The World Cup Ticket Skim

You don't want to do business with criminals, but sometimes, you find yourself in an impossible spot. Such is acquiring World Cup tickets. It's the most magical sporting event in the world. It's also the kind of event where the prices for the nosebleeds might make your nosebleed. But still, we did it.

You park and walk towards the stadium, past the packs of cops, past the parking lot parties, and blocks from the stadium it's like you're walking through GA at a giant concert, people are parading, singing, flairs are flaring, and in the back of your head you're thinking, "Did they all pay that much and in some cases a lot more to be here, now?!"

In 1994 I watched the World Cup on TV. There wasn't money for tickets. There was a Sports Illustrated for Kids subscription I hadn't all the way abandoned yet (hey, I was finishing middle school still), probably on discount via a Scholastic Book Club, that came with all the team and player profiles, including a fill-it-out-yourself group stage result tracker and knock-out bracket. You better believe I filled it out in its entirety. From the USA getting knocked out by Brazil on the 4th of July, to Roberto Baggio skying that PK for Italy in the final.

My wife had never been fully immersed in a World Cup before. Qatar 2022, you remember, the one where the "we swear we are totally not corrupt" organization moved the tournament to the winter and erected stadiums in a desert with totally up to standard working conditions, etc. (it still hurts to remember this), was on in the background, but celebrating it and trying to talk her into the games beyond the endless stream of human rights violations was a tricky sell.

But when it was announced it would come to the United States (and Canada, and Mexico, which to the rest of the world is all part of America anyway), I was extra committed to get her into it. I swore we'd go to a game. I enrolled in the FIFA lottery. I watched nothing happen. I watched aftersale tickets go up. I watched their prices soar, inexplicably at first, and then inexorably higher. I cursed the organization and swore we wouldn't go.

The reality of it being in America, and American cities though, matters to me. It's that '94 pride that I missed out on last time. Plus, with games basically down the road in New York/New Jersey and Philly, I wanted to see it for myself. I wanted to show my wife the magic of this tournament. TV and social media were already showing us the whole globe's attention descending on the weirdness that is our daily reality. From free refills to country music in rented pick-em-up trucks, local America was getting both the economic benefit AND the social benefit of people hanging out here.

Check out some of the lift we're seeing in the Panoptica Sports Storyboards reflecting this. You'd think hosting a global tournament is all opportunity cost, the town's attention and investment going toward stadiums and broadcast deals instead of other local business that could use the boost. The data says otherwise. The World Cup effect is real, and it's overwhelming any case that sports take away from local business, or that rooting for different teams is divisive beyond the 90ish minutes each game takes.

The world has been looking at this World Cup pretty favorably. Make no mistake about it, this spin helped me out. I love having the data to actually prove the feeling, too. Because when my friends and I couldn't commit or stop kvetching to each other about crime lords and conspiracy theories, it was my wife who went on the ticketing apps and reported back, "It's done, we're going. And Friday's a holiday so you don't have work. No excuses."

Price insensitivity may be the ultimate unifier. The unity is in our Storyboards too, and it's only climbing.

We had tickets. And I had a reason to keep digging, because now that the hardest decision was taken out of my hands, I could return back to my fascination with these "market" things. It didn't take much to make me more green in the gills about this whole fiasco. Turns out FIFA's own resale FAQ only clearly discloses a single 15% resale fee. It never spells out, on the same page, that buyers are also charged 15% on top. The Athletic's breakdown of the 2026 resale platform fills in the rest, putting the combined skim at 30% (15% to the seller, 15% to the buyer), making FIFA both the police and the scalper for the same event. Whether FIFA itself is quietly working the resale market too is its own question.

It explained a lot about the price she paid to get us there. But it's also a reminder that when it comes to an event like this, where the FOMO is as fleeting as each match, if you commit, you are committing to abandoning any sense of reasonable price discovery. You either leap or you don't. This is not a fair market. This is the price of an emotionally charged event that may or may not tie directly back into core memories from your formative years.

What is fair to also acknowledge here is the additional amounts of money fans are spending on experiences they're reporting on social media. Beyond the Nordic fans rowing (the best unified fan performance since Iceland's Viking clap), there's real money moving behind all those social posts about "once-in-a-lifetime" nights out. Bank of America's U.S. card data from last year's FIFA Club World Cup tune-up already showed a measurable spending lift in host neighborhoods, and Oxford Economics now forecasts close to $900 million in incremental hotel revenue alone across U.S. host markets in 2026, the kind of mid-summer stimulus that's hard to argue with, even if you're still mad about the ticket fees.

My love-hate relationship with the World Cup continues. On one hand, FIFA makes us forget about politics for a minute, reminds us of the glory of rooting for our team but still feeling unified for the love of the game, and it only happening every 4 years makes it especially scarce. But on the other, FIFA is FIFA and, oh who am I kidding, for all the evil in the world, can you beat a memory like this?