Dear Mr Infantino,

Four thousand one hundred and eighty five dollars. That is what you have decided the cheapest ticket to the 2026 World Cup final should cost. Not the best seat. Not even a decent view. The cheapest entry point to witness the culmination of the tournament you claim belongs to the world. Four thousand one hundred and eighty five dollars for the privilege of being present whilst history unfolds somewhere below, mediated through screens because the seats you have priced within reach of ordinary people are too far away to see clearly.

When the United States bid for this tournament seven years ago, the proposal included hundreds of thousands of tickets at twenty one dollars. That was the promise your organisation made. Accessibility. The people’s game. Football as democratic spectacle rather than luxury commodity reserved for those with disposable income measured in many thousands rather than hundreds. You have broken that promise. You have done so knowingly, deliberately, and with apparent pride in the commercial sophistication of your pricing strategy.

The figures published last week through ticket allocations to national associations reveal the scale of your betrayal. Group stage matches begin at one hundred and eighty dollars. Semi finals start at nine hundred and twenty dollars. The final ranges from that four thousand dollar floor to eight thousand six hundred and eighty dollars at the top end. And these represent merely starting points, because you have introduced dynamic pricing (that slippery euphemism for algorithmic gouging) which means prices will rise further based on demand. You have imported the logic of airline tickets and hotel rooms into football. You have treated the World Cup as inventory to be optimised rather than culture to be shared.

Above inflation increases

Let us be precise about what you have done here. In 1994, when the World Cup last came to America, tickets ranged from twenty five to four hundred and seventy five dollars. Adjusted for inflation, that twenty five dollar ticket would cost roughly fifty dollars today. You claim tickets will be available from sixty dollars, but those tickets do not exist in the allocations given to national associations. The loyal supporters, the ones who have followed their teams through qualification campaigns and friendlies and all the mundane fixtures that constitute the rhythm of international football, are offered nothing below one hundred and eighty dollars. For their loyalty, for their years of attendance, for embodying the tradition FIFA claims to uphold, they are rewarded with prices five times higher than Qatar, where the cheapest tickets were around seventy dollars just four years ago.

Football Supporters Europe has called this “a monumental betrayal of the tradition of the World Cup.” They are correct. What we are witnessing is not inflation or market adjustment or any other naturalised economic force. This is policy. This is your deliberate transformation of a cultural event that belonged to working people into a premium product for the wealthy. You have priced the working class out of their own game and you have done so whilst speaking constantly about football’s universal appeal, about the tournament belonging to everyone, about sport transcending boundaries.

.Who can afford this, Mr Infantino? Not the supporters who have been attending matches since they were teenagers. Not the working class fans whose presence in stadiums creates the atmosphere your broadcasters capture and monetise. Not the communities whose investment in football over generations created the global phenomenon you now profit from. You know this. You have access to decades of data on supporter demographics, on attendance patterns, on the economics of match going. You know these prices exclude precisely the people whose participation made football matter. You are counting on it.

The mechanism is efficient. You allocate a tiny fraction of tickets to the most loyal supporters, price most of those tickets beyond their means, and fill the remaining capacity with corporate clients and wealthy tourists who want to consume an authentic football experience without the inconvenience of actual football culture. What you lose in working class attendance you gain in revenue per seat. What you sacrifice in tradition you recover in profit margins. The calculation is transparent. You have decided that maximising FIFA’s income matters more than ensuring working people can attend the tournament.

FIFA’s riches

Let us discuss your organisation’s finances, since you have made this a question of economics rather than culture. FIFA paid you 4.25 million Swiss francs in 2024—nearly five million dollars for a single year of work. Your organisation expects to earn more than ten billion dollars from the 2026 tournament. Ten billion dollars. Yet you claim you cannot afford to price tickets at levels working class supporters can manage.

There are alternative funding models. There are different ways to structure allocations. There are choices about who pays and who profits. You have made those choices. You decided that dynamic pricing and premium categories and corporate hospitality were more important than accessibility.

Your recent behaviour suggests you understand none of this matters. Last week you created a peace prize out of thin air and awarded it to Donald Trump at the World Cup draw ceremony. You told him he “definitely deserves” this prize, which nobody had heard of until you invented it, for reasons you have not explained using processes you have not disclosed. You said Trump’s leadership represents what you want from a leader. You posted on Instagram that together you would “make not only America great again, but also the entire world.” You have been accused of breaching FIFA’s duty of political neutrality. Human rights organisations have filed ethics complaints. None of this appears to concern you.

Your predecessor was removed from office for corruption. The system that removed him has been weakened under your leadership. The ethics investigators and judges are now seen to operate with less independence than they once did. You have consolidated power, eliminated checks, and created an environment where you can act without meaningful accountability. The ticket pricing for 2026 demonstrates what happens when that power operates without constraint. You do what serves your interests and FIFA’s commercial goals. The supporters, the communities, the working class fans who built football into what it is—they can afford entry or they cannot. You have decided this is not your concern.

Working class culture and football

But it should be your concern, Mr Infantino, because what you are destroying cannot be rebuilt once it is gone. The culture created by working class attendance (the songs, the banners, the traditions passed between generations, the sense that the stands belonged to communities rather than consumers) is not replaceable with corporate hospitality packages and premium experiences. When you price out the supporters who created that culture, you do not replace it with something equivalent. You replace it with simulation, with purchased atmosphere, with spectators who are present to consume rather than participate.

The irony is that you know this. FIFA knows this. Your broadcasters know this. Television audiences want to see passionate supporters. They want to hear organic crowd noise. They want to witness the spectacle that makes football compelling viewing. You want the product that working class attendance creates. You simply do not want working class fans to be able to afford attending. You want the aesthetic and cultural benefits of popular support whilst extracting maximum revenue from wealthy consumers. This is having your cake and eating it.

There is no mechanism for supporters to resist this. Boycotts do not work when demand exceeds supply at any price. Protests achieve visibility without changing your revenue calculations. National associations lack structural power to challenge your pricing policies. You can do this because nobody is positioned to stop you. FIFA operates as sovereign power within global football, accountable to no one, constrained only by its own commercial imperatives. You have built that system. You benefit from it. And you have used it to price working people out of their own game.

Change is needed

So this letter is not a request. You will not change the pricing structure. You will not abandon dynamic pricing. You will not prioritise accessibility over profit. The system you have built does not respond to moral arguments or appeals to tradition or invocations of football’s working class roots. The system responds to power and you hold it. What this letter represents instead is a record. A documentation of what you have chosen to do and what it means.

History will record your choices. The supporters you have priced out will remember them. The communities you have excluded will not forget what you did or why you did it. You claim to be making football truly global, as your Instagram biography states. What you are actually doing is making it exclusive, expensive, and extractive. You are enclosing the commons. You are fencing off what was built collectively and selling access to the highest bidder.

The beautiful game, they call it. Under your leadership, that beauty is something working people are permitted to watch on television, to consume at a distance, to participate in only as viewers rather than present witnesses. You have determined that the stands at your World Cup will be filled with those who can afford premium pricing rather than those whose lives have been shaped by following football. That is betrayal, complete and undeniable.

We will not forget it.

Yours,

A supporter priced out of his own game

Simon’s regular articles can be found at Home – anti capitalist musings