2025 Club World Cup Ticket Prices, An Encomium of FIFA, & Ambivalent Dynamic Pricing
A dearth of good commentary on all three
Tldr: Nashville has the cheapest tickets at $40.88 on average, while Miami has the most expensive at $167.92. The most expensive club is Inter Miami’s $212.24 & Ulsan Hyundai apparently has the least market demand in the eyes of the “non-automatic” dynamic pricing at $43.21. Full tables below.
2025 Club World Cup Ticket Prices
Tickets went live on the 19th after an initial pre-sale, and prices are higher than one would like. In a turn of events, the usual scapegoat Live Nation/TicketMaster will be able to hide behind FIFA although I will argue that is not the case here & in general FIFA gets more disdain than it should. (Tldr: it solves coordination issues & allows for collective bargaining.)
Why TicketMaster, LiveNation, & Yank owners are to blame: FIFA has its own ticketing system that it runs internally. The output we are seeing now is from a completely different system, ie the American ticketing ecosystem. We aren’t seeing Europe’s Eventim, we are seeing LiveNation’s TicketMaster. The easiest decision tree for FIFA would be to do what it has done for every other event: run it internally. The Club World Cup being a rushed process gave the stadiums leverage. American stadiums use TicketMaster. TicketMaster in general is a win-win for LiveNation & the artist/other side of the marketplace that is opposite the end consumer. Therefore, American operators coerced FIFA into using TicketMaster/the American default. The lack of TicketMaster being announced in advance until the 19th shows FIFA’s hesitancy to broadcast this change. Naturally, prices being higher due to dynamic pricing, ie the base ticket price is $30, creates negative news which FIFA unduly shoulders here. Congrats to LiveNation. One hopes that FIFA doesn’t buckle to the economic logic of TicketMaster’s best practices, although I suppose one can become a LYV shareholder to balance out the loss of consumer surplus.
Prices as of 12/21/24
FIFA is an Undeserved Villain
FIFA gets lambasted constantly as a greedy, self-interested & amoral entity. The Swiss headquarters doesn’t help but FIFA does not deserve this:
FIFA solves coordination issues: 211 national associations working in one entity is materially better than a continental or individual patchwork that allows for price discrimination and weakened negotiating power.
Someone has to do this. Otherwise, it would be a disjointed mess of external entities (media broadcasters, governments, sponsors) playing associations against each other. Any national football league tells you this: pooling the streaming rights of all clubs benefits everyone. Brazil’s Serie A lack of collective media bargaining shows the industrial logic.
In general, when one hear’s complaints, said complaints are likely biased! Who are the biggest detractors of FIFA? UEFA, the Union of European Football Associations. Why? Because UEFA has the biggest domestic leagues, the biggest continental competitions, and the biggest continental footballing heft. FIFA including the AFC, CAF, CONCACAF, OFC, & CONMEBOL dilutes UEFA’s power to serve its interests. Naturally there is a tension. It should be self-evident that unless one is in UEFA, then a global football system under FIFA is empirically going to be better than one where UEFA operates under its own whims. Think the World Cup is already tilted towards UEFA members? Without FIFA, who will advocate for more African & Asian members to have qualification spots.
Who writes English language football media? Americans or Western Europeans! (The Guardian, The Athletic. Without having taken any media literacy classes, it is clear that there is a bias, and FIFA or non-English football perspectives are not heard. Just look at the ticket prices, Real Madrid & Bayern Munchen are clearly in demand in part because they are written about so much. Mamelodi Sundowns of South Africa, Ulsan Hyundai of Korea, & Esperance Sportive de Tunis of Tunisia (unsurprisingly) are not. And in a world without FIFA those three would be left behind for the Madrids & Bayerns of the world. One sees the corrosive roots of the Super League (which Madrid continues to fight for.)
Dynamic Pricing: Bottled Water vs Tickets
Dynamic or surge pricing gets a lot of flack, I just disparaged it above. But in the context of football tickets, not a meaningfully finite resource like water. In a natural disaster, dynamic pricing is a pro-social measure. Bottled water prices increasing means that it becomes prohibitively expensive to hoard which maintains supply for everyone. The diminishing marginal returns of water run against the dynamic pricing curve, ensuring that everyone can meet the tangent.
For football tickets which do not have serious implications & therefore a need to ration, the motive for dynamic pricing is clearly economically motivated. Ultimately, being the uninspired finance person that I am, I will defer and state that dynamic pricing is ultimately pro-social, pro-economic, and just good sense in all scenarios for properly mediating supply & demand & ensuring that entities can earn sufficient economic profit against their cost of capital ensuring that society’s finite resources are appropriated allocated. You’ve gotta fire the farmers after all.
The best pejorative against anyone who self identifies as a neoliberal: “To call yourself a neoliberal you have to have at least some interest in reading political theory and upon exploring beyond the standard normie opinions still side with the status quo. Donkey mindset”- r/redscarepod user
In lieu of elaborating further, it is evident that the gradient of rationing precious resources vs excess profit varies across scenarios, and one end of the spectrum leaves me feeling disatisfied. I want to live in a World Cup, & I don’t think a Club World Cup achieves that, but high ticket prices certainly don’t. Here’s hoping for CONMEBOL, AFC, CONCACAF, CAF, & OFC clubs to play with passion & upset European giants & win. If the global theme of the 21st century is the world becoming flatter in every regard (the communists are in the WTO, manufacturing capabilities are broadening out, every league has progressive pressing systems), then a Club World Cup is a great way to usher that into the football world.
