The North American World Cup next year is shaping up to be a mess, and not in the charming, chaotic way these tournaments used to be.
The World Cup once felt like one of the few truly global events that still belonged to regular people. It was loud, imperfect, and accessible enough that you could at least imagine being there someday. Over the last decade or so, though, it has become hard to ignore how thoroughly corruption and commercialization have taken over, hollowing out what made it special in the first place.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently detailed updated ticket pricing for matches at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, and the numbers tell the story clearly. Group stage tickets now start far higher than they used to, premium seats run into the hundreds, and the Atlanta semifinal climbs well into four-figure territory. The cheapest ticket category has been eliminated entirely. To make matters worse, much of the inventory was immediately scooped up by scalpers, meaning plenty of people who entered the lottery in good faith never had a real chance. As an Atlantan who was hoping to go to a game or two with the family, I’m not sure I’ll be able to snag one even if I wanted to at this point.
The problem is not simply that next year’s World Cup is expensive. It is that the entire system is designed to extract value at every step, while maintaining the fiction that this is all just the natural outcome of supply and demand. In reality, FIFA wins no matter what.
Tickets are sold at inflated prices from the start, and then FIFA controls the official resale marketplace as well. When fans can no longer attend, FIFA still wins. When demand spikes, FIFA still wins. They take a cut when tickets are sold the first time, and they take another cut when those same tickets change hands. It is scalping, but institutionalized and sanitized by branding and policy language.
In the process, nearly all of the risk is stripped away from the organizers and pushed onto the fans. Enthusiasm becomes the product. Flexibility becomes liquidity. The underlying message is clear: if you really cared, you would pay. If you cannot, someone else will gladly take your place.
That logic should feel familiar. It is the same enshitification pattern that emerges once platforms mature and goodwill stops being a priority. Accessibility gives way to optimization. The experience still exists, but primarily as something to be monetized as efficiently as possible.
Sports are especially vulnerable to this dynamic because fandom is sticky. People build identity, memory, and community around teams and tournaments. That emotional attachment makes fans ideal targets for extraction, particularly when an event can credibly sell itself as once in a lifetime, even when it shows up like clockwork every four years.
The outcome is predictable. People do not revolt. They disengage. They stay home. They stop planning. They stop imagining themselves there. The World Cup becomes something you watch, not something you participate in, even when it is happening in your own city. And yet, FIFA still rakes in the cash.
The World Cup no longer needs fans. It needs customers and a tightly controlled marketplace to move money between them. Good for them.