Chris Cook

So the short answer is that this World Cup is the most expensive World Cup ever.

So group stage tickets are up to about three times the price of those for the last World Cup held in Qatar in 2022.

Some of the prices, if you're like a European football fan that are being quoted, are absolutely wild.

I am delighted to say that I'm a season ticket holder at Qatar.

Crystal Palace, a sort of mid-size Premier League team.

And it cost me about $1,000 a year to have a season ticket.

That's 19 games across the whole season.

That's roughly how much it would cost at the moment to get a ticket to see the USA versus Paraguay, a rather undersubscribed game happening in Los Angeles.

Yeah, so the way that FIFA released the tickets is actually another thing that's slightly baffling.

So FIFA allowed people to buy up to 40 tickets so you could amass quite a big box office of your own.

And then it allowed them to resell them at basically whatever price they wanted.

So one of the slightly odd things about this tournament is...

At the beginning of this week, there are about 180,000 tickets to the group games, which are available from people who clearly bought those tickets with the intention of reselling them at a profit.

But one of the things that's been happening over the last week is those resellers have managed to shift a load of those tickets by massively slashing their prices.

That means a load of those people are losing money on their ticket scalping.

So the first politician to really put the FIFA prices on the agenda in the U.S.

was Zoran Mamdani, the recently elected mayor of New York, who campaigned against FIFA's pricing.

But that's actually really been put in the shade recently by the New York Attorney General, Letitia James, and the New Jersey Attorney General, Jennifer Davenport, who have begun an investigation into FIFA, into whether they've misled fans and whether they were trying to do something that was going to lead to soaring prices.

So there's a possibility that this will turn into yet another FIFA financial scandal.

So FIFA's been very unapologetic about all of this.