Adam Crofton

Which just gives you a sense of it.

So you do have to be extremely wealthy.

And that is having an impact now on host cities, you know, who, as I said, were looking for this economic impact.

And I think a lot of them are now coming to terms with this will largely be a domestically attended World Cup.

which will mean that the stadiums are pretty well sold because America is huge.

And there's a lot of people in the three countries that will go to these games, but you won't have that impact of people staying in the hotels and going to museums and spending money in the way that a tourist would, which was the original point of it and is meant to be the point of a World Cup.

That's what it increasingly feels like.

And even then, it's a World Cup for a pretty small percentage of Americans who can actually afford it.

I was speaking to someone who works at FIFA a couple of weeks ago and they basically said, even we can't mess up taking the best football players in the world to the biggest economy in the world and not having everyone at the end of it saying, what a great football tournament.

And that's kind of the reality of what tends to happen by the end of it.

Once you're a couple of weeks in and you've got the best players in the world in incredibly high jeopardy games that they only play in every four years.

I mean, we could have a quarterfinal in Kansas City of Portugal against Argentina.

It'd be the first time Ronaldo and Messi have played against each other in what will be both of their last World Cups.

I mean, by that stage, that's what people are going to be talking about.

However...

you know that i think there are going to be i think a lot of these stories are going to run and run during the world cup i mean that you know this was still even issues around you know four of the countries who are competing um senegal ivory coast iran haiti you know they're

Their people are under travel bans.

There's exemptions for the athletes.

But, you know, in some cases, there's countries at their first World Cups or first World Cups for 50 years or whatever.

And their fans can't travel to get to the tournament, which for FIFA, it's completely unheard of and unprecedented.