FIFA pricing risks alienating premium product-making fans

The 2026 FIFA World Cup has already been sold as the biggest ever: 48 teams, three host nations, a projected $13 billion in revenue and a corporate footprint sprawling across North America like a traveling trade expo. Somewhere in between lies the faint outline of an actual soccer tournament, watched by actual people, many of whom are increasingly being priced out of it.

It is as if FIFA were standing in the middle of the world’s most popular sport like a luxury landlord rattling a velvet donation bucket insisting that the rent must go up again because demand is “historic”.

Negotiations over China’s broadcasting rights for the 2026 World Cup remain stalled, with FIFA demanding $300 million, 17 times what it is charging India, a country with a comparable population. This despite the fact that China’s men’s national team did not qualify. That absence alone dramatically alters the economics of the tournament in China. Without the Chinese team, domestic enthusiasm has inevitably softened. Advertisers know this. Sponsorship appetite has cooled. The longer FIFA clings to fantasy valuations, the more sponsors will simply turn their attention elsewhere.

Besides, this is not 2002, when families gathered around television sets at dawn, or even 2010, when live broadcasting still held sway. The death of CNN founder Ted Turner on Wednesday is itself an elegy for the decline of the television network. Chinese viewers now consume soccer through fragmented streams, mobile highlights, social clips and flexible digital platforms. Younger audiences are perfectly comfortable catching goals after they have been scored rather than sacrificing sleep for group-stage kick-offs. In that environment, FIFA’s pricing model looks more like figures plucked out of the ether.

There is another layer of absurdity here. Chinese journalists have reportedly faced prolonged visa delays that have prevented many outlets from securing on-site studios, commentary positions and working facilities in time for the tournament, which kicks off in the United States on June 11. Reduced access inevitably means reduced broadcast quality. Yet FIFA still appears determined to charge champagne prices for watered-down beer.

And then there are the tickets.

This week the FIFA chairman defended soaring World Cup ticket prices by arguing they reflect the US market. It’s difficult to track exact 1994 US World Cup ticket prices, but according to ESPN, prices ranged from $25 to $475 per match. For the final between Brazil and Italy, some tickets exceeded $1,500. Adjusted for 2026 inflation, that means tickets roughly ranged from $55 to $1,050, with the final costing the equivalent of about $3,300 today. In sharp contrast, attending eight matches at the 2026 World Cup (one per round) costs roughly $6,900 for the cheapest category tickets — and up to $16,400 for the most expensive, as per BBC Sport.

Soccer has always sold dreams. FIFA has decided to sell exclusivity instead. This is the danger of overcommercializing a sports spectacle. The World Cup is not the Super Bowl. It is not Coachella with shin pads. It belongs, at least morally, to billions of people who invest themselves emotionally in the game every four years.

FIFA should understand the risks of overestimating its hand. This is, after all, the same organization whose recent history includes the 2015 FIFAgate, a scandal that revealed systemic bribery, opaque governance and industrial-scale self-interest inside soccer’s ruling structures. Yet the institution survived, repainted itself in the language of reform, then resumed accumulating money with renewed enthusiasm.

Which raises the obvious question. Who watches over FIFA now?

Because soccer governance increasingly resembles a closed financial ecosystem answerable mainly to itself. Even former insiders have openly criticized FIFA’s lack of accountability.

The World Cup should be the great festival of sport for the world. Instead, FIFA risks transforming it into a gated premium product wrapped in the rhetoric of global unity.

China’s broadcasters are right to resist unrealistic pricing. Fans everywhere are right to complain about ticket costs. And FIFA would do well to remember a simple truth: soccer made FIFA rich. FIFA did not make soccer beloved.