Laura Williamson

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251 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 9 Jun

Laura Williamson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Fresh Air · How sky-high ticket prices, war & politics could impact the World Cup · 9 Jun 2026 podcast

That is just so prohibitive for the average person.

It's an incredible amount of money before you've added on hotels and travel, etc., etc.

So the dynamic pricing has been very controversial because it also doesn't distinguish between – they're called supporter fans in FIFA language –

between fans who have been to every game that their team has played for the past 10 years, for example, and somebody who lives in Philadelphia and quite fancies going to a World Cup game.

You might think, well, that's just tough luck.

If the demand's there, that's what happens.

But it's a very different approach for football in general.

And I think that's why it's caused so much upset, because you're not being rewarded for loyalty, if you like, or for being an expert about your team.

So that's been very, very controversial and has upset a lot of people.

Yeah, Henry has been incredible in terms of the rigorous ways reported this process.

And another point that he's made in an article on Monday on The Athletic is a lot of this has come because the process has been so opaque.

So FIFA can do what they like ostensibly.

They are the World Cup organisers.

So as you referenced there, we've heard examples of people thinking they're buying football

VIP hospitality tickets and then actually when the ticket seat and row number comes through it's category one which is a very very different experience and I think even going back to sort of September that was the first time that information about ticketing for this tournament was released and that was only in September you know less than a year to go before kickoff and

And then there was the sort of right to buy fiasco, if you like, which was where you paid an additional fee to have the right to buy a ticket because FIFA were banking on there being such high demand, which there was.

Then the dynamic pricing kicked in and the sort of initial prices shot up by an average of 35% for, I think, 95 of the 104 games.

And then people have realised what tickets they've got.

And as you say, they're not in the area they thought they were.

Then there's also the resale market.

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