How FIFA Is Killing the World Cup
When Lionel Messi lifted the FIFA World Cup trophy in Lusail, Qatar, after his Argentina team defeated France in 2022, close to 1.5 billion people were watching. It was a final that had everything: two global powerhouses, an aging legend proving he still had it, a young French phenom in Kylian Mbappé at his peak and drama that unfolded in real time. Many argued it was the greatest soccer game ever.
Since Qatar won the bid to host the competition-beating out the United States-the tournament had faced relentless scrutiny over the country's treatment of migrant workers, its restrictions on LGBTQ+ rights and accusations that the Gulf state had used sports to whitewash its human rights record.
For FIFA, the governing body that runs the tournament, that final was a chance at redemption. It was also a promise: A spectacle like this one, played out four years later across American stadiums, would finally make soccer impossible to ignore in the world's biggest sports market.
Now, with the World Cup kicking off on June 11 on North American soil for the first time in 32 years, FIFA and its president, Gianni Infantino, have turned that promise into something many fans say they never wanted. The tournament has been expanded from 32 to 48 teams, making it too big and too long. It has priced supporters out of stadiums. It has added a halftime show to the final, a first in the tournament's history.
A second chance for American soccer has arrived. Just not the one many expected. Far from an advertisement for The Beautiful Game and the magic it can produce, critics say the tournament has been transformed into one giant money-grabbing exercise that has alienated fans before the first ball has even been kicked.
A ‘Monumental Betrayal'
When the United States last hosted the World Cup in 1994, it was viewed as soccer's potential turning point in America. The world's most popular sport had struggled to break through in the U.S. market. The '94 tournament delivered. "MLS was birthed from that World Cup," Tim Howard, the legendary goalkeeper who played 121 times for the U.S. men's national team, or USMNT, told Newsweek. "That is a seismic shift."
In 2026, the landscape is transformed. Soccer-specific stadiums dot the country. MLS has grown to 30 teams. Viewership for the European leagues has climbed, and young Americans are playing soccer in record numbers. Over 25 million Americans watched the World Cup final in Qatar, the most-watched men's game in U.S. history. The moment FIFA had been waiting for had arrived.
But as this year's event has drawn closer, enthusiasm appears muted. Sports analysts and media observers attribute the tepid interest not to American apathy, but to the organization's self-inflicted missteps.
If one story has dominated World Cup coverage ahead of the tournament, it has been the ticket prices. For the first time, FIFA took direct control of ticketing rather than outsourcing to local organizers. The organization introduced dynamic pricing and resale platform fees-features common in U.S. entertainment but unfamiliar to soccer fans worldwide.
When FIFA confirmed its pricing structure, it became clear this World Cup would be fundamentally different. The backlash came swiftly-from the very people whose passion had always defined the sport: the fans.
FIFA defended the model, pointing to a limited "supporter entry tier" priced at around $60. The tickets make up roughly 10 percent of each participating nation's allocation, offering a lower-cost option for a small share of supporters.
But for many supporters, that concession did little to address the broader shift in costs. Ronan Evain, director of the Football Supporters Europe organization, which has monitored FIFA's preparations for months, told Newsweek, "Many people are simply being priced out of the tournament. Even those who are buying tickets are putting themselves and their families under financial pressure."
In December, FSE accused FIFA of a "monumental betrayal." The numbers bore out the charge. In Qatar in 2022, the cheapest seats ran $55. For 2026, comparable seats in more widely available categories jumped nearly tenfold, to $560. The cost is not only financial.
A World Cup is not a balance sheet. The tournament's cultural power has always come from the stands-the noise, the color, the partisan chaos that no amount of corporate hospitality can manufacture. When Ghana played Portugal in 2022, the atmosphere inside the stadium was generated not by sponsors or suite holders but by thousands of fans who had traveled from Accra and beyond, many at enormous personal cost. That energy is what separates a World Cup from any other sporting event. Strip it out-through pricing, through restricted access, through corporate gatekeeping-and what remains is a television product with excellent production values and no soul.
"The feeling of the world coming together, the colors, the chants-a lot of that won't be there," Evain said.
In March, FSE and the consumer group Euroconsumers filed a formal complaint, alleging that FIFA had abused its market position to impose excessive pricing.
For most fans, attending the World Cup became a layered calculation. A $1,000 ticket required a $400 flight. A $400 flight required a hotel room that, in many cities, was doubling or tripling in price. Parking at some host stadiums was running as high as $175 per car. Surging prices have put people off. In Boston, Philadelphia and Seattle, hotel demand trailed behind a typical summer season. Host cities warned they may not recover the hundreds of millions they are spending on security and infrastructure, even as FIFA is expected to generate $11 billion in revenue from the tournament.
FIFA President Infantino dismissed the criticism. "We have to look at the market-we are in the market in which entertainment is the most developed in the world," he said at the Milken Institute Global Conference in May. "In the U.S., it is permitted to resell tickets as well, so if you were to sell tickets at the price which is too low, these tickets will be resold at a much higher price."
President Donald Trump, Infantino's close ally and recent recipient of FIFA's inaugural Peace Prize, seemed caught off guard by the numbers. When asked about the $1,000-plus price tag for the USMNT opener against Paraguay, Trump admitted he hadn't realized how high they'd climbed. "I didn't know that number," he told The New York Post. "I would certainly like to be there, but I wouldn't pay it either, to be honest with you."
Some tickets for the final have been listed for resale in the millions. For the fans who had been watching the resale market for months, refreshing pages and watching prices climb, it was cold comfort. Meanwhile, the attorneys general of New York and New Jersey had subpoenaed FIFA, investigating what prosecutors suspected was artificial scarcity-suggestions that supply may have been managed to drive prices on the organization's own authorized resale platform, where fees can total around 30 percent of each transaction. FIFA declined to comment.
Beyond the cost, there are deeper barriers to the World Cup in 2026. Trump's immigration crackdown directly impacted fans from qualified nations. Haiti and Iran, whose teams both qualified for the tournament, faced full travel bans, while Côte d'Ivoire and Senegal faced partial restrictions. Haiti had qualified for the first time in over 50 years, yet due to the travel ban, most fans from the island would be unable to watch their team play in the U.S.
A Costly Relationship
The optics did not improve when it emerged that federal agents might be part of the tournament's security footprint. White House officials spoke with confidence about a coordinated operation. Vice President JD Vance reminded visitors that they would have to go home when the tournament ended or answer to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Infantino now found himself caught between two sets of interests that did not align: the game's, which depends on the world feeling welcome, and the host nation's, where the political climate has made that harder to guarantee.
None of this is new, exactly. The World Cup has always been useful to the governments that stage it. Benito Mussolini hosted the 1934 tournament and turned it into a fascist pageant, his Italian team winning under a regime happy to treat the result as proof of national supremacy. In 1978, Argentina's military junta staged the Cup while it was disappearing its own citizens.
The pattern continued in plainer commercial dress: Vladimir Putin's Russia in 2018, Qatar in 2022-with its widely reported migrant worker death toll, hotly disputed by FIFA and Qatari officials-and a future tournament already promised to Saudi Arabia.
The irony is that Infantino was supposed to be the cure. He rose to the presidency in 2016, in the wreckage of the FBI bribery investigation that had toppled FIFA's old guard, campaigning as the reformer who would clean the money out of the game. For Infantino, it had been easier to deal with regimes like Russia or Qatar, where the pushback was minimal, but the United States was a different challenge, with the news cycle far less forgiving.
Some of that scrutiny was self-inflicted. FIFA maintains a strict no-politics policy. Yet Infantino had spent years building a relationship with Trump, attending his inauguration, inventing a peace prize and awarding it to him and allowing the World Cup draw to be turned into a celebration of the administration. The concessions accumulated. When the United States refused to host Iran after going to war with the country, FIFA looked the other way, even as its own statutes require that all qualified nations be welcomed by the host.
By the time the tournament arrived, the world's most beloved sporting event carried the unmistakable imprint of Trump's brand. The bad press had come from every direction at once and the prospect of empty stadiums is becoming increasingly real. Yet FIFA appears unbothered.
Soccer's New Economics
The summer before the World Cup, FIFA had gotten a preview of what was coming. The 2025 Club World Cup, where the top professional teams from around the globe compete, featured vast sections of empty seats in massive NFL stadiums in 11 U.S. host cities. FIFA implemented a dynamic pricing model for the tournament, a strategy in which prices varied in response to demand. It didn't work. By the semifinal between England's Chelsea FC and Fluminense of Brazil, FIFA slashed ticket prices to around $13, desperate to fill MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
What FIFA saw was different. When the tournament ended, Infantino declared it "already the most successful club competition in the world" and said it had generated more than $2 billion-a figure he equated to "$33 million per match." The tournament was supported by a $1 billion global broadcast deal with DAZN and secured $174.5 million in sponsorships.
Like with most professional sports nowadays, broadcasting, not ticket revenue, is FIFA's financial engine, said Simon Chadwick, professor at Emlyon Business School and author of The Business of the FIFA World Cup. With the expanded 48-team, 104-match format, FIFA is expected to generate around $3.9 billion from broadcasting rights alone, a roughly 30 percent increase from Qatar 2022.
FIFA said nearly two million tickets were sold in the first two sales phases alone, with demand so intense that World Cup tickets were oversubscribed more than 30 times. But for those who do make it into the stadiums, FIFA has found another way to compensate for empty seats. Prices range from $40,000 for suites during the group stage to as much as $300,000 for suites in the semifinals. Seats for the final at MetLife Stadium were listed on FIFA's official resale platform for anywhere from $8,500 to $2.3 million each. One corporate client, FIFA has found, is worth dozens of priced-out fans.
"The FIFA Men's World Cup is absolutely FIFA's cash cow. It's the organization's main source of income over a four-year cycle," Chadwick told Newsweek. "A lot of people may dislike the way Infantino has run the game, but confederations and national federations are happier than ever because FIFA is bringing in unprecedented amounts of money under his leadership."
Infantino defended FIFA's commercialization strategy by arguing that the Men's World Cup remains the sole reliable revenue source for the organization, claiming "every dollar" would be reinvested in soccer across its 211 member associations.
"What many people don't know, because of course we generate billions in a World Cup, people don't know FIFA is a non-for-profit organization, which means all the revenue we generate, we invest them in the organization of the game," Infantino said, citing what he described as a "special market" compared to concerts or NFL matches.
Infantino's quest for new revenue streams has few limits. FIFA has never had a problem selling broadcasting rights or tickets, but now it is selling everything else. The final will include a halftime show, featuring Madonna, Shakira and BTS. Some players will wear special patches that will become collectible trading cards. Even cooling breaks, meant to protect players from heat, will carry advertising. "What we now have is a heavily commercialized and industrialized version of soccer, built around what market data supposedly says consumers want. For FIFA, it is not only a sport anymore, but also entertainment, fashion, lifestyle and digital culture," Chadwick said.
"The danger is that this alienates traditional supporters, the same ones that made the game what it is," Chadwick said.
Who This World Cup Was Built For
Felipe Cárdenas, a soccer journalist based in Atlanta who has covered the sport's growth in the U.S. for years, saw the contradiction clearly. The conversation around the World Cup wasn't about American fans rejecting soccer-it was about FIFA rejecting what American soccer fans already were.
"This idea of ‘Americanizing' soccer isn't really coming from American fans. It's coming from FIFA," Cárdenas said. "FIFA believes it needs to reshape parts of the experience to appeal more to the American sports consumer."
American soccer audiences were already international, immigrant, bilingual-connected to soccer cultures from around the world. This season, Champions League matches on CBS averaged 1.71 million U.S. viewers, up 39 percent, putting European club soccer in a similar range to MLB and NBA regular-season audiences. The final between Paris Saint-Germain and Arsenal drew 3.09 million-the largest U.S. English-language audience for a club soccer match in history. Yet FIFA had decided the American market required a complete redesign.
"The American soccer fans didn't need halftime shows, dynamic pricing or collectible patches to appeal to them," Cárdenas said. "They were already invested into the game, but they are now being locked out."
It had not worked. A majority of Americans, 54 percent, said they were not at all interested in the World Cup, according to a May YouGov survey. Nearly six in 10 said they did not expect to watch a single match. Only 2 percent said they would spend $600 or more on a ticket to a U.S. match.
FIFA's model-the high prices, the halftime shows, the commercialization-was designed to attract American spectators willing to pay for a one-time experience. It had succeeded mainly in making that audience not want to come. But the deeper damage was elsewhere. In chasing a new fan, FIFA had systematically excluded the ones who had built the culture, who understood the sport at a deeper level and who would pass their passion to the next generation.
"Football needs fans, not just spectators," FSE director Evain said. "What's the point of hosting the World Cup there if the communities that usually attend soccer games are being excluded?"
The Industrialization of Soccer
As World Cup kickoff approaches, there is a sense among soccer experts, coaches and journalists that something fundamental has shifted. The broken promises and soaring ticket prices are only part of it. Something larger is at work, a transformation so complete that it extends beyond the commercial decisions of FIFA into the structure and soul of the sport itself.
"Soccer has become an industrial process. [Former manager] Pep Guardiola at Manchester City had 32 data analysts. If you think back to the 1970s or '80s, when you had César Luis Menotti, somebody on the Argentina bench smoking a cigarette, and maybe he might have a coach next to him, and that was it. But now, you might have 20, 30, 40, 50 data analysts alongside you," said Chadwick, of Emlyon Business School.
The purpose of any industrial process is efficiency: bringing different elements together in a way that is effective, scalable and, in modern soccer, increasingly predictable. What was once the strength of great teams, a core group of players who understood each other deeply, had become a liability. Now teams carry rosters of up to 26 players.
The consequences show up on the field. As broadcast revenue reaches all-time highs and competition expands, elite players are paying the price. A player at a club competing for multiple titles can play up to 70 90-minute games in a season. By the time the World Cup arrives, the sport's biggest stage is being contested by players running on empty.
"Players are arriving with too many games on their legs, there's very little time to prepare, the temperatures will be intense and having the tournament spread across three countries only adds to the physical and logistical demands on teams trying to compete at the highest level," Jorge Luis Pinto, the Colombian coach who guided Costa Rica through a grueling qualifying campaign in 2014, told Newsweek.
Pinto, who orchestrated one of soccer's greatest tournament surprises-eliminating heavyweights England, Italy and Uruguay-said one of the keys was having "plenty of time to prepare." While he is not necessarily opposed to expansion itself, he believes FIFA has lost sight of what the tournament was meant to be-a competition reserved for the very best the sport has to offer. He is not alone in that assessment. "I personally think it's kind of taken a little bit of the excitement and quality away from the tournament, and it's almost like it doesn't start until the round of 32," former U.S. forward Clint Dempsey said.
The 2026 World Cup will likely be the last global stage for soccer superstars Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. The hopes of many rest on players like Kylian Mbappé and Lamine Yamal to carry the torch forward. Soccer had always faced fundamental crises, and it had always produced new legends to replace the old ones. But in a sport increasingly built around data, rotation and efficiency, there is a growing fear that the sport has outgrown the conditions that produced giants like Messi and Ronaldo.
"Players no longer have the same confidence because coaches now have more control," Pinto added. "I do like some of the rule changes that have made soccer faster and fairer, but in my 42 years of coaching, I've seen that the players that shine are the ones with continuity, confidence and a small glimpse of selfishness."
Soccer has been grappling with that tension for years. But for FIFA, the product keeps selling. The 2026 World Cup is set to become the most commercially successful sporting event ever, measured by revenue and global reach. The Beautiful Game has become so thoroughly industrialized that it no longer needs to be beautiful to sell. The question FIFA has not answered, and may not be asking, is how long a product can keep selling once the beauty is gone.
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This story was originally published June 10, 2026 at 5:00 AM.