World Cup 2026: The Spectacle That Turned Spectators into Speculators

Every World Cup is a reflection of the country hosting it. That's the beauty of the thing, and 2026 was no different. Mexico was exuberant, chaotic fun and overwhelmingly a true football experience. Canada were wonderful hosts, even if the tournament never quite took the country over. And the United States was the capitalist engine — diverse, extreme, enormous fun in places, and utterly divided between the haves and the have-nots. It also turned everyone who visited into a speculator, whether they wanted to be one or not.

Some of our crew were on their sixth World Cup, and there is a particular kind of person who turns up to a sixth. The sort who can tell you exactly where they were standing when Tim Cahill's equaliser against the Netherlands went in at Porto Alegre, who holds firm views about which tournament had the best atmosphere and will defend them well past the point of general interest, who has spent thirty years arranging annual leave around a draw that hasn't happened yet.

I'm on fewer than six, but enough to have a view. And the thing about doing this repeatedly, across different decades and continents, is that you develop a feel for what a World Cup is supposed to be like — not the football, which takes care of itself, but the thing around the football. Who's in the queue next to you. Who's in the seat in front. What it costs a bloke from Salford or Salta or Suva to be standing there at all.

In defence of FIFA, briefly

Let me be fair for a paragraph, which is not a register I use often when FIFA is the subject.

FIFA is a commercial organisation. It has been for decades, and to a certain degree it should be. The money that comes out of a World Cup pays for development football in places that would otherwise have almost none, and anyone who tells you they remember a golden age of pure, uncommercialised tournaments is misremembering the 1970s. Sponsors on the boards, television dictating kick-off times, official beer, official everything — we've all made our peace with that. Well, mostly. In 2018 I stood in a country with world-class vodka and was contractually offered an American lager owned by a Belgian conglomerate. Every World Cup reflects its hosts, except at the bar. But we make that peace in exchange for the four weeks every four years when the entire planet watches the same thing at the same time.

So the case here isn't that FIFA wanted money. FIFA always wants money. It's the mechanism it chose this time, and what that mechanism did to the rest of us.

Though the defence only stretches so far. A red-card ban suspended after a phone call from the White House. Hydration breaks that looked a lot like ad breaks. A twenty-seven-minute half-time show where the laws allow fifteen. Iran commuting from Tijuana for every match, fourteen staff refused visas. A Somali referee, the first his country had sent, turned around at Miami airport. And a peace prize, invented by FIFA and handed to a sitting US president, by an organisation that fines players for political gestures. None of that is commerce. None of it is defensible.

The pricing that made speculators of spectators

Under Gianni Infantino, FIFA brought dynamic pricing to a World Cup for the first time — the airline model, where an algorithm moves the price in real time according to demand. The top category of final ticket went from A$9,570 when sales opened to A$15,630 by the April window. The most expensive seat at Qatar 2022 had been somewhere around A$2,280. The bid document for this very tournament, submitted in 2018, had projected group-stage tickets starting at A$30.

Here's the part that doesn't get said enough, because it isn't about the headline numbers. A variable price doesn't just cost you more. It changes what you are.

Long before any of us left Australia, one of the boys came out of the ticket portal at half past three in the morning holding six matches we had no way of evaluating. Qualifying wasn't finished. FIFA had released the schedule without the teams in it. We were buying a date, a venue and a shrug.

Understand what that does to you. We had no interest in trading anything — we wanted seats at football matches, which used to be a fairly simple transaction. But buying blind was the only way in, and the moment you're holding six unknown fixtures scattered across a continent, the market starts making your decisions for you. Some of those games were always going to fall on the wrong side of America from wherever Australia ended up. You either move them or you eat them. Nobody sat down and decided to speculate; the mechanism simply left no other way to behave. So we diversified. We hedged. We waited for the draw and rebalanced on resale. One fixture became the golden ticket. Another became the money maker: sold on, never attended, a football match we owned as an asset and experienced as a bank transfer.

Nobody asked to be a trader. The system simply made everyone one, and then quietly noted who was best at it.

All of which changes what a ticket actually is. Nobody should be buying a seat at a World Cup on the off-chance it goes up in value, but a market that moves invites exactly that. And the moment a ticket can be traded at a profit, you've stopped selling seats to supporters and started issuing securities to whoever can read a spreadsheet fastest.

The people's game, priced out

The sense that the game was slipping away from the people it belongs to didn't arrive all at once. It accumulated, country by country — and it began well before we reached America.

We spent a week in Mexico City and met hundreds of Mexicans — in bars, in taquerias, in markets, in the queue for everything, on a rooftop at two in the morning. Football people to a man and woman, in a country that lives on the stuff. Not one of them was going to a match. Not one. They talked about the tournament with enormous warmth and about the ticket prices the way you'd describe weather happening somewhere else. The World Cup had come to their city and been priced beyond the people who live in it.

Then there were our Argentinian friends. They live in the United States, they are very good at what they do and they are paid accordingly — the comfortable professional life that is supposed to put a football match within reach of anybody who fancies one. Argentina were playing thirty kilometres from their front door. They didn't go. Not through lack of interest: by the time they looked, the number on the screen had stopped being a ticket price and become a decision about the month. Thirty kilometres. Argentinians. Priced out of watching their own country play, in the country they live in.

And it wasn't only them. My US friends from San Francisco and New York — both host cities — all successful, mortgages under control, several of them proper football people who were setting alarms for European kick-offs long before it was fashionable over there. Not one of them went — same arithmetic, same conclusion. So they watched a home World Cup on television, forty minutes from the ground, while five middle-aged Australians flew thirteen thousand kilometres and got in.

Football Supporters Europe had warned about this before a ball was kicked, calculating that following your team from the first group match to the final on the official route would run to at least A$9,800 — close to five times the equivalent trip to Qatar. They called the pricing extortionate and complained to the European Commission. The attorneys general of New York, New Jersey and Texas opened investigations of their own.

Then there was the getting there, which is its own tax on ordinary supporters. The Boston stadium sits twenty-nine miles out of the city with essentially one road in, parking cut from around twenty thousand spaces to roughly five thousand, and a special match train at A$114 return on a line where the usual fare is about A$12. In Miami a twenty-minute drive to the ground took two and a half hours, and hundreds of ticket-holders never made kick-off at all, stranded in a lot a mile away watching the opening minutes on their phones. Getting out was worse: a three-kilometre walk to a pick-up car park where several hundred people stood in the dark holding phones over their heads, then a shuttle and a second car — three hours and about a hundred and forty dollars in Ubers to reverse a journey that is a twenty-minute drive. One of our five did that walk on crutches, in a moon boot, four weeks after rupturing an achilles.

Strictly speaking, that isn't a pricing decision. But it comes from the same place: enormous care taken over extracting money from a crowd, and almost none taken over the crowd itself.

Fifty cents to cross Mexico City. A hundred and fourteen dollars to travel twenty-five miles out of Boston. That's the whole tournament, right there, in two fares.

The haves and the have-nots

I've been reluctant to write this next part, because three weeks in a hire van doesn't make anybody an expert on American social policy.

But we saw it in city after city. In Portland, where I lived in the early nineties and which I'd spent a year promising the boys as the best place in America, the downtown I remembered was hollowed out — hundreds of people living on the footpaths, visibly unwell, a great many of them plainly in the grip of addiction or serious mental illness, and no apparent plan anywhere in sight. Venice Beach was the same picture in better weather: postcard sand on one side of the path, an encampment on the other. It was, honestly, depressing, and it stayed with all of us.

And then you'd walk two blocks and find the other thing. The rooftop bar. The pool party. The influencer economy in full flight, everybody beautiful and lit and performing, an entire industry of people photographing themselves in front of a city that was falling apart just out of frame. The glamour and the destitution weren't in different neighbourhoods. They were sharing a footpath.

You cannot spend a month watching a country price a football seat to the exact dollar the market will bear, in real time, algorithmically, and then walk past all of that, and not feel the two things are talking to each other. This is a nation with delivery robots trundling through Little Havana. The precision is astonishing. It appears to be available for absolutely everything except the problems that would cost somebody money to fix.

And here is the part I keep returning to. We had spent the year before the tournament behaving like traders — watching resale prices, timing sales, running margins on a spreadsheet — and then we arrived, and did our arithmetic in the morning, and walked through all of that in the afternoon. Football's job is not to fix any of it. But it left every one of us quiet. It had stopped feeling like a game that belonged to everybody. It felt like a market with a football match in the middle of it.

So who were we sharing the stands with?

This was the worry we carried onto the plane, and we'd talked about it before we left. What has always made a World Cup great isn't the football alone — it's who turns up. Supporters from every corner of the earth and every rung of the ladder, thrown into the same concourse, arguing about the same match. The Peruvian boys we met eight years ago, who remortgaged their house to watch their heroes in Russia. That mix is the tournament.

Price the entry high enough and you filter the mix. That was the fear. And I'd say it was slightly confirmed rather than wholly — which is its own kind of answer.

Vancouver was everything you'd want. So was Mexico. But at a couple of the American venues it felt different in a way that took me a while to name. Nobody was unfriendly. It was that a visible share of the ground had plainly been sold to people for whom this was a corporate day out or a content opportunity: the phone up through an entire half, the seat empty for the next one, the lanyard, the branded polo, the bloke who couldn't have named a player on either side and had a strong view on the wine list. No crime in any of it. But a football crowd is a made thing, and you cannot make one out of people who bought the experience rather than the match.

The numbers back up the impression. In Guadalajara on day two, FIFA announced 44,985 in a 46,000-seat stadium and the cameras found great blocks of empty seats, plenty of them in hospitality tiers reportedly going for around A$7,100 while the lower bowl went for A$710. FIFA said the ticket-holders were out in the concourses. In a city with Guadalajara's football culture, nobody was especially convinced. Meanwhile the actual supporters were being rationed: after the backlash, FIFA released a tranche of A$85 tickets to national federations for their regular fans — 130,000 across 104 matches, or roughly 1,250 affordable seats a game in stadiums holding forty to eighty thousand. A gesture, offered late, sized like an apology nobody meant.

An empty hospitality seat isn't a failure of the market. It is the market. Somebody bought it and then decided the football wasn't worth the trip.

The verdict of a man on his third

Two things are true at once, and pretending otherwise is how supporters get taken for granted. This was one of the best months of my life. It was also an exercise in establishing precisely how much a football fan will pay before they stop. We found out. So did FIFA, which wrote the answer down and will be using it in 2030.

The part that ought to worry the game isn't the money. It's the empty hospitality tiers in a football city. It's my American mates watching a home World Cup from the couch. It's a group of blokes on their fifth and sixth tournaments spending the year beforehand behaving like day traders. When the people who love it most are the ones being priced out, and the ones who can afford it are the ones leaving at half time, you haven't built a bigger World Cup. You've built a smaller one, in a larger stadium, with better catering.

Thank God for the football

And the football was exhilarating, as the football always is.

That needs saying plainly, because everything else here is criticism and the criticism would be worthless without it. We watched Australia beat a Turkey side whose captain had spent the build-up promising to dominate us, two rows from the front behind the goal, in among the active support, with a father and son behind us losing their minds. We watched us reach the knockout stage for only the third time in our history from a seat so far up the back that the players were rumours. In a bar in Mexico City a lone South African walked in carrying a flag and was carried around the room like a returning hero.

None of that has changed. The game is still the game. What differed was where you happened to be standing when you watched it.

Gracias, México. Merci, Canada. Cheers, USA.

The tournament was magnificent, and all three countries had a hand in that.

Mexico handed the whole thing over for the price of a taco: a restaurant terrace in Condesa that turned into a nightclub somewhere around the second round of tequila, strangers who took personal responsibility for teaching five Australians how to celebrate properly, a bloke at the next table who liked my Maradona shirt and turned out to have written the book on him. No algorithm arranged a second of it.

Canada was the other one. Vancouver put its stadium downtown, ran the trains properly, and let the walk in become part of the day. Locals stopped us in the street to say welcome. One of them mistook our kit for South Africa's and then apologised so thoroughly that I felt I ought to apologise back. The tournament never entirely took the country over — one afternoon we watched the USA dismantle Paraguay at a fan site so leafy and unhurried it felt like a picnic — but as hosts they were faultless.

And then there is America, which I have spent this article criticising and which gave us the time of our lives anyway. A brass band inside the stadium in Seattle playing Nirvana, then Metallica, in the city that produced them. An open-mic night in a sketchy dive bar near the airport where one of ours put his name down and sang Down Under to a few hundred bemused strangers. Cuban food in Little Havana with delivery robots whirring past the table. Waterfalls in the Columbia Gorge, Big Sur at dusk, a bar in Santa Clara where a Mexican bloke shouted the table a bottle of mescal and then watched us beat the resident pool sharks. Not one American we met had anything to do with the price of a ticket, and almost every one of them went out of their way for us.

Three countries, three completely different tournaments, and the same thing true in all of them, whatever the organisers had planned: the crowd isn't the revenue. The crowd is the event.