FootBiz newsletter #172: Real Madrid election gets spicy, FIFA under fire (again)
Why can't more superclubs have elections with wild transfer promises?
This time next week, we will be in the World Cup. In the fray. In the mix.
At FootBiz we’ve already activated World Cup mode more than most but it won’t feel real, really real, until we are at the Azteca next Thursday and the whistle blows to kick off this tournament.
World Cup host cities are preparing for this month’s tournament in different ways.
Kansas City has made public transport free and put on special buses for particular routes that fans will need.
Philadelphia has fought to allow tailgating at their stadium so fans can get the full American experience.
Houston has rounded up stray dogs and flown them to Minnesota.
Wait, what?
Yep, in a pretty wild story in the Houston Chronicle, you can read about how the Texan city’s stray dog problem is so bad that they have caged up and flown out their at-risk animals.
In Houston’s East End, Fifth Ward, Third Ward and Sunnyside, “packs of stray dogs are a fact of daily life” per the local newspaper. And given they are near World Cup locations, including the FIFA Fan Fest, the Houstonian authorities have decided to take action.
“This city has had our share of maulings. I think I counted 12 since the end of December of ’25,” Shannon Parker, executive director of Houston Pets Alive, told the Chronicle.
Crikey.
Elsewhere in World Cup preparations, FIFA has backtracked on allowing fans to take refillable water bottles into games (despite the weather being so hot they had to introduce hydration breaks?) while accusations are getting louder that FIFA has been leaking tickets onto the tertiary market to avoid embarrassment (and financial penalties) after their high prices and restrictive sales process fell a little flat.
Economist Florian Ederer from Austria was the first to spot that whole blocks of tickets were being offered on what we’d traditionally called ‘secondary markets’ (in this case, Seatgeek).
Of course, to make sure they make all the money, FIFA opened their own secondary market this time around and the sale via other platforms is not permitted. So SeatGeek is essentially a tertiary market here, but how would they be in possession of rows and rows of tickets?
“That's not what ordinary fan or even commercial scalper resale looks like who resell pairs, fours, and scattered seats,” explains Ederer.
“Instead, this looks like inventory being dumped in bulk onto secondary markets, at prices below FIFA's official site.”
Indeed, for the Saudi Arabia vs Cape Verde match above, tickets are being sold in the 200s that are going for more than 700 on FIFA’s official platform.
So why would they do this?
“Probably because official price cuts could trigger refund demands, chargebacks, or consumer-protection headaches from fans who already bought at much higher prices,” Ederer says.
FIFA are desperately trying to avoid the empty seats that blighted the Club World Cup
“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.”
FIFA, when asked by a number of media outlets, declined to comment.
In related news, FIFA and Bank of America announced that they have donated $2.25m worth of tickets to veterans and first responders.
That would certainly be a convenient way to fill some of the stadiums where FIFA have struggled to sell tickets due to the expanded format serving up games people don’t really want to spend hundreds of dollars to watch.
They’ll just need a couple more of these initiatives and then perhaps there won’t be tens of thousands of unsold tickets.
Whether FIFA broke the law with their ticketing prices seems to be something that probably won’t fully come out until after the tournament, though New York and New Jersey attorney generals have subpoenaed FIFA, claiming fans have been misled about seat maps, and something has definitely seemed a bit off.
This time next week, though, we’ll be in the World Cup. And then a lot of these issues tend to simply melt into the background.
Yes, there will be stories about huge transport and logistical issues, fans will struggle to get in for kick-off at certain stadiums and, given the summer storms in the US, we might see some games that last six or seven hours long.
But we’ll be in it. There will be football to talk about.
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