Fifa’s World Cup model is grotesque and will drive away credible future hosts
The FA and other potential future World Cup hosts should take Fifa to task over an event model that makes no sense for rational bidders, says Ed Warner.
Great news! It’s just got cheaper to get to the World Cup. NJ Transit has slashed the price of a return train from Penn Station to the New York New Jersey Stadium by 30 per cent to only $105. Simply hold your nose, forget that the non-matchday fare is a mere $12.90, and enter your Visa card details.
Such travel price gouging is emblematic of the structural imbalance embedded into the economics of this summer’s tournament. It raises once again the timeworn question of why any sane nation would want to host a global sporting event.
I’m rationing my viewing of the BBC’s Twenty Twenty Six so as to prolong my enjoyment of this gentle lampooning of the current preparations for Fifa’s flagship competition. Having been inside a few organising committees for big events myself, I can confidently state that the comedy’s farcical crises around sustainability, legacy and social media cut-through are spot on.
Immovable deadlines create bubble mentalities within delivery teams that encourage absurd obsessions and wacky suggestions. Crucially, though, they can also promote a divorcing from reality. There are so many signs emerging that Fifa is guilty of just such an operational sin.
Fifa has dispensed with the conventional delivery model for this World Cup. Almost all major sporting events have an LOC (local organising committee) that handles the day-to-day preparations and games-time operations on behalf of the awarding international body – the “rights holder” in the language of the events industry.
This time the rights holder, Fifa, has dispensed with an LOC and is conducting all the work through a team of its own that it has assembled in Coral Gables, Miami. This is the target of the Twenty Twenty Six satire.
Operationally, dispensing with the traditional LOC model may make a lot of sense. An LOC typically contains representatives of national and local government, public funding agencies, and the relevant sport’s national governing body.
Each party will have different aspirations for an event, many of which may not square with the rights holder’s own. Disagreements proliferate and can become incendiary. They regularly waste time and money and blur focus.
In going it alone, Fifa has secured greater control, mirroring the financial stranglehold it is exerting on the cities within the three nations – the USA, Canada and Mexico – hosting matches at its tournament.
The financial construct for this World Cup is truly extraordinary. Although grateful hosts shoulder almost all of the expense of staging an event, they typically are granted some means of defraying the costs by the rights holder.
Ticket sales, hospitality revenues and local sponsorship deals normally fall to the benefit of the LOC, which will operate a P&L shored up by a financial underwrite from national and/or local government. Not at this World Cup, though.
If the cost of World Cup tickets has got your goat, blame Fifa. It is keeping all of the ticket revenues for itself. Does a parking space for $200 at the Miami Stadium for the Scotland-Brazil match raise your blood pressure? Again, blame Fifa.
If those NJ Transit fares irk you, blame Fifa for a different reason – transportation is one of the very few ways in which hosts can claw back some of the financial burden of delivering stadia and logistics that meet Fifa’s exacting standards. The average overall cost to each of the 16 cities has been said to approach $200m. Those are expensive local vanity projects.
Politics of course is a constant exercise in big numbers colliding with individual need. Every billion spent by government on one-off projects can be converted into additional hospital beds, extra teachers or benefits payments.
When it comes to sums sunk into sporting events, politicians routinely fall back on analyses of social impact and incremental tourism revenues to justify enterprises that lose money for the public purse – even while they are fattening the wallets of rights holders who are raking in monies from TV deals and global sponsors. Trouble is, these impact studies are often of dubious credibility with embedded bias towards positivity.
Local politicians through Canada, Mexico and the US have been committed by their predecessors to the World Cup brickbats they will inevitably receive from their electorates. National politicians will attempt to rise above this turbulence, grateful that Fifa’s 2026 model is very much city-centric.
Potential future hosts, however, would do well to question the wisdom of exposing their political class to the criticism that financial capitulation to Fifa inevitably entails.
With the embarrassment of England’s failed World Cup bid now over 15 years in the past, talk of a future UK tilt for the tournament occasionally surfaces. Unless Fifa rows back from its current model, however, there is no conceivable metric on which such a bid would make sense – apart from that which measures political ego.
Fifa gets away with the grotesque skew in its event construct simply because it can. Association football is the global game. It barely needs a publicity boost anywhere across the world, including the US.
And yet six countries on three continents have come together to stage the next edition after this, while Saudi Arabia has been ushered in as unopposed host by Fifa for 2034 – perhaps a last enormous hurrah for the kingdom’s apparently receding sporting ambitions.
While it can still ginger up eager wannabe hosts, Fifa will continue to ride the wave of its sport’s popularity and the vanity and/or desperation of politicians keen to bask in its glow.
If the UK and other well-established football nations with hosting aspirations want to redress the balance of power they need to come together and conduct a hosts strike. Leave Fifa with only riskier staging options – whether political, financial or logistical – and in time it might just come to realise that the people’s game shouldn’t be taken for granted.
Now is the time to ask who might welcome the World Cup in 2038, why, and on what basis?
“And the all time winner, Has him by the balls… And the train it won’t stop going, No way to slow down”
Locomotive Breath, Jethro Tull
Thank you, dear reader
This week’ column is dedicated to the former BBC presenter, a regular reader of this newsletter, who messaged as follows:
“God knows the BBC can make errors of judgement (eg the Trump Panorama edit) but where is the possible news value in a [Panini] stickers launch, however bigger and brasher this World Cup may prove to be? Unless, I suppose, you’re going to report it within the context of a hugely expensive, rip-off tournament and mention the ticket prices, profiteering on hotel and travel costs and maybe even ICE agents at the turnstiles?!
“Which of course takes us back to Trump, Infantino and his absurd peace trophy… and from there to the Strait of Hormuz, the price and potential scarcity of aviation fuel and doubts even about whether the planes will be flying to the US!!! I see I’m beginning to rant but as the current POTUS always says, THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!!!! (Deep breath).”
Ed Warner is chair of GB Wheelchair Rugby and writes his sport column at sportinc.substack.com