You don’t have to follow or like soccer to recognize that something is rotten with the way FIFA is treating World Cup fans.
If you’ve ever bought a ticket to watch your favorite team, you’ll get it.
Soccer is the most popular sport in the world, and the World Cup, celebrated every four years, is a global obsession. Billions of people will be watching the matches on TV or via streaming.
A small subset of the fanbase — and this year, with matches hosted in North America, that group includes many Texans — wins a lottery for the chance to buy expensive tickets to watch the games in person, including at AT&T Stadium in Arlington. As reported by our newsroom, The New York Times and other outlets, fans are finding out after shelling out upwards of $800 that the mid-tier seats they thought they were purchasing are actually nosebleeds.
FIFA, the soccer governing body, is selling the tickets. Its explanation? The color-coded maps that fans used to orient themselves served only as “guidelines.” Fans are telling reporters that they feel misled and scammed.
Attorneys general in California and New Jersey, states that are hosting World Cup matches, have launched investigations into FIFA. The New York attorney general is also looking into the matter and issued subpoenas with her counterpart in New Jersey. Where is Texas?
Consumer protection is one of the main duties of the Texas attorney general’s office. Ken Paxton has been perfectly happy to launch all sorts of inquiries and lawsuits, many of them frivolous, to keep himself in the headlines during election season. Here is a pretty egregious matter that deserves his attention, if Texans can get him to care now that he’s won the GOP nomination for U.S. Senate.
According to news reports, FIFA changed stadium seating maps from one sales phase to the next, with each phase getting progressively more expensive. The Times reported that some fans were led to believe they could end up in a desirable area labeled Category 1, but that unbeknownst to them, FIFA had held back some front rows to sell at prices two to three times higher in April.
FIFA President Gianni Infantino has dismissed complaints about pricing by saying that the organization is simply charging market rates for North America.
The insults don’t stop there. The BBC recently cited a report by the American Hotel & Lodging Association that found hotel bookings for the event had fallen short of expectations. The industry group partially blamed FIFA for booking too many room blocks for its own use, which drove up prices earlier on, and later canceling a large number of rooms. We can only hope that hotel bookings in Dallas, host of the World Cup’s International Broadcast Center, live up to what was promised.
Will FIFA keep scoring goals at Texans’ expense, or will our attorney general get in the game?
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