In the mid two-thousands, Barry Kahn was getting a doctorate in economics at the University of Texas at Austin. He also worked part time in the university’s athletics department, home to the Texas Longhorns, then one of the leading teams in college football. People were camping out to buy tickets for Longhorns games, and some tickets ended up on resale sites, like StubHub, where they changed hands at a big premium compared with their face values, Kahn told me when I called him up last week. Other professional sports teams and concert promoters were dealing with the same issue. “The question was should we try to stop this, or get a piece of it,” Kahn said.

Scalping tickets wasn’t new, of course, but Kahn believed that its formalization online provided sports teams, and other entertainment businesses, with valuable information about demand that could enable them to make more money without alienating their most loyal fans. He founded a software company, Qcue, to help sports teams exploit this opening. Qcue’s first client was the San Francisco Giants, which began using dynamic pricing in 2009. Rather than setting fixed prices for tickets, Qcue’s software adjusted them over time based on demand and timing. If a fan bought a ticket weeks or months in advance of a given game, they could lock in a certain price. If they waited until closer to the game, they bore the risk that the price would go up, but they also stood to benefit from lower pricing if the games didn’t attract much advance interest.

Other sports franchises followed the Giants’ example, and dynamic pricing, which had already been employed by airlines and hotels, gradually became the norm in American sports. A creature of the burgeoning experience economy, it enabled teams to capture from resellers some of what economists refer to as consumer surplus—the money in excess of an item’s purchase price that some buyers are willing to pay.

By Kahn’s reckoning, adopting dynamic pricing helped teams raise the revenues that they received from individual ticket sales by anywhere from ten per cent to thirty per cent, but he insisted that the new pricing model wasn’t solely about maximizing the take from individual games. Sports franchises also care a great deal about cultivating and retaining repeat fans, particularly season-ticket holders, who provide a steady source of revenue. To avoid alienating this fan base, teams that used dynamic pricing were wary of raising prices too high or of cutting them below the levels that season-ticket holders had already paid. “Every team that did this was interested in building long-term relationships with the fans,” Kahn said. “That’s very different to what you are seeing now with FIFA and the World Cup.”

The quadrennial soccer tournament, which is the world’s most watched sporting event, starts on June 11th, and games will be held in sixteen cities spread across the North American continent: eleven in the United States, three in Mexico, and two in Canada. Last year, FIFA, the governing body of world soccer, adopted dynamic pricing for tickets, which could be purchased through its online portal. It also launched its own secondary market, where fans could buy or resell tickets.

FIFA is a not-for-profit organization that is supposedly wholly devoted to developing soccer across the globe. In a letter to the Guardian, Bryan Swanson, FIFA’s media director, wrote that its new ticketing model was designed “to provide access to fans, while at the same time ensuring as much value as possible is retained for redistribution into the game around the world.” But fans have been suffering from sticker shock. When the initial prices were announced last October, some tickets for the first round of group games were listed at sixty dollars. But most tickets cost hundreds of dollars, and prices were even higher for the knockout stages of the tournament. Since then, prices for many games have been raised further, sparking widespread outrage. “It feels like an organization that is coming into a market and is not looking to cultivate repeat business,” Kahn said. “It looks like they are trying to find a way to squeeze out every dollar.”

The tickets come in four categories. At the start of this month, FIFA upped the price of the most expensive Category 1 tickets for the final to nearly eleven thousand dollars. It also raised the prices for Category 3 tickets, the cheapest ones generally available, to nearly six thousand dollars. Prices for games earlier in the competition vary widely, depending on location and who is playing. There’s no set price—that’s how dynamic pricing works. This lack of transparency is one of the things enraging fans, and it makes it tricky to make over-all comparisons. But Henry Bushnell, a reporter for the Athletic who has been diligently tracking the story for months, has pointed out that tickets “are multiple times more expensive than equivalent tickets to previous men’s World Cups.” Counting ticket sales, media rights, and other sources of revenue, FIFA has estimated that this year’s tournament could bring in as much as eleven billion dollars.

It isn’t just ticket prices that are irking fans. For most big stadium events, such as Giants games or Bruce Springsteen concerts, you buy specific seats. But, for this World Cup, fans were obliged to order tickets based on color-coded maps of the stadiums. When FIFA allocated individual seats at the start of this month, “many fans received unfavorable placements, in corners or behind a goal,” Bushnell reported a couple of weeks ago. “Some Category 1 ticket holders were placed in sections that, at one point, were color-coded as Category 2.” Seemingly, the aggrieved fans have no recourse. In the fine print on its ticket terms of use, FIFA says that its stadium maps are “for guidance purposes only.”

In soccer-mad Britain, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has expressed concerns that FIFA could “lose touch with the genuine supporters who make the game so special.” In Brussels, a soccer supporters’ group and a consumer group that represents fans from five countries registered an official complaint with the European Commission, charging FIFA with introducing “excessive” prices and “opaque and unfair purchasing conditions.” (FIFA responded that it had not formally received the complaint, and that it invests World Cup revenue back into soccer.) The complaint captured the feelings of many devoted soccer supporters. One of them is an old college friend of mine, Dan Corry, an English economist, who, since 1982, has attended eleven successive World Cups. This year, he’s planning to make it twelve. He’d like to attend an England game but, so far, the only ticket he has managed to get hold of is for Egypt versus New Zealand in Vancouver, Canada. He bought this ticket on the FIFA resale site for three hundred dollars, plus a fee of forty-five dollars. “Getting tickets is hard, the travel is hard, it’s all hard,” he said to me last week from London. “At other World Cups, the focus seems to be on making sure the fans have a good time. The ticket prices are reasonable, there are fan fests, and the host cities work out how to get fans to the grounds for free. It just doesn’t feel like this World Cup has the idea of making sure the fans have a good time at its center. There are all sorts of other agendas going on.”

Some of these agendas are political. In December, Gianni Infantino, the Swiss lawyer who heads FIFA, awarded Donald Trump the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize. Last week, Mikie Sherrill, the governor of New Jersey, demanded that the soccer ruling body contribute to the cost of transporting fans to MetLife Stadium, where eight games will be played, including the final on July 19th. “New Jerseyans shouldn’t be stuck with that bill while FIFA makes $11 billion in profits,” Sherrill said on X. On Friday, New Jersey officials confirmed that they are raising the price of a round-trip journey from Penn Station to the stadium, which is usually $12.90, to a hundred and fifty dollars on match days. There seems to be some grandstanding here. The original host-city agreements, which were signed in 2018, included a stipulation that fans would have free transport to and from games. In 2023, these agreements were modified to say that fans would be able to travel at cost. Citing this history, a spokesperson for FIFA said, “We are quite surprised by the NJ governor’s approach.” After state officials announced the huge fare increases that fans will face, a FIFA official said that they would have “a chilling effect.”

This isn’t the only challenge FIFA is facing. A couple of years ago, Infantino told the host cities they could expect hundreds of thousands of visitors who wanted to be “part of something special,” but the controversy over ticket prices seems to be having an impact. Last week the Financial Times reported that hotels in some host cities are cutting prices for dates during the tournament because bookings haven’t been nearly as high as expected. “It’s possible we will get some more demand, but at this point it certainly will not be the cornucopia that Fifa was promising,” Vijay Dandapani, the president of the Hotel Association of New York City, told the newspaper. FIFA insists that demand for tickets is unprecedented, with more than five hundred million requests having been submitted for about six and a half million seats. Recently, it raised the ticket prices for some games, which seemed to indicate that there was no shortage of buyers for them. But when I checked the FIFA website a few days ago, there were still tickets available for many group games, including U.S.M.N.T.’s opening match against Paraguay in Los Angeles on June 12th.

The prospect of empty seats would alarm the television networks and sponsors who have paid top dollar to be associated with the tournament. If games don’t sell out soon, FIFA could end up having to slash the prices for tickets to them, in which case I may well try to buy one or two for old time’s sake. In the summer of 1986, when the World Cup was held in Mexico, Corry and I, and another friend, took a bus from Houston to Monterrey, where England was based in the group stage. We didn’t have any tickets, but we were able to buy them at the stadium for a modest price. We moved on to Guadalajara to watch Northern Ireland play Brazil and, finally, to Mexico City, where I purchased tickets, at the Azteca Stadium, for England’s round-of-sixteen victory over Paraguay and its crushing defeat in the quarterfinals at the hands of Argentina and its boy genius Maradona, who scored his infamous Hand of God goal and another one of sheer brilliance. Back then, online purchases hadn’t been invented, experiences were less curated, and the World Cup was regarded as a festival of soccer rather than an opportunity to extract consumer surplus. Of course, there’s no going back—for us, for soccer, or for the broader experience economy. In the words of Simon Kuper, whose engrossing new book, “World Cup Fever,” recounts his experience at nine tournaments since 1990: “World Cups don’t change the world, but they do illuminate it.” ♦