Dear FIFA: a spreadsheet is not a pricing strategy

When FIFA designed its ticketing strategy for the 2026 World Cup, someone ran the numbers. What nobody did was ask whether the numbers were the right question. 

By now, FIFA will have hoped to be counting profits as the players completed their final warm-ups. Instead, they're counting the cost of one of sport's most spectacular pricing disasters – and the tournament hasn't even started yet.

The problems have been stacking up for months. Exorbitant costs and misleading seat allocations have led to legal challenges on both sides of the Atlantic. FIFA's own resale platform listed final tickets at nearly $2.3 million each – and with FIFA taking a 30% cut of every transaction, they had every financial incentive to look the other way. And most recently, fans who had legitimately purchased tickets had their orders cancelled after a so-called pricing inaccuracy, and were told to repurchase the same seats at the higher correct price. 

When pressed on the $2.3 million listings, FIFA president Gianni Infantino laughed it off at a conference in Beverly Hills, promising to personally deliver a hot dog and a Coke to anyone who paid that much. For fans already priced out of the tournament, it was about as tone-deaf as it gets.

And even now, just weeks before kick off, many tickets for the smaller matches still remain unsold.

The main problem is that they overestimated demand for the smaller countries. When you don't have a high number of loyal fans willing to pay through the nose for tickets, you are then relying on the broader public who want to go to the matches despite not necessarily supporting that specific team. And what they seem to have underestimated is that demand. Despite having some variable pricing, where the cost goes up as more tickets are sold, they now find themselves in the sorry position of having to substantially lower prices.

What they got wrong comes down to a few things. A lack of transparency left fans feeling cheated at every turn – not least because when FIFA bid for this tournament eight years ago, they pledged hundreds of thousands of $21 tickets would be available, a promise quietly abandoned by the time sales opened. Demand for the lower-profile matches was overestimated and prices set accordingly. And throughout, the focus stayed firmly on profit rather than on whether the event itself would be a success.

And one might argue – what makes a successful event for FIFA? Yes, of course, there's the profit. It's clear they are a profit-led organisation and of course they want to optimise that. But what they've missed is that the World Cup is about more than that.

It's a massive marketing opportunity – and one that goes to the very heart of what FIFA says it stands for. Their stated mission is to "globalise, popularise and democratise football for the benefit of the entire world." To inspire young people locally. To touch the world through its tournaments. Surely part of the reason this World Cup is being held in the US is to grow the game in a country where football has long played second fiddle to other sports. Pricing out the very fans who would fill stadiums with noise and passion is not democratising anything.

This is why marketing should always be in the room when pricing decisions are made. Not as a veto, but as a voice that asks the questions a spreadsheet can't. What does this price say about us? Who are we excluding – and does that matter to our long-term growth? Will the experience we're creating actually deliver the demand we're counting on next time? These are not soft questions. They are commercial ones. FIFA had the data. What they lacked was someone willing to challenge whether the data was telling the whole story.

Because when you optimise your pricing, you shouldn't just be optimising for the instant bottom line profit. You should be thinking about what that price says about you as an organisation. FIFA's own values are authenticity, unity and integrity. Will full stadiums – energised, passionate, genuinely mixed in who can afford to be there – create a better advert for the sport than ones that are profitable but half empty? If your mission is to democratise football, then your pricing has to reflect that. The two cannot be in contradiction.

It's going to be an interesting one to watch. Will FIFA really realise that they need to fill the stadiums? And that they need to discount those final tickets substantially so that they sell them all?

Either way, FIFA will not come out of this unscathed. Even if they manage to fill the stadiums, the brand damage has already been done – and the gap between what FIFA says it stands for and what its ticketing strategy revealed it to actually be is not one that a hot dog and a Coke is going to close.

FIFA is an extreme case – a monopoly with no real competition and a product the world will watch regardless. Most brands don't have that luxury. But the underlying mistake is one that any organisation can make: letting pricing become a purely financial exercise, disconnected from brand, experience and long-term demand. Marketing's job is to protect the relationship between a brand and the people it depends on. When they're not in the room, that relationship is no one's responsibility. And as FIFA are finding out, that is a very expensive oversight.