Dan McDonald

The headlines here yesterday and across the last couple of days are about the fact that the city of Toronto, transpires, bought a load of World Cup tickets yesterday.

for resale at a higher price to corporates to in some way cover the cost of the competition being here, which is a new story here because it seems to fly in the face of, say, laws about touting and so on, and yet the city is effectively engaged in that practice.

But they're saying, well, this World Cup is costing us, I think it ended up costing something like $380 million Canadian dollars

I think the initial estimate for the city was something like, I think maybe 45.

Okay.

We've seen this story before in a lot of different places, but they're kind of saying, well, we have to, you know, we have to buy these tickets and guess what?

Only 70 remain or something, you know.

Okay.

Yeah.

And I think $3,000, um,

yeah tickets in the rate in the region of sort of three three grand ahead maybe to go to the game on on friday here which you know the exchange rate is maybe what's 78 of that or something or might be a little bit off but you know it's still a substantial amount of um substantial amount of money and it's part of the the broader dilemma i mean toronto i mean people i'm sure we probably have

listeners from Toronto and a lot of people who've been to Toronto it's an incredible city it's the biggest city in Canada but because their stadium is relatively small it's interest in the competition ends at the round of 32 stage

There's not too many games here.

They actually are set up to potentially get a very good round of 32 games with the runner-up of the England-Croatia group against the runner-up of the Portugal-Colombia group.

So that has the potential to be a heavyweight game.

But otherwise, with the exception of the opener...

the World Cup here is just it's going to happen and like Germany are here but it's very much like passing through it's on the fringes of the competition so I think there's part of that unease around well we've spent a lot of money to be somewhat peripheral to this competition but the flip side of that is I think everyone is aware of it that

if Canada do win this opening game, you know, or, you know, they pick up some points and they play Qatar second, which is definitely a game they should be looking to win.

Well, then it is one of those where it might actually ignite and everyone will get in behind it.

But there was a big rally down here last night