When Philadelphia learned it would host World Cup matches in 2026, city officials projected the usual benefits: tourism revenue, global exposure, infrastructure improvements that would look good in a slide deck long after the fans went home. Missing from those projections, at least publicly, was a simpler question. How many people who live in Philadelphia would actually be able to afford a ticket to a match played ten minutes from their homes?
A public school teacher in the city decided to answer that question for herself. She looked at FIFA’s pricing tiers and focused on a Category 3 ticket, one FIFA describes as accessible. At her median salary, that single seat represented roughly forty-seven hours of work, more than a full work week. She wondered, quietly, whether anyone at FIFA had ever done the same math.
The 2026 World Cup will be the largest in history: forty-eight teams, more than one hundred matches, three countries, dozens of host cities. It will also be one of the most lucrative sporting events ever staged. Ticket prices are set centrally by FIFA using global demand models that treat a seat in Kansas City or Guadalajara as interchangeable with a seat in New York or Los Angeles. That is how global markets work. Prices follow demand, not geography.
Cities, however, do not work that way. Global markets do not pave roads, staff emergency rooms, extend police shifts, or manage crowd control. Cities do. Workers do. Residents do.
That is where the mathematics of mega-events begin to break down. A service worker in Atlanta adjusts to congestion and extended hours under heightened security protocols. A transit operator in Mexico City reroutes buses and absorbs schedule disruptions. A small business owner in Kansas City closes early on match days to avoid the traffic. These costs are not abstract. They are immediate, local, and unavoidable. Yet access to the event these people are underwriting is priced as if their contribution does not exist.
Supporters of the current system argue that ticket prices simply reflect what the market will bear. That claim is true in a narrow sense. The market FIFA is serving is global, mobile, and affluent. It includes corporate buyers, hospitality packages, international travelers, and secondary resale platforms. It does not include the median wage earner in most host cities.
A well-functioning market aligns who pays with who benefits. The World Cup breaks that alignment. Costs are localized. Benefits are globalized. Access follows purchasing power, not contribution.
FIFA’s pricing structure for 2026 uses a four-tier system that varies by match stage and city. Group-stage matches offer Category 4 tickets starting around sixty to seventy-five dollars, though availability is sharply limited. Category 1 seats for the same matches run several hundred dollars. Prices escalate rapidly in later rounds. Quarterfinal Category 4 tickets approach three hundred dollars. Category 1 seats exceed a thousand. For the final at MetLife Stadium, the official range spans from just over two thousand dollars to more than six thousand, before resale platforms add their own premiums. Numbers like these remain oddly abstract until translated into something more concrete: hours of work.
To make that translation visible, a simple public web tool was built at worldcupanalysis.org. The application does one thing. It converts ticket prices into hours of labor based on local wages. Select a city, an occupation, a match, and a ticket category. The output is not a dollar figure but a measure of time.
The results clarify what pricing tables obscure. A nurse in Guadalajara earning the local median wage would need to work roughly sixty-two hours to afford a single Category 3 group-stage ticket. A retail worker in Toronto would need nearly forty hours. A teacher in Houston would need just over forty. For the final, a food service worker in the New YorkâNew Jersey region earning fifteen dollars an hour would need more than one hundred thirty hours of labor for the cheapest available seat.
These are not luxury accommodations. These are the seats FIFA describes as accessible. The word begins to feel misplaced. Accessible to whom? Accessible under what conditions?
FIFA often points to its sixty-dollar “Supporter Entry Tier” as evidence of affordability. On paper, the tier sounds promising enough. But the reality is considerably more modest. It amounts to roughly one thousand tickets per match, distributed through national football federations to supporters of qualified teams. Residents of host cities have no special access. Local workers underwriting the event are not the intended audience. The tier functions as a symbolic gesture rather than a structural solution.
This is not an argument about fairness in the sentimental sense. It is an argument about economic coherence. Hosting a World Cup match is not a purely voluntary transaction for a city. Streets close. Transit systems strain. Police and emergency services expand. Public money flows in ways that are rarely reversible. Officials speak of global visibility, a phrase that usually means commitments have already been made.
Residents are told this is the price of hosting history. Yet the mechanism that determines who gets to participate in that history treats local contribution as irrelevant.
Political resistance has begun to form around that contradiction. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has publicly criticized FIFA’s pricing strategy, contrasting it with the approach planned for the 2028 Olympics, which includes explicit commitments to local affordability. New York City Council member Zohran Mamdani has called for discounted tickets reserved for local residents and for limits on official resale pricing. Similar criticism has emerged from supporter organizations in Europe, which describe the 2026 pricing model as a betrayal of the tournament’s cultural roots.
Defenders of the system respond that elite sporting events have always been exclusive. That argument misses the point. The World Cup is not a private concert or a luxury resort. It is a publicly enabled global institution. Municipal cooperation, public infrastructure, and civic legitimacy make it possible. The event cannot function without local consent and labor, yet the pricing model behaves as if it can. The system works well for balance sheets. Democratic legitimacy fares less well.
Alternatives exist, and they are not particularly radical. Cities could reserve a portion of tickets tied to local wage benchmarks. Municipal lotteries could distribute access at capped prices. Revenue-sharing mechanisms could return a share of ticket sales directly to host-city services. Other mega-events have experimented with such approaches. None are perfect. All acknowledge a basic principle: when an event depends on public support, access cannot be governed by purchasing power alone.
FIFA has made a different choice. It has treated the World Cup as a purely commercial product while relying on public goods to stage it. That contradiction becomes visible the moment prices are translated into hours of labor. A seat priced at two thousand dollars looks different when it represents three full work weeks for someone earning an hourly wage. The abstraction collapses. What appeared to be a market transaction reveals itself as a transfer from people who cannot afford access to an institution that cannot operate without them.
Mega-events everywhere face versions of this tension. Cities compete for prestige based on projected benefits that often fail to materialize, while residents absorb costs that reliably do. The difference with the 2026 World Cup is scale: more cities, more workers, more revenue. The stakes are higher, and the incoherence is harder to ignore.
Trust erodes when residents begin to feel like extras in a production they are financing. Consent erodes with it. The World Cup is often described as a celebration of the world coming together. That promise rings hollow when the people standing closest to the stadium gates cannot afford to walk through them.
The teacher in Philadelphia who did the math is not opposed to the World Cup. The nurse in Guadalajara is not opposed to global sport. Their objection is narrower and more reasonable. They object to an economic arrangement that renders their labor invisible.
Economic justice in this context does not mean making every ticket cheap. It means ensuring that those who bear the costs of an event have a meaningful claim on access to it. What that looks like will vary by city. What it cannot look like is the current system, which treats global pricing as neutral and local impact as incidental.
If the World Cup truly belongs to everyone, its economics should reflect that. Not as aspiration. As structure.