"Why Does No One Care About the World Cup This Year?"
And why is the backwash of the French Empire better than that of the British Empire at soccer?
From the New York Times opinion section:
Why Does No One Care About the World Cup This Year?
June 3, 2026
By David Wallace-Wells
Opinion Writer
They used to call the World Cup, unequivocally, the planet’s biggest sporting event. But it is about to start, right here in North America, and no one much seems to care.
My guess is that once the World Cup starts in a week, you’ll hear so much about it that you’ll get sick of it.
But, yeah, there is so much entertainment available these days that people don’t get excited a week beforehand by reading a Special Preview Issue of Sports Illustrated or whatever. Instead, you wait until the last moment, then skim something online, and you’re ready to go.
For example, last winter, lots of people were posting about how the Winter Olympics is practically here, and yet nobody is talking about it: it’s totally different from the Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding Olympics when we were 13! Obviously, the Winter Olympics are doomed!
But then the Winter Olympics actually started and they turned out to be the usual entertaining diversion they always are (even if I won’t remember much about them until the 2030 Winter Olympics come around — “Oh yeah, remember last time when she slipped? That was so sad.”)
But let’s listen to the reasons put forward for why the World Cup is dead, because, who knows, they might turn out to be true this time:
Thousands of tickets remain unsold, and just weeks ago, others were being resold well below their official price.
One reason is because nobody yet has much of a clue what the real price of tickets will turn out to be. FIFA, the soccer monopoly, is no doubt playing sophisticated Econ 402 profit maximization games. From the Daily Mail:
FIFA accused of colluding with ticket resale platforms in desperate attempt to shift seats at low-interest World Cup games - despite warning fans not to buy from resellers
By MIKE KEEGAN, CHIEF SPORTS REPORTER
Published: 08:55 EDT, 3 June 2026
… The organisation has consistently warned fans not to buy tickets from resale platforms and instead use its own service, however, Austrian economist Florian Ederer spotted what he feels is evidence of a bid to sell tickets and swerve legal action. He posted a seat map on X showing the highlighted areas.
‘I believe we now have evidence of FIFA’s World Cup ticketing shell game,’ he explained. …
‘FIFA is colluding with third-party resale platforms for its own supply management. Look at this SeatGeek map (secondary market) for Saudi Arabia vs Cape Verde. The circled areas are not random single resale tickets, but large, contiguous blocks of seats: entire rows and swaths in sections. The blue circles appeared weeks ago, then the purple blocks suddenly showed up a day or two ago, and the red blocks seem to have appeared recently too.’
Ederer added: ‘That’s not what ordinary fan or even commercial scalper resale looks like who resell pairs, fours, and scattered seats. Instead, this looks like inventory being dumped in bulk onto secondary markets, at prices below FIFA’s official site.’
Ederer then went on to explain his thoughts on why FIFA would take such an alleged step.
‘Why doesn’t FIFA just lower prices on its own site? Probably because official price cuts could trigger refund demands, chargebacks, or consumer-protection headaches from fans who already bought at much higher prices.
‘Instead FIFA keeps official prices high, avoids openly admitting the market-clearing price is lower, and moves unsold inventory through third-party resale platforms instead.’
Some have also pointed out that seats in the same areas for the match cost $700 on FIFA’s resale platform and $200 on SeatGeek.
Oh, man, only $200 to see Saudi Arabia vs. Cape Verde.
I’m there!
Seriously, 2026 is not like 1994 when the World Wide Web had just barely been invented So FIFA had to print up a brochure months ahead of time with its best guesses at its optimal prices.
My impression is that the world has gotten better for sellers because sellers can now afford to play all the theoretical profit maximization games I heard about from economics professors in 1976-1982, but that almost nobody could implement in the real world at the time. This helps explain why the Dow Jones average is now over 50,000 while it was under 1,000 back then.
Am I …
Paywall here.
