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Chapter 1: What are the key factors impacting ticket prices for the World Cup?
On June 11th, the globe's biggest sporting event comes to North America, the FIFA World Cup. The Super Bowl, you might say, averages something over 100 million live viewers, but the World Cup final, I think like five times that much. The favorites, the underdogs, and the Americanization of the world's game. Listen now to the Sunday story from the Up First podcast on the NPR app.
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. The FIFA World Cup opens this week with soccer matches in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. With 48 teams in 104 matches, this will be the biggest World Cup ever.
Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, the international federation that runs the tournament, has declared that this will be the greatest event that humanity, mankind, has ever seen and ever will see. So, yes, there's plenty of excitement.
Chapter 2: How are political issues affecting travel to the World Cup?
More than 5 million tickets have been sold to international travelers alone. But this is also a season of some discontent surrounding the Cup. Aside from logistical challenges like transportation, there are issues arising from war, politics, infectious disease, and, according to many, greed.
FIFA's ticketing practices and pricing have outraged many fans and prompted investigations by two state attorneys general. U.S. immigration restrictions and the war with Iran have affected travel from many countries, and the Ebola outbreak has the attention of local and international health officials.
And just to keep things interesting this week, there's the NBA finals and another one-of-a-kind sports event coming up on Sunday, the Ultimate Fighting Championship on the White House lawn. To talk about all this, we've invited Laura Williamson, editor-in-chief of The Athletic, to join us. The Athletic is the subscription-based sports journalism site of The New York Times.
Before joining The Athletic, Laura Williamson was sports news editor and a correspondent at The Daily Mail.
Chapter 3: What challenges do fans face regarding ticketing for the World Cup?
She joined us from London, where she is based. We recorded our conversation yesterday. Laura Williamson, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
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.
Sure.
Yeah, I mean, when I think about my experience of World Cups as a kid and then being lucky enough to be in Qatar four years ago and to cover that tournament, you might not remember the score, you might not remember who scored, but you remember where you were and who you watched it with and what it meant to you at that time.
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Chapter 4: What is the impact of dynamic pricing on World Cup tickets?
And I think it's that power that actually sport can have and football, soccer in particular, can have to bring people together, that sort of connective tissue, if you like. So that's the hope that that's what this tournament can do without sounding sort of too sentimental about things. But I really do believe that football in particular has the power to do that.
Is there a heart stopping play or moment that sticks in your mind when you think about the World Cup?
I do think back to that final three and a half years ago in Qatar, France and Argentina, and it going right down to the wire in terms of penalties. And watching Lionel Messi lift the World Cup trophy was just an incredible moment. When you think of his career, and it's obviously still going, he'll be there this time around as well.
But it's so rare that you get an incredible game to match the occasion, and that delivered on all fronts.
All right. Well, so let's talk about some of the issues here.
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Chapter 5: How does the Ebola outbreak influence the World Cup experience?
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?
Yes. Yes. The first time it's ever been used.
Yeah. So what does that mean for fans?
It means ticket prices go, I was going to say up and down, but actually they just go up at the moment, depending on scarcity and depending on the demand for those tickets. So because a certain number of tickets have been kept back or allocated to fans that are going to follow that country throughout the tournament, it's meant prices have gone up and up and up. So
for the final, which obviously we don't know who's going to be in that.
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Chapter 6: What security measures are being implemented for the World Cup?
At the moment, the sort of average price for around $11,000, which is eye-watering, to be honest.
But then at the other level, an England fan, for example, who wanted to have the opportunity to buy a ticket for every one of their group games and then an opportunity to buy a ticket to follow their team, even all the way on to the final, they were being asked to park with £14,000 ahead of the tournament. I mean, 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.
Chapter 7: How does the U.S. political climate affect the World Cup?
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.
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.
Chapter 8: What is the significance of President Trump's involvement in sports events?
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. You were shown a map of the stadium and basically the good seats in the lower half along the sidelines were category one.
So you didn't know what seat you were getting, but you figured you're getting one of those. But in fact, what happens is after you bought it, they changed the lines without your knowledge. And what you might have found is that now your category one price got you a seat somewhere else. And here's a cut from a video that Henry Bushnell said describing about what happened to most of these fans.
He said he's talked to a lot of them and they are not getting what they thought.
I haven't been able to find a single fan who got those desirable seats. Everyone says they're in corners or behind the goals or even in the second deck. And in some cases, even if they paid a category one price, they're actually in sections that were colored red for category two at one point because FIFA has been quietly altering these maps throughout the past several months.
So the fans are furious. They feel misled, taken advantage of, scammed. Those are a few words they've used. One even told me he's considering a class action lawsuit. FIFA's response? The maps were, quote, indicative and, quote, designed to provide guidance rather than the exact seat layout.
So, Laura Williamson, what's the fallout from this?
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.
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