The World Cup Got Worse On Purpose

On June 11, in the second half of the opening match of the 2026 World Cup, the referee raised his hand and stopped play for a hydration break. Fox cut to commercials. The ad-break ended late. American viewers missed ten seconds of live football in the first game of the tournament. FIFA reviewed the incident and penalized nobody.

I watched it from my sofa. I grew up in the UK but live in America now. The tournament has finally come to the country where I live, and I am watching it on TV anyway, because attending priced out somewhere between a used car and a downpayment on a new house. More on that below.

The water break deserves the first word because it is the cleanest example of FIFA’s extractive influence on the game: a player-safety measure converted into ad inventory.

Cooling breaks entered football at Brazil 2014 as a safety measure, triggered only when the heat index crossed a danger threshold. Last December FIFA made them mandatory in all 104 matches of this tournament. Its tournament chief was explicit: "no matter where the games are played, no matter if there's a roof." That covers the air-conditioned dome in Arlington. It covered a cool, wet evening in Boston where England played Ghana.

In March, FIFA cleared broadcasters to run advertising inside the breaks. Inside the stadiums, the pause is announced as the Powerade Hydration Break, with branded coolers rushed onto the touchline. Call it two minutes of sellable air per break, two breaks per match, and 104 matches: nearly seven hours of new commercial time carved out of live football, a sport that had gone a century and a half without an ad interrupting play.

I grew up in West London going to QPR matches. Ten pounds got me into Loftus Road, fifteen on a big occasion, and that pricing held right through my teenage years. Football was the cheap thing you did with your mates, and the World Cup sat above it as the free festival, the one month every four years when everyone in the country was collectively enthralled by the action.

Hold that image against the bid book. When the United States, Canada and Mexico won hosting rights, the official bid promised group-stage tickets from $21 and a final topping out at $1,550. In April, FIFA released its own direct-sale final tickets at $10,990. That figure was FIFA's face value, sold by FIFA. (On FIFA's resale platform, one optimist listed four seats behind the goal at $2,299,998.85 apiece, with FIFA positioned to take 15 percent from seller and buyer alike.)

The $60 "Supporter Entry Tier" announced after December's backlash turned out to mean "hundreds, rather than thousands" of seats in stadiums holding 80,000, per the Associated Press. Attorneys general in four states are now investigating, and New Jersey's described the buying process as "a gauntlet of confusion, fake scarcity, and impossibly high prices."

The pricing algorithm punished loyalty with precision. Between October and April, FIFA raised prices on more than 90 of the 104 matches, up an average of 34 percent by The Athletic's count, and then cut them roughly 37 percent in the final ten days when real demand arrived. The supporter who bought early because they cared paid the top of the curve. Football Supporters Europe calculated that following your team from the group stage to the final costs about five times what the same journey cost at Qatar 2022, and filed a complaint with the European Commission over it.

The England Supporters Travel Club's cheapest final ticket this year is £3,119. The equivalent seat at the Euro 2024 final in Berlin cost £83. UEFA has already capped Euro 2028 so that nearly half of all tickets come in under £60.

FIFA's extortionate prices are a choice.

FIFA sells the only World Cup there is. No substitute exists. A normal business that treats its buyers like this loses them to a competitor. FIFA has arranged a world with no competitor to lose them to.

Last week I catalogued the mechanisms of enshittification. FIFA runs most of the list simultaneously, from inside a Swiss non-profit that pays no federal tax on tournament revenue and demands blanket tax exemptions from host nations as a condition of bidding. Mexico granted a 100 percent income-tax exemption for this tournament.

The strategy shows up in FIFA's own accounts. Revenue per four-year cycle: $4.19 billion in the 2010 cycle, $7.57 billion in the Qatar cycle, roughly $13 billion budgeted for this one, with reserves that peaked near $4 billion after Qatar.

FIFA also brought its hospitality business onto its own books this cycle and budgeted it to more than triple, from $949 million to $3.1 billion, with roughly a million tickets routed into hospitality tiers. A single-match hospitality package starts around $2,500, against $950 at Qatar, and private suites run from $43,200 past $100,000.

The worse the tournament got for the person in the stand, the better it looked in the boardroom in Zurich.

None of this arrived unannounced. FIFA staged the rehearsal in the same country, in many of the same stadiums, one summer earlier. The 2025 Club World Cup opened with dynamic pricing asking $349 for Inter Miami against Al Ahly and settling at $55 by kickoff. A Chelsea semi-final ticket fell from $473.90 to $13.40 across a single weekend. The Associated Press counted more than a million empty seats over the group stage, with grounds averaging 56.7 percent full. DAZN piloted split-screen commercials during stoppages, a first in any FIFA competition. The final at MetLife stretched halftime to roughly 24 minutes for a stadium show.

Every complaint you have heard this month was visible there in miniature, a full year out. FIFA watched the pilot empty the seats and fatten the revenue line, then shipped the whole system to the World Cup.

The pattern completes on July 19, when the final carries the first halftime show in World Cup history. Madonna, Shakira and BTS with Chris Martin curating, and an interval expected to run well past the 15 minutes the laws of the game allow.

I watched the 2018 semi-final in a pub with friends, England against Croatia. Trippier put a free kick in after five minutes and the whole room sang about football coming home. Then Perišić equalized and Mandžukić scored in extra time and the place fell into a sickening silence. I embraced sobbing strangers outside after the game.

That version of the World Cup, the communal one, already sat on top of this machine. We had all seen FIFA executives arrested on the news three years earlier. We sang anyway.

The playbook has been run for over two decades: FIFA books the revenue while someone else eats the cost. South Africa spent about $4 billion on stadiums and infrastructure for 2010, including a waterfront stadium in Cape Town built at FIFA's insistence over a cheaper upgrade in working-class Athlone. A FIFA delegate reportedly told city officials that "a billion television viewers don't want to see shacks and poverty." That stadium loses millions a year.

Brazil's 2014 stadium bill roughly tripled from the bid book, 78 percent of it public money, and the $550 million national stadium in Brasília ended up parking buses. Brazilian law enforced commercial exclusion zones around venues, inside which a local bar could not print the words "World Cup." FIFA left Brazil with about $4.8 billion, untaxed.

Qatar had the worst outcomes of all. The Guardian counted 6,500 South Asian migrant workers dead in the decade after the award, an all-causes figure that remains contested. Qatar's official count of work-related stadium deaths was three; the tournament's own chief later allowed "between 400 and 500." Whichever number you accept, FIFA's response was to tell federations to "focus on the football" and to steer its $50 million legacy fund toward international agencies rather than worker compensation.

Two days before kickoff, Qatar banned stadium beer sales and blindsided Budweiser, a sponsor paying roughly $75 million a cycle. The corporate boxes kept pouring. Even sponsors are customers here, and no customer is safe.

Underneath it all sat the governance. In May 2015 the US Department of Justice unsealed a 47-count indictment and Swiss police arrested seven FIFA executives at dawn at the Baur au Lac hotel in Zurich, with charges covering roughly $150 million in bribes paid across 24 years.

Chuck Blazer, the CONCACAF official who flipped for the FBI, kept a Trump Tower apartment mostly for his cats. When FIFA hired a former US federal prosecutor to investigate the 2018 and 2022 bids, it published a 42-page summary that he publicly disowned as materially misleading, and he resigned. The full 430-page report surfaced only in 2017, after a German paper began leaking it.

My favorite detail from the whole fiasco: FIFA asked the US government to classify it as a victim of the crimes its own executives had committed. The government agreed, and handed FIFA and its confederations more than $201 million of the money forfeited by the convicted.

FIFA's defense deserves a fair hearing, so here it is. FIFA is a lawful non-profit that says it reinvests more than 90 percent of its budgeted spending into football. It sends roughly $8 million per cycle to each of its 211 member associations. The $60 tier exists. Dynamic pricing genuinely cut some late prices. And the water-break ad money really does land with broadcasters this cycle rather than with FIFA themselves. Infantino's exact words were that there is "no additional revenue for FIFA."

Each point is true. None survive much scrutiny.

Take the 90 percent first. Most of what FIFA books as investment in football is the cost of staging its own tournaments: the prize money and the production and the operations behind the product it sells. By that accounting, McDonald's reinvests nearly everything in hamburgers.

The money that actually leaves the building goes to the 211 member federations, and each federation holds one vote in FIFA's presidential elections, so the development budget doubles as a campaign fund. Expanding the World Cup to 48 teams minted 16 more federations that owe their place to the man who expanded it. ESPN's Gabriele Marcotti summarized the cynics' reading of the expansion as "creating more inventory to sell to sponsors and broadcasters and generating more coin." And the most notorious development grant in FIFA's history, $10 million routed toward Jack Warner under the banner of an African diaspora legacy program, appears in the Department of Justice indictment as a bribe.

You have already seen the $60 tier for what it is: a few hundred seats in an 80,000-seat bowl. And the late price cuts arrived only after the loyal had paid the top of the curve.

The Infantino quote is accurate for this cycle but beside the point. Fox is charging up to $750,000 for a single water-break spot, per Wall Street Journal reporting, against a reported $485 million it paid for US rights to the whole tournament. FIFA manufactured that inventory and licensed it, and the American rights for 2030, still unsold, get priced against it.

The thing FIFA actually sells broadcasters is the crowd, the noise, the color and the flags. This tournament opened with visible empty sections and, per a Financial Times analysis, roughly 176,000 unsold tickets across the opening round on the eve of kickoff. Infantino called demand "unprecedented by a factor of 10," and fact-checkers pointed out that the raw ticket numbers are inflated mostly because there are 104 matches now instead of 64. The prices keep out the fans who make the atmosphere, and the atmosphere is what FIFA sells. FIFA is degrading its own product and charging more for it than ever.

Of course, none of this has stopped me loving it. I watched England win at the Azteca on Sunday. It was one of the best matches I have ever seen, and I watched it from my living room. I moved to the country hosting this World Cup. The tournament came to me for the first time in my life, and the sensible choice was still to stay home. Multiply that choice by every priced-out fan who would have filled those quiet sections.

So on July 19 I will watch the final at home, the way I watched the opener. Somewhere around the 22nd minute the referee will raise his hand. Twenty-two players will walk to the touchline to drink from Powerade bottles, and a sales desk inside a broadcast tower will quietly hit its number. I thought money had already reached every conceivable corner of a football match. They found one more, and they sold it.

FIFA's statutes open by stating the organization's first objective: "to improve the game of football constantly and promote it globally." The body that exists to make the game better and more open has spent two decades making the greatest sporting spectacle on Earth worse and harder to reach. It has been rewarded with record revenue at every step.

Readers of this newsletter will recognize the shape. It is a story we have told many times before: when the customer has no alternatives, the product can be sacrificed in the interest of profits.

Sport, sadly, is not immune.