FIFA's 2026 World Cup: The Greatest Fleecing on Earth

It was the water bottle that did it.

Not the ticket prices. Not the travel costs. Not the hotels. After months of quietly absorbing everything that FIFA has thrown at the ordinary football fan in the build-up to this summer's World Cup, it was the announcement that supporters would no longer be permitted to bring a reusable water bottle into a stadium — in the middle of an American summer, at venues where temperatures are expected to comfortably, or more so uncomfotably hit 28°C+ — that finally made the whole thing feel complete.

FIFA had previously said empty transparent bottles would be allowed so fans could refill them. Then, days before the tournament, they changed their minds. The official reason was safety. Bottles, apparently, present a risk of injury if thrown. For an organisation that has placed matches in open-air venues in temperatures that medical professionals have described as dangerous for sustained physical activity, the sudden concern for fan welfare lands with all the sincerity of a US citizen receiving a get-well card from their medical insurer.

It would not surprise anyone at this point if FIFA introduced dynamic pricing on the water itself, adjusting the cost depending on queue length. It's the logical progression from what they have already managed to engineer with tickets.

What made the water bottle announcement worse was the immediate response from Mercedes-Benz Stadium (pictured above), who posted on X that fans should remember they can get a fountain Coca-Cola with unlimited free refills for just two dollars — yes, even at the World Cup. Intended as reassurance, it reads more like a scene from the dystopian Indie film Idiocracy. The tournament organiser bans water. A stadium seizes the opportunity to advertise sugar water. The world's most consumed soft drink, perhaps the single most recognisable symbol of western consumer capitalism — presented as the solution to a hydration crisis caused by the world's most powerful football organisation.

And then there are the mandatory three-minute "hydration breaks" in the middle of each half. Breaks that, by remarkable coincidence, allow broadcasters to squeeze in another round of advertising. The players get water. The advertisers get revenue. The fans get told to buy a Coke. Welcome to THIEFA's World Cup.

The Ticket That Time Forgot

A ticket to the 1966 World Cup final at Wembley, adjusted for inflation, would cost you around fifteen dollars today. The cheapest general sale Category 3 ticket for the 2026 final starts at $1,490. That is not a typo. That is one hundred times the price.

If that figure alone is not enough, FIFA also introduced, and we must pause here to appreciate the audacity, 'Front Row Category 1 tickets'. For those unfamiliar with football grounds, the front row of a stadium is widely regarded as one of the worst places to watch a game. You are essentially staring up at the underside of twenty-two sets of knees. The perspective is all wrong, the ball disappears into blind spots and Carlo Ancelotti is absolutely not going to pop over for a chat at half time. This is not courtside at the NBA. It is not Wimbledon's Royal Box. It is a plastic seat at pitch level where you will spend ninety minutes craning your neck and questioning your decisions. FIFA looked at this and thought: premium product.

The pricing story gets murkier from there. FIFA stands accused of offloading tickets for lower-demand matches through unofficial resale platforms, including SeatGeek, rather than reducing prices on their own website. The alleged motivation was straightforward. If they lowered prices officially, fans who had already paid full price could demand refunds. By routing tickets through third-party channels, they avoided that inconvenience. The evidence cited was simple: entire rows and sections appearing simultaneously on SeatGeek, which does not happen in normal fan-to-fan resale. Both SeatGeek and StubHub denied having any agreement with FIFA. New York and New Jersey have opened investigations. Make of that what you will.

Getting There Will Cost You Too

The stadiums, predictably, are not in city centres. The United States is not known for its public transport infrastructure at the best of times, and FIFA has chosen to combine that particular national characteristic with the kind of event pricing that makes the Premier League look like a community fundraiser.

The metro to MetLife Stadium in New York typically costs $12.90 for a return journey. For the World Cup it was initially marketed at $150. Following what one assumes was a fairly significant public reaction, it came down to $98. Which is still $98 for a train journey that normally costs $12.90.

Someone online put it more succinctly than any journalist managed: "It truly feels like FIFA awarded the World Cup to the USA so they could be more corrupt than ever. Which is wild when you think the last two locations were Qatar and Russia." When Qatar and Russia represent the comparatively restrained option, you begin to understand quite how far through the looking glass we have travelled.

And then there are the things that go beyond money. Iran are currently training in Mexico because they cannot gain entry to the United States. Real concerns exist about whether fans from certain nations will be able to attend, and what treatment they might face from immigration authorities if they do. And then there is Ebola, a story that has drifted beneath the radar of most tournament coverage but which represents perhaps the most serious cloud hanging over this summer. These are not gripes about pricing. They are the other reasons why this World Cup feels, for many people, like one to be watched from a distance rather than embraced.

(FYI - The irony of me moaning about fans being fleeced by big corporations and my amazon associate ad for a world cup ball pops up is not lost on me!)

From Blatter to Infantino

Some of us are old enough to have read books about legendary FIFA snout in the trough specialists Sepp Blatter and Jack Warner. About brown envelopes and vote-buying and the systematic plundering of a sport that billions of people love. It felt, at the time, like something that would eventually be exposed, dealt with and consigned to history. The game would be cleaned up. It had to be.

It was not cleaned up. It got comfortable.

Gianni Infantino walked into the White House and stood next to Donald Trump, who received FIFA's inaugural Extraordinary Football Award, a shiny new peace prize conjured specifically for the occasion. Trump, a man who has displayed approximately zero interest in football across eight decades on this earth, received the accolade with the expression of someone who had just been told he was the smartest person in the room and had no reason to question it. FIFA got their political runway cleared. Trump got his shiny accolade telling him how great he was. Not once, apparently, did the conversation turn to what everyday citizens attending this tournament were being asked to pay.

Everybody Has a Limit

Football club fan groups, to some extent, can organise their supporters as a collective. Liverpool's fanbase has a geography, a community, an infrastructure for collective action. When 90% of a 60,000-capacity Anfield held up protest cards over a relatively modest proposed ticket increase, Fenway Sports Group noticed. They backed down.

Fans travelling to a World Cup from forty-eight different nations, speaking different languages, navigating different visa regimes, many of them arriving in a country where they already feel unwelcome, have no equivalent mechanism. FIFA know this. They have always known this.

What this summer has produced is the free market World Cup in its purest form. Not just expensive, we have come to expect expensive, but brazen. Unapologetic. A tournament that has decided the love of football is an inexhaustible resource that can be taxed indefinitely without consequence.

Except the consequences are beginning to show. Several stadiums remain less than sold out. The tourists did not all materialise. The corporate hospitality packages did not all shift. When you price out the actual football fans and replace them with a hoped-for wave of wealthy neutral consumers, those consumers turn out to have other options. Football is the biggest show on earth, but everybody has a limit and FIFA have been uncomfortably at ease about testing where that limit sits.

We will all still watch it. The football will be real, even if everything around it is rotten. But the assumption that fans' loyalty is unconditional, that assumption is looking shakier than it has in a long time. There's a prevailing feeling that they pushed it too far this time.

Currently they'd consider sticking a card reader on a fire exit, and probably get an official sponsor. Maybe it needs the European federations to find some courage and stand up to them, from Blatter to Infantino, surely this hyper-capitalisation of football has to come to an end.

Enough is enough.