Pricing a memory

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Today is Wednesday, June 24th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: The World Cup.

This year, the United States is co-hosting the global soccer showcase for the first time since 1994. Canada and Mexico also are hosting venues. And it happens to be the most expensive World Cup ever for fans.

SOUND: [Soccer match]

Ticket prices may be too rich for some die-hard fans and that leaves a few empty seats in some stadiums … but for others, money’s no object when it comes to experiencing a World Cup.

SOUND: [Atlanta streets]

MAST: On a humid Thursday afternoon in Atlanta, about 70,000 fans watched South Africa and Czechia compete. A little more than a mile away, hundreds more watched the game on a large screen in Centennial Olympic park.

Some had tickets to see live games elsewhere. Nina Wenklaar of Curaçao paid more than $700 combined to see her team play in Houston and Kansas City.

WENKLAAR: I know it's a lot, but it's a once in a lifetime experience. So for us, no price can overdo that.

That’s not a universal sentiment.

Soccer player Damian Efraingarro lives in Georgia, but his family is from Argentina. He wanted to watch the legendary Lionel Messi play in person but couldn’t.

EFRAINGARRO: It's just, it doesn't make a lot of sense for it to be that much money, to be honest.

EICHER: In the early stages of ticket sales, FIFA offered a $60 option. But that price was for only a fraction of the tickets. Most group stage games cost hundreds. For the final match in July, prices start at about $11,000 on FIFA’s resale marketplace.

Victor Matheson is an economics professor at the College of the Holy Cross. He says it hasn’t always been this way. When he saw Spain play Germany in the 1994 World Cup, Matheson paid just $50.

MATHESON: At the minimum, we’re talking about tickets that are four times as much after inflation.

MAST: This year, FIFA is using dynamic ticket pricing. Kind of like airline tickets… the costs change based on demand. FIFA also controls resale and charges both the buyer and reseller an additional 15%.

MATHESON: In 1994, you had to actually print a ticket and write a price on it. And there were laws that prevented resale at higher prices.

Matheson believes FIFA changed prices partly because Americans have more disposable income than in the past. In 2024, the median household income was above $83,000. In 1994, that figure was $63-K. And generally speaking, the whole world is wealthier.

MATHESON: We have a large number of people who can afford to purchase tickets in a way they couldn't before.

Plus, soccer is becoming more popular with a growing number of Americans.

MATHESON: We have more people in the United States today that identify soccer as their favorite sport than there are people in England who do the same.

EICHER: Generally, Americans are used to expensive sporting events. The average cost of seeing pro football or major league baseball in person rose 300% between 1990s and the early 2020s.

But few fans expected World Cup ticket prices to soar as they did. Some predicted the increase would affect attendance… and at least three games have had more than 1,000 empty seats each. But that’s not even 2% of seats in stadiums that hold more than 60,000 fans.

There are more countries competing than ever before, so matches between smaller nations may not be as popular at such high prices. But Matheson says early worries about half-full stadiums have been overblown.

MATHESON: I’d say the concern is real, but so far we've seen pretty exciting in-stadium environments.

A trip to the United States was always out of the budget for many international fans. And that is how it’s always been.

MATHESON: Even in the old days of the 1994 World Cup, the subsistence farmer in Romania was not able to make it to Detroit to see their team match up against Switzerland. Anytime you've got an international tournament involving 5,000 miles of travel and some type of lodging for weeks, this was always an event for the rich.

MAST: Some fans invented creative justifications. Viviana Vazquez got married last year … and made the World Cup part of the honeymoon experience.

VAZQUEZ: To date what we've spent on the world cup so far is eleven thousand nine hundred and eleven dollars and that includes like what we've spent at the games and like transportation and all that.

Vazquez and her husband have been able to afford five World Cup games because they started saving in 2022. Many die-hard soccer fans didn’t do that kind of preparation.

VAZQUEZ: There's a lot of people that I know or that I've heard that are taking on debt to be able to buy a ticket, I think that stress is not worth it.

AUDIO: [Sound of watch party]

Still, some are enjoying the World Cup experience outside the stadiums. Back in Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, Kevin Bolaños traveled from Costa Rica, just to be nearby.

BOLANOS: Soccer, football, whatever. It's like my passion since I was a kid. I used to play football since I was four years old. So I'm a big fan of this. So to have the World Cup this close was really a great opportunity to come.

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