Nick Martell

Despite the high prices, reselling is still rampant for this World Cup.

And FIFA only lets it happen on their official platform, where they take a 30% fee.

A fee fee.

Jack, could you sprinkle on even more context for us on FIFA?

FIFA is corrupt.

It's not just Nick and I saying that.

It's the FBI saying that.

Because in 2015, the FBI indicted nine FIFA officials for racketeering conspiracy and corruption.

But last year, the White House paused enforcement of America's anti-bribery laws, which was basically a wink-wink to FIFA to go ahead and do your bribery stuff this World Cup.

So now FIFA stands to make $9 billion in profit on these games, and they say they're going to put it into promoting soccer across the globe.

But FIFA bribes like Neymar flops.

We promise we will pivot from ticket price frustration to soccer excitement.

But first, Jack, can you whip up our takeaway?

You can't beat scalpers by becoming them.

Vasties, FIFA set ticket prices extraordinarily high for a reason that we actually agree with.

It was to beat ticket scalpers.

Sophisticated scalpers these days use bots to buy up all the tickets online before real humans can, and then they resell them for a profit.

They take a bunch of revenue and have nothing to do with the performance.

So if FIFA sold soccer tickets at an everyman price, scalpers would just jack up that price, which would be bad for FIFA and bad for us.

So this World Cup, FIFA tried to predict what prices would resell for if scalpers got their hands on them and then just made it that price in the primary market.