Adam Crofton

the special event train for if you are going to the world cup games they it was announced a couple of weeks ago that's going to be 150 right so that gives an idea of of the markup that's being made now

I actually don't think this is all about being in kind of Trump's America in this case.

I think part of what's going on here is that FIFA's model is that they take their tournament into countries and FIFA take all of the revenue from ticketing, sponsorship, broadcast, even the parking fees.

FIFA are charging like $250 in some cases to park your car.

They take all of these revenues and

while the cities are expected to pay all the public transportation costs, the increased security costs, and the security costs for FIFA events are kind of off the scale, particularly when you get into what America charges for policing in any case.

And a lot of these burdens are falling on the cities.

And these cities, you know, when the bids were made seven or eight years ago, were talking about economic impact.

and they were projecting huge, huge, huge uplift in economic impact.

However, as is so often the case, as you get closer to these mega sports events, the cities aren't really seeing that uplift in the way that was projected.

And what you're now seeing is they're attempting to claw back some of these costs by transferring it on to World Cup visitors rather than their own taxpayers, which is an interesting debate because it's, you know, should...

I guess what you could argue is, should the average low-income person who is going to work from Manhattan to New Jersey have to take on that cost over a period of time, or should it fall to somebody who is probably an affluent World Cup visitor?

That's the argument they're making.

The counter-argument is, don't bid for something you can't afford in the first place.

Yeah, I mean, we've already seen the stories about, you know, people remortgaging houses and selling houses and things like that.

But that's no, with all due respect, most normal, nobody normal does that, you know, to go to a football match.

It was always going to be a really hard.

hard World Cup for fans to attend in the sense of it's three countries so you know so it's already really vast you know if you're trying to follow England you're going from Dallas to Boston to New York possibly to Mexico you know there's Atlanta and Dallas again for semi-finals you you're always going to have to be pretty affluent to do this but the level of the ticket pricing now combined with

hotel prices, which started off just astronomically when the draw was made in December.

I mean, we did an assessment that showed across the 16 cities across North America, I think the hotel prices were like 350 to 400% up.