The FA need to actually speak up, to show fans they have their back.
For the moment, Fifa’s latest missives indicate they are not changing. A news release on Friday night was crowing about five million registrations, but most of those were before the announcement of these prices.
That can change, too. Football doesn’t just need to accept this ridiculous “supply and demand” rationale, as if it’s only subject to the market rather than its own decisions. There is actually time for something to be done.
It would be good if, for once, senior football figures actually tried that.
