The beautiful game has a hideous price tag, and now Westminster is demanding answers. British MPs have launched a formal investigation into Fifa’s pricing strategy for the World Cup, accusing the global football body of fleecing fans with ticket prices that have ballooned beyond the means of ordinary supporters. The inquiry, led by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, threatens to impose statutory fan protection legislation if Fifa fails to explain itself.
As a veteran observer of markets and fiscal accountability, I find this intervention both overdue and fraught with irony. After all, the same government that presided over a decade of flatlining real wages and soaring inflation now tuts at the cost of a match ticket. But let us not allow hypocrisy to obscure the central issue: ticket prices for major tournaments have escalated at a rate that would make any hedge fund manager blush.
The average cost for a group stage seat at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar was £160, a 40% increase from Russia 2018. For the final? Premium seats were changing hands for over £4,000 on secondary markets.
That is not market efficiency. That is rent-seeking. Fifa, a non-profit tax-exempt organisation, has become a monopoly supplier of an inelastic good: national pride.
And like any monopolist, it has maximised its surplus. The MPs’ threat of legislation is a classic government intervention: a sledgehammer to crack a nut. But perhaps the nut deserves cracking.
In a properly functioning market, arbitrage would correct these distortions. Yet the secondary ticket market is a regulatory swamp, opaque and rife with touts. The Treasury should take note: if you want to lower prices, lower the tax burden on ticket sales and encourage competition.
Instead, we get more red tape. The capital flight from fans’ wallets to Fifa’s coffers is a textbook case of regulatory failure. The Committee demands transparency on how Fifa sets prices and allocates tickets.
I propose a simpler solution: let the market breathe. But if the government must intervene, let it do so with precision, not a blanket regulatory guillotine. Otherwise, we will end up with the worst of both worlds: high prices and limited supply.
And that is bad economics, bad governance, and bad for the fans.
