Laura Williamson

speaker

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

No, no, they haven't.

Like you had to sign up for the FIFA pass scheme, which was supposed to basically enable you to book embassy appointments, et cetera, and help with the visa scheduling process.

You had to have done that and have bought a match ticket by April the 15th.

Some countries didn't qualify until three weeks earlier, three weeks before that.

So there will be lots and lots of people who have been affected by this.

It was totally and utterly different because all those games really were within one city.

You wouldn't be able to see all of it, but in theory, if you wanted to, you could go to four games in a day by getting the air-conditioned, very clean, very efficient, very free train system between the two, their version of a subway system.

Whereas here, because it is so spread out over 16 host cities and three countries, all of which are almost like their own little kingdoms, if you like.

They've all signed individual contracts with FIFA.

So there's all different rules all over the place.

It's going to be completely different.

And also, I think because of the one of FIFA's things is about the naming of stadiums.

So you can't have commercial names in stadium titles.

So MetLife is MetLife to so many people, but it will be New York, New Jersey Stadium for the duration of this World Cup.

The answer is we don't know, again.

So it's a huge unknown in terms of, I mean, fans, you would think fans actually coming from Congo will be very, very, very limited because of the reasons we've discussed.

And the health measures around the team itself will be incredibly tight.

But it's another factor that, of course, is very concerning, another thing for people to think about.

I was at that final and actually my children and my dad were there as well.

It was very, very scary in terms of it happened, I think, because fans left it as they're allowed to.

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