4 hours ago
5
Like any journalist with an unerring nose for an offbeat feature, my interest was sharply piqued by this week’s announcement of the $95 bus ride. What magnificent accoutrements might conceivably justify the £70 fare for a half-hour journey from south Boston to Foxborough? An at-seat shiatsu? A pool deck? A five-course dining experience? A brief but moving Céline Dion set in the aisles? At the very least, I felt I owed it to my profession to find out for sure.
Alas upon closer investigation, the Boston Stadium Express being launched for this summer’s World Cup appears to be an entirely regular bus journey on an entirely regular bus with entirely regular bus seats. Your non-refundable ticket – no child concessions – entitles you simply to be dropped off a 15-minute walk from the ground, and picked up again from the same place. There is, in short, no more complex rationale for the Boston organising committee to charge £70 than the fact that they can, and the World Cup only comes once, and if you don’t want to pay then some other rube will.
In any case, if you happen to have a precious ticket for Scotland v Morocco or England v Ghana, how else are you going to get there? A parking space is £129, rising to £199 for the quarter-final. A taxi will probably be more still. If you have a friend with a car, they will not be allowed to drop you off. And perhaps none of this really matters very much in the broader context of this soiled and sorry tournament, a grotesque experiment in vulture capitalism and authoritarian overreach.
But sometimes, you know, it’s the little details. A lot of the coverage of World Cup pricing to date has focused on the big-ticket items: £516 for England v Croatia, £8,333 for the final in East Rutherford, thought to be the most expensive football match ticket ever sold. And fair enough, these are headline-grabbing sums of money: life-altering, gameshow-prize sums of money, jacked up by an opaque and voracious dynamic pricing model. All the same, does anyone really have a firm grasp on what a World Cup final ticket should cost these days? By contrast, we all get the bus. A bus journey is a commonly understood unit of value, which is why subjecting it to the Fifa premium feels particularly, deliberately, obnoxious.
And be in no doubt that this is indeed a Fifa premium, the hallmark of a financial model in which football’s governing body siphons off virtually all the tangible profit while loading host cities with virtually all the tangible costs. Fifa takes all the ticket revenue. Fifa takes all the broadcast revenue. Fifa takes the merchandising and concession revenue. Fifa even takes the parking money. Meanwhile, the hosts bear all the additional infrastructure costs, from the fan parks to the heightened security measures to the police escorts for the referees.
This is in essence a mob-style shakedown, one that forces local governments into ever more creative means of recouping their sizeable stake. And Boston is by no means an outlier here. According to a report in the New York Times, New Jersey Transit is planning on charging more than $100 (£74) for the train shuttle from Penn Station to the MetLife Stadium, where England play their final group game. Then you have the secondary resale market, where tickets sold at face value can be moved on at a heavy markup, with Fifa taking a generous 15% cut at both ends. Indeed Gianni Infantino was positively gushing about this when he spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos this year. “This is incredible, because it really shows the impact the World Cup has,” he said.
The result is a World Cup unique in modern times: one that ultimately makes no secret of its disdain for the paying public, its goal of sweating its monopoly asset, its intention to make the spectator experience as joyless and exploitative as possible. This can be glimpsed, too, in the travel bans imposed on four of the competing countries (Côte d’Ivoire, Haiti, Iran and Senegal), the intentionally hostile entry process, the still-live threat of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in host cities. If Russia 2018 and Qatar 2022 were at their heart grandiose sportswashing exercises, elegant acts of persuasion, then America 2026 is the World Cup that actively hates you, that brandishes the darkness of its late-capitalist heart as a proud badge of honour.
And frankly, what are you going to do about it? Not watch? Not care? Boycott? In recent months there have been calls for football fans in this country to lobby the Football Association to use its modest leverage within the corridors of power to do … well, it’s not entirely clear. Beat the drum for £30 tickets? Persuade Fifa to subvert its entire funding model? Hope that the combined heft of Infantino and Donald Trump cower and cave in the face of insurmountable pressure from Debbie Hewitt?
Perhaps all of this feels 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, perhaps the real legacy of this tournament – and one with implications that go well beyond football – will be to expose the contempt in which the powerful hold the powerless. For so many years so many fans have nourished the delusion that investment and growth was a net benefit: that the sport could reap the fruits of rampant capitalism while still retaining its basic essence, some skin in the game.
Well, here we are: a World Cup distended to 48 teams, 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, put through the indignity of long queues and being forced to show their social media history to US customs. And perhaps, in a weird sort of way, we should be grateful. In their shameless avarice and ill-disguised contempt, the good men and women of Fifa are at least dropping the facade, and showing us what they really think.
