Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Cut price tickets for next year's Soccer World Cup, but only for the lucky few. Live from the UK, this is the Marketplace Morning Report from the BBC World Service. I'm Gideon Long. Good morning. Soccer's world governing body FIFA has said it will release some $60 seats for next year's World Cup, following complaints from fans over high prices. But there won't be many.
The BBC's business reporter Nick Marsh has more. Hi Nick. Hello. So first of all, just explain what FIFA has announced. Right. So this is the new so-called supporter entry tier ticket that FIFA will be offering to signed up fans of the member associations. So the member associations at a World Cup, they get a set amount of tickets.
They're going to start at $60 for all games all the way up until the final, which until now, the cheapest ticket would have been $4,000 at the very minimum.
Chapter 2: What recent changes has FIFA made to World Cup ticket pricing?
Now you can get a ticket for $60. Now, that sounds like great news for fans. So now fans can get their hands on a ticket for $60. But when you dig down a little bit deeper, it's not really that great because we're only talking about 10% of the tickets that are released to member associations. So, for example, take England v Croatia. They're playing in Dallas.
The English Football Association get 4,000 tickets there. So 400 of them will be available for $60. Now, 400 tickets in a stadium with a capacity of 90 odd thousand isn't really much. So the prices of the vast majority of tickets for the matches remains unchanged. Yes. And if you don't manage to get your hands on these tickets, which are few and far between, the calculations have been done.
We're talking about $7,000 at a minimum to follow your team all the way throughout the tournament. And how have soccer fans or football fans, as they're known around much of the world, how have they reacted? almost universally in disgust. I think it's been described as scandalous by some supporter associations.
I mean, if you look at the previous World Cup in Qatar three years ago, the average ticket price is about seven times what it cost in Qatar. Now, the argument is that in the United States, salaries are pretty high.
Chapter 3: What are the implications of the new supporter entry tier ticket?
Sports in general is seen maybe as more of a luxury good compared to other countries, but seven times is a lot. And not to mention the fact that this is a global event, isn't it? You've got countries like Haiti, Ghana, countries in South America who will all be going to support their teams and they come from much less developed economies.
I mean, the minimum price to go and watch Haiti is something like the equivalent of four months salary for the average person there. So even taking into consideration that salaries are higher in the United States, this does seem a little bit more extreme than usual. And I wonder if fans, having gained this concession, I wonder if they might think, well, clearly these prices are not set in stone.
Maybe we can push back further. Yes, and I think that's what's going to happen. If there is enough pressure, then maybe FIFA would be willing to budge a little bit more. I mean, another interesting aspect of this World Cup is the possibility of dynamic pricing, where prices go up and down depending on the demand.
You've seen it in music concerts and things like that, and dynamic pricing is pretty much entrenched in American sports. It's not the case in European sports, and it's not the case in most of the world. Nick Marsh, thanks for joining us on Marketplace. It's my pleasure. Let's do the numbers. UK inflation has fallen by more than expected. It was just 3.2% last month.
That's its lowest level in eight months. And shares in the Chinese chipmaker MetaX integrated circuit soared around 700% in Shanghai on the company's stock market debut. Back to soccer for a moment, because France's star player Kylian Mbappé has won a court case against his former club Paris Saint-Germain.
A French Labour tribunal ordered the club to pay him around $70 million in compensation for unpaid wages. Both sides had filed claims for hundreds of millions of dollars. Here's the BBC's Hugh Schofield. The Labour Tribunal is more used to settling complaints for unfair dismissal from workers like shop assistants and office staff.
But this is an affair in which phantasmagorical sums of money have been at stake. The final settlement is essentially the salary that he says was still owing when he left the club in such acrimonious circumstances last year. Now at Real Madrid and captain of the French national side, Kylian Mbappé remains a popular figure in France. This money row, though, has not been particularly uplifting.
Kylian Mbappé says he was bound to act against PSG to show that the club can't push its players around. But what remains for many is the sight of an unimaginably wealthy young man getting even wealthier. world is going to use more coal this year than ever before. That's according to the International Energy Agency, which says we'll burn through a record 8.85 billion tonnes of the stuff in 2025.
That'll be the first time that coal consumption has increased in 15 years. The agency said US coal consumption will rise by 8% this year, helped by strong policy support from the But the agency expects demand for coal to fall in the coming years as alternatives become more widely available.
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