Does not compute.
If your team plays the final of the WORLD CUP, you’ll pay thru the nose to see it (or prefer staying in your home country just in case there’s a sudden need to go to the Obelisk in the center of the capítal city for… reasons).
If not? may be go see it if it’s reasonably priced and you happen to be there, the presence or absence of things unrelated to football is irrelevant. Worse, if I knew the half-time wait was to be longer than usual I would be less interested in paying for watching the game.
I’m glad England didn’t go in for this theatrical squad announcement bs. Though we do have Harry Maguire and his family to make up for it 
Scotland did though.
He’s (AFAIK) the only baseball supporting pope in History (a life long White Sox) fan.
Pope John Paul was a former goal keeper (and Liverpool fan), I always wondered if there was an obscure polish town that converted to protestantism because their local rivals keeper became Pope
The one Cup game I will attend is in Vancouver. I did have trouble finding a room (had to go with one across the bay). At first these news items* (about lodgings not yet filled up in several cities) seemed odd, given my experience…but then it dawned on me: Canada! A country more welcoming than than the United States.
*That was over three weeks ago. I assume most hotels are booked up by now.
Sergio Ramos and Xabi Alonso were central to that squad.
Group stage tickets are going for over $1k in the nosebleeds. Finals tickets look like they’re ~$10k in the upper deck, $15k behind the goals, and $50k along the sidelines.
I wasn’t his biggest fan, to put it mildly, but this is what always made him sympathetic to me, because I used to be a goalie in my youth, too.
It turns out that actually being welcoming towards foreigners helps your tourism industry, nobody knew that.
That’s bonkers, absolutely bonkers. They take away football from the people that way.
So my tickets to Curacoa-Ivory Coast came though this week (only available via a dodgy FIFA app, of course 
). I’ll be taking the train up from DC to Philly for the day with my daughter. It will be the first world cup game for either of us.
I don’t believe in national football shirts as souvenirs, but the Ivory Coast shirts are pretty awesome this year, so maybe I’ll break that rule…
England ticket prices are starting to come down (I can’t imagine why, are people not keen on coming to the US or something? 
). They are still outrageous but below 700 bucks on Stubhub, if they continue to drop I might try see England play in the group stage.
Obligatory joke klaxon:
I bet he was good with crosses.
This is my hope, that people get desperate to unload them as the tournament gets closer and I can see a game for a grand including transportation and hotel.
The prices are hard to justify regardless, a halftime show is irrelevant. I’m not personally interested in football, but I’m English, I used to work at as a football steward, I have family who are obsessive football fans. I’m familiar with the sport. It’s a bit like saying tickets are $1000 higher than usual but you’ll get a squid to take home, it’s just a bit weird and it’s not something most of the actual fans are likely to think adds any value.
Anyway, I’ll only wind up watching any at the pub if someone else wants to go. Or if Scotland reach the final. Heh.
I remember, and it fits. Goalies are like drummers: batshit crazy. The good ones at least.
You know I mean that in a friendly way, of course
Right! Ramos central defender, Xavi Alonso central midfielder.
These ticket prices are the result of what the market will bear; nothing more, nothing less. If FIFA is pricing them so low that the buyer is compelled to turn around and sell it on the secondary market for a huge markup, then it’s FIFA’s problem for setting the shelf price too low. If they price them so high that only the wealthy can attend, then the wealthy will attend and the rest of the fans will watch on TV.
Yes, it sucks that the average fan is priced out of tickets to most games. Yes, it sucks even more that the USA is such a shithole now that people are rethinking coming here for games. What that probably means is that low-interest games, like (spitballing here ) Haiti v. Morocco, will have empty seats, particularly at the top of the stadium and further away from the field. Unless the price comes down enough that Americans who wouldn’t have an interest in the game will buy tickets just to be a part of the experience.
Again, it’s the free market at work. I don’t necessarily like it (I’d love to be able to watch the USA opener at SoFi Stadium*, but unfortunately for me, so do millions more Americans, most of whom have more money than I and are willing to pay through the nose for it). But I do understand it.
*OK, so going to SoFi would require a plane ticket and a hotel room, but my point stands.
You forgot left wingers, they’re crazy too. At least according to 70s football wisdom I grew up with.
On very shaky ground. It seems that it is not possible for US Americans to understand that some things have a societal value beyond monetary terms like cost or price. But it’s OK, I am here to learn. Today I learned that a US American who claims not to know much about football also claims
and does not mind not being able to attend the matches because they are too expensive but finds that normal. I am left scratching my head, let’s see where this ends.
See? That’s the problem right there, an unabashed free market without reins in the current USA, not only in football. But that’s surely a subject for another thread.
After all what’s more important than the Free Market Cup? certainly not some sport where 22 guys run after a ball…
The ticket prices for this tournament are double or triple what they have been previously. In Vancouver, parking a mile from the stadium is going for $300.
“What the market will bear” ignores the billion dollars Canadian governments spent to subsidize this, assume all the risk and see its citizens pay outrageous prices for the benefit of a corrupt FIfA. The non-disclosure agreement and tripling of cost estimates are not great examples of transparency and free markets.