Rachel Bachman

Fans have responded to ticket prices with shock.

FIFA is using what they call dynamic ticket pricing.

which means the prices are set to respond to the demand.

And what this has meant is enormously high prices, shockingly so.

Generally for that U.S.

opener, tickets are priced at $1,940 to over $4,000.

It's yet to be seen whether this game will sell out.

My sense is it probably will.

But the fact that there are still tickets on sale is pretty remarkable, given that we are now weeks away from kickoff.

Claudia Golden is really a rock star in economics.

She's the first woman to win a solo Nobel in the field.

That was in 2023.

And she's done exhaustive research on pay discrimination and also in the history of women in the workplace.

So she really is one of the authorities on those subjects in the world.

It really went supernova in early 2024.

That's when Kaitlyn Clark went number one overall in the draft.

She's a huge star and set the NCAA scoring record at Iowa.

And there were several other very well-known players who were coming out of college at the same time.

And they really took the league by storm.

Viewership on ESPN went up 170 percent, attendance surged, and really this league went from a little bit more of a niche product to kind of a household discussion almost in one year.