Dave Davies

You know, we'll be talking about some issues and controversies surrounding the World Cup.

But to begin with, I just want to take note of the enormous pleasure and joy that this brings to many hundreds of millions of people around the world.

Just share with us, you know, what the World Cup can be at its best.

Is there a heart stopping play or moment that sticks in your mind when you think about the World Cup?

All right.

Well, so let's talk about some of the issues here.

Ticket prices at this World Cup are higher than any World Cup ever, in part because FIFA, which runs this thing, is using dynamic pricing, right?

Yeah.

So what does that mean for fans?

And it's not just the prices.

It's the way they are being managed and marketed.

And I didn't understand really how troublingly deceptive this can be until I read a piece in The Athletic, of which you are editor-in-chief, by Henry Bushnell, who wrote this story about how typically when you buy a sports ticket,

I'm going to go to a game in Baltimore.

My daughter lives in Baltimore.

So I was going to get a Baltimore Orioles game.

And you go to the website and there's a map of the stadium and you can pick the section, the row, the seat that you know exactly what you're getting and what it costs.

But he writes in this piece that when people went to the FIFA site to buy tickets for their games, you couldn't choose a seat.

You chose a category of seats.

There were four categories.

And he noted that for category one, the most expensive, which was for most of them more than $1,000, sometimes several thousand.