Ticket to ride? Fifa premium makes this the World Cup that actively hates you | World Cup 2026
LLike any journalist with an unerring flair for offbeat reporting, my interest was keenly piqued by this week’s announcement of the $95 bus ride. What gorgeous accessories could justify the £70 fare for a half-hour trip from South Boston to Foxborough? A shiatsu at the seat? A swimming pool terrace? A five-course dining experience? A brief but moving performance of Céline Dion in the aisles? At the very least, I felt I owed it to my profession to know for sure.
Alas, upon further investigation, the Boston Stadium Express launched for this summer’s World Cup appears to be a completely regular bus trip on a completely regular bus with completely regular bus seats. Your non-refundable ticket – with no child discount – simply entitles you to be dropped off 15 minutes’ walk from the ground, then picked up at the same location. In short, there is no more complex reason for the Boston organizing committee to charge £70 than the fact that they can, and the World Cup only happens once, and if you don’t want to pay, then another rube will.
Either way, if you have a prized ticket for Scotland v Morocco or England v Ghana, how else are you going to get there? A parking space costs £129, rising to £199 for the quarter-finals. A taxi will probably be even more so. If you have a friend who owns a car, they will not be allowed to drop you off. And maybe none of this really matters in the broader context of this tainted and desolate tournament, a grotesque experiment in vulture capitalism and authoritarian excess.
But sometimes, you know, it’s the little details. So far, much of the media coverage on World Cup prices has focused on the most expensive items: £516 for England v Croatia, £8,333 for the final at East Rutherford, believed to be the most expensive ticket to a football match ever sold. And it’s true, this is headline-grabbing money: life-changing, game-show money, augmented by an opaque and voracious dynamic pricing model. Anyway, does anyone really know what a ticket to the World Cup final is? should does it cost these days? On the other hand, we all take the bus. A bus journey is a commonly understood unit of value, which is why subjecting it to the Fifa premium seems particularly, deliberately, odious.
And there is no doubt that this is indeed a bonus from Fifa, the hallmark of a financial model in which football’s governing body siphons off almost all of the tangible profits while passing on virtually all of the tangible costs to host cities. Fifa takes all ticket revenue. Fifa takes all broadcast revenue. Fifa takes revenue from merchandising and concessions. Fifa even takes parking money. Meanwhile, the hosts bear all the additional infrastructure costs, from fan parks to increased security measures to police escorts for referees.
It is essentially mob repression, forcing local governments to resort to ever more creative means to recoup their considerable share. And Boston is by no means an exception here. According to a New York Times report, New Jersey Transit plans to charge more than $100 (£74) for the rail shuttle from Penn Station to MetLife Stadium, where England plays its final group match. Then there is the secondary resale market, where tickets sold at face value can be exchanged for a hefty mark-up, with Fifa taking a generous 15% cut at both ends. Gianni Infantino welcomed this when he spoke this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “It’s amazing because it really shows the impact of the World Cup,” he said.
The result is a World Cup unique in modern times: a World Cup that ultimately makes no secret of its contempt for the paying public, its aim of sweating out its monopolistic advantage, its intention of making the spectator experience as sad and exploitative as possible. This is also seen in the travel bans imposed on four of the competing countries (Ivory Coast, Haiti, Iran, and Senegal), the intentionally hostile entry process, and the ever-present threat of Immigration and Customs raids on host cities. If Russia 2018 and Qatar 2022 were at their heart grandiose exercises in sports washing, elegant acts of persuasion, then America 2026 is the World Cup that actively hates you, that brandishes the darkness of its late capitalist heart like a proud badge of honor.
And honestly, what are you going to do about it? You’re not looking? Don’t you care? Boycott? In recent months there have been calls for football fans in this country to put pressure on the Football Association to use its modest influence in the corridors of power to do… well, it’s not entirely clear. Beating the drum for £30 tickets? Persuade Fifa to reverse its entire financing model? Hoping that the combined weight of Infantino and Donald Trump will buckle and give in to the insurmountable pressure of Debbie Hewitt?
Perhaps this all seems particularly egregious because of the unique cultural status of the World Cup: an event that should in theory belong to all of us. In fact, the real legacy of this tournament – and one whose implications go far beyond football – will perhaps be to expose the contempt in which the powerful hold the weak. For so many years, many fans harbored the illusion that investment and growth were a net profit: that the sport could reap the rewards of unbridled capitalism while retaining its core essence, part of the skin of the game.
Well, here we are: a distended 48-team World Cup, lasting longer than many wars, in which most of the greatest players will be exhausted, watched by fans who have been squeezed for every last penny they are able to cough up, ferried to the stadium on £70 buses, subjected to the indignity of long queues and forced to show their social media stories at US customs. And maybe, in a strange way, we should be grateful. In their shameless greed and ill-disguised contempt, the good men and women of Fifa are at least letting go of the facade and showing us what they really think.
