FIFA are now part of the global scam economy

Paul Macdonald

• 8 Apr 2026 11:01 CDT
• 5 min read

Analysis

FIFA’s ticket pricing strategy for the 2026 World Cup is another example of the scam economy that normal people are forced to put up with.

The intrinsic value of an item has been lost. The scam economy is a term coined to represent the multitude of cryptocurrency, AI, phishing, and other illegal behaviour that has become a staple of online life, but in reality the concept goes far deeper.

It seems as if each day we hear of a new innovative startup that lost user data, or sold a totally misleading product. Just this week the New York Times - who themselves have a direct licencing deal with Amazon to use their content for training purposes - were lured into a ludicrous and patently false report around a two-man Telehealth startup allegedly worth $1.8 Bn which, you’ve guessed it, wasn’t worth remotely that amount, nor was it a two-man startup.

This stuff is everywhere and you better believe that FIFA have bought into every aspect of it, hook line and sinker. It’s been broadly swept under the carpet now but if you go back a few years to the glory years of NFTs, FIFA set up their own service called ‘FIFA Collect’ which was designed to allow the holder the ‘right to buy’ tickets for their selected team at the tournament.

But this right to buy was essentially an option to enter into the ticket bidding process, which has evolved in so many ways since this venture was born and died that the NFT was essentially worthless. Fans were even able to buy NFTs for teams that hadn’t even qualified with no chance of a refund. The Swiss government is currently conducting a review as to whether FIFA Collect actually constituted gambling, given how unlikely it was to purchase a ticket for the World Cup using this method.

That was just the beginning of this charade of affordability which will forever shroud this tournament. If we go back to the initial bid document, tickets were on offer for as little as $20, while a box seat for the World Cup final would set you back $4,000. At the time of writing a single ticket in FIFA’s latest release clocks in at $11,000. Americans might be used to election promises being reneged upon, but even by FIFA’s standards this is an off-the-scale betrayal of a bid promise.

It would seem as if fans are becoming desensitised to the idea that they are being ripped off at every turn. Whether it’s for buying kits (a new England ‘match worn’ home jersey will now set you back £150, leading to a thriving underbelly of Chinese replicas), ticket prices, pay-to-watch TV services across multiple providers, food and drink in stadiums - every part of the game is built upon the American dream of fan value.

And so this World Cup being hosted in the home of excess is fitting, and heavily leans into the idea that consumers are simply there to be taken advantage of. The latest ticket update involves certain category 1 tickets being ‘recallocated’ - ie, moved to another part of the stadium - leaving fans clueless as to where they will actually be sitting. At this point any good news for the fans attending would be more of a surprise; car parking tickets at some of the venues exceed ticket prices for any other World Cup in history. Even local transit is getting in on the act, with Foxborough increasing their train prices by four times on the day of matches hosted there.

And FIFA couldn’t let prediction markets, the latest incarnation of scam betting, to pass them by. But in a comically corrupt move they chose to partner with ADI PredictStreet, who at the time of writing doesn’t yet have a website. The transparency of that tender process would be interesting, to say the least.

Of course in the background of all of this is the biggest scammer in history, Donald Trump. The current World Peace Prize champion has withheld federal money from venues, refused tax breaks usually granted to attending teams, and placed unfeasible VISA conditions on some of the smallest competing nations. All this while Gianni Infantino stands grinning in the background, in his red MAGA hat. It’s insulting, it’s disgusting, but this World Cup is the representation of modern life in western economies; how much value can be extracted from the mark - sorry, customer - and how long will they accept it.

FIFA has done many, many unscrupulous things in the past. But this confidence trick of a World Cup may well be the worst of all.