I want to tell you about the moment I realised something had fundamentally changed about the way football’s governing bodies think about the people who love this game.
It was during the Club World Cup last summer. A tournament that FIFA had expanded, rebranded and repositioned as the new pinnacle of club football, staged in the United States with the kind of fanfare that suggested the whole world had been waiting for it. I was looking at tickets for one of the marquee fixtures. Not a final, not even a semi final. A group stage game between two of the biggest clubs in the world.
The price I saw when I first looked was one thing. The price I saw forty minutes later, having thought about it and come back to check, was noticeably different. Not because I had been looking at a different category. The same seat. The same game. A different price, because in the time I had spent deliberating, demand had apparently shifted and the algorithm had adjusted accordingly.
I had just had my first direct experience of dynamic pricing in football. And I felt something I have not felt very often watching this sport I have loved my entire life.
I felt like a customer being managed rather than a fan being welcomed.
That feeling has not gone away. And with the 2026 World Cup now on the horizon, the prospect of dynamic pricing being applied to the most watched sporting event on the planet should concern every football fan on earth.
What Dynamic Pricing Actually Is
Before we get into the football specific implications it is worth explaining clearly what dynamic pricing actually means because the term gets thrown around without always being properly understood.
Dynamic pricing is a revenue management strategy in which prices are adjusted in real time based on demand. When lots of people want something, the price goes up. When demand drops, the price comes down. The algorithm is constantly recalibrating based on how quickly inventory is selling, how much time remains until the event, what comparable events are charging and a range of other factors that the companies using it rarely disclose in full.
You have almost certainly experienced dynamic pricing without realising it. Book a flight six months in advance and the price is reasonable. Book the same flight two weeks before departure and you will pay significantly more. Book it the night before and you might pay three times the original price or you might find a last minute deal, depending entirely on how the algorithm assesses the remaining demand.
Hotels do the same thing. So do ride sharing apps, where surge pricing during busy periods has become so normalised that most people accept it without a second thought. Concerts and live events have increasingly moved toward dynamic pricing too, with Ticketmaster and similar platforms adjusting prices based on demand in ways that have caused significant controversy among music fans.
The logic of dynamic pricing from a business perspective is straightforward. If people are willing to pay more, charge more. Maximise revenue from every unit of inventory. Leave no money on the table.
It is a perfectly rational commercial strategy. It is also, when applied to football, a philosophy that is fundamentally at odds with what the sport is supposed to be about and who it is supposed to serve.
What Happened at the Club World Cup
The expanded Club World Cup staged in the United States in the summer of 2025 was FIFA’s most ambitious commercial project to date. Thirty two clubs, multiple venues across multiple American cities, a prize fund of over a billion dollars and a marketing operation that positioned the tournament as the new benchmark for club football globally.
The ticketing operation told a different story.
Prices for Club World Cup fixtures fluctuated dramatically in the weeks and days before games, with some tickets increasing in price by significant margins between the initial sale and the matchday. Fans who had been monitoring prices reported watching the cost of the same seats change multiple times over the course of a single week.
The situation was particularly acute for the high profile fixtures involving the biggest clubs. Games featuring Real Madrid, Manchester City and Bayern Munich saw pricing volatility that made planning attendance genuinely difficult for supporters who needed to book travel and accommodation alongside their tickets. By the time some fans had organised the logistics of attending, the ticket price they had originally budgeted for had increased substantially.
The tournament also suffered from a broader atmosphere problem that was directly connected to the pricing and accessibility issues. Several games, including some involving genuinely enormous clubs, were played in front of crowds that were visibly below capacity. The dynamic pricing model had not just frustrated fans. In some cases it had priced them out entirely, leaving empty seats at fixtures that should have been sellouts.
The optics of that were terrible. FIFA had spent months telling the world that the expanded Club World Cup represented a celebration of global football. The reality of half empty stadiums at group stage games between clubs with hundreds of millions of supporters worldwide told a different story about who the tournament was actually designed for.
How Dynamic Pricing Works in Practice for Fans
The practical experience of navigating a dynamic pricing system as a football fan trying to attend a game is worth walking through in detail because the frustration of it is not always immediately obvious to people who have not encountered it directly.
You identify a game you want to attend. You check the ticket price. It is higher than you expected but within the range you can manage if you plan carefully. You spend a week sorting out travel, accommodation, time off work. You go back to buy the ticket and the price has increased by thirty or forty percent because demand has picked up in the intervening period.
Do you pay the higher price, having already committed to travel and accommodation? Or do you absorb the sunk cost of the planning you have done and walk away?
This is not a hypothetical dilemma. This is the situation that dynamic pricing creates for fans repeatedly and deliberately. The model is designed to capture the maximum amount of money from people whose desire to attend has already been established. It exploits commitment. It monetises enthusiasm. It treats the passion that football fans feel for their club and their sport as a commercial vulnerability to be harvested rather than a human quality to be respected.
Compare that experience to what a fan encounters buying a season ticket. The price is fixed. You know what you are paying. You can plan around it. There is a transaction of trust between the club and the supporter that says we value your commitment and we will honour it with consistency and transparency.
Dynamic pricing is the precise opposite of that relationship. It says we will charge you whatever we can get away with and we will change our minds as many times as the algorithm tells us to.
The World Cup 2026 and What Is Coming
Everything that happened with Club World Cup ticketing needs to be understood as a preview of what is coming with the 2026 World Cup, because FIFA has given every indication that dynamic pricing will be central to its ticketing strategy for the tournament.
The 2026 World Cup is the biggest version of the event ever staged. Forty eight teams, sixteen host cities across the United States, Canada and Mexico, a final at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey that will be watched by an estimated five billion people globally. The commercial opportunity is unprecedented and FIFA’s approach to monetising it has been consistent throughout the planning process.
For fans in the United Kingdom and Europe who want to attend, the financial picture is already daunting before dynamic pricing is factored in. Flights to North America, accommodation across multiple weeks if you want to follow your national team through the tournament, ground transport between host cities that are sometimes hundreds of miles apart. The baseline cost of attending the World Cup as a travelling supporter is already significant.
Add a dynamic pricing model on top of that and the unpredictability of the total cost becomes a serious deterrent for anyone who needs to budget carefully. A family saving for two years to attend their national team’s World Cup games cannot plan around a ticket price that may double between the moment they first check and the moment they are in a position to buy.
The people who can absorb that unpredictability without significant stress are the people for whom money is not a primary constraint. Wealthy individual fans, corporate buyers, tournament tourists for whom the World Cup is an experience they will spend whatever it takes to have. The ordinary supporter, the one who has been following their national team through qualifying, who has watched every game, who has been dreaming about going to a World Cup for years, is the person most damaged by a pricing model that treats the tournament as a yield management problem rather than a global celebration of football.
FIFA’s Role and the Pattern of Decisions
Dynamic pricing at the World Cup does not exist in isolation. It is the latest in a consistent pattern of decisions by FIFA under Gianni Infantino that prioritise commercial revenue over the supporter experience and the integrity of the sport.
The expansion of the World Cup to forty eight teams was presented as a gift to smaller footballing nations. It was also a decision that adds sixteen more games to the tournament, creates a significantly more complex scheduling challenge, and dilutes the group stage to the point where a significant number of fixtures carry minimal competitive meaning. More games means more broadcast rights to sell and more ticketing inventory to monetise.
The decision to stage the 2022 World Cup in Qatar required moving the tournament to winter, disrupting every major domestic league on the planet and forcing hundreds of millions of fans to watch their clubs compete in a fragmented and diminished season. The financial arrangements around that decision have been well documented and extensively reported.
The Club World Cup expansion was sold as recognition for club football’s global reach. It was staged in the United States at a time when FIFA is specifically trying to grow the commercial value of the American market ahead of the 2026 World Cup. The timing was not a coincidence.
Dynamic pricing fits this pattern perfectly. It is a mechanism for extracting maximum revenue from maximum demand at the event that generates more demand than any other sporting occasion on the planet. From a purely financial perspective it is an obvious decision. From the perspective of a governing body that claims to hold football in trust for the people who love it, it is a betrayal.
FIFA collects billions from World Cup broadcast rights, sponsorship deals and commercial partnerships. The organisation’s financial position does not require it to implement dynamic pricing to remain solvent. The decision to do so is not born of necessity. It is born of a philosophy that sees every aspect of the World Cup as an opportunity for revenue optimisation, including and especially the tickets that allow fans to actually be present at the event.
What We Are Losing
There is a version of the World Cup that exists in the memories of everyone who has ever attended one or watched one from the stands.
The atmosphere generated by supporters from dozens of countries sharing the same spaces, the colour and noise of fans who have saved and planned and dreamed about being there, the spontaneous moments of connection between strangers from completely different cultures united by football in a way that almost nothing else achieves. That atmosphere is not produced by corporate hospitality packages or wealthy tourists checking a bucket list item. It is produced by football fans. Real ones. The kind who care about the result and feel every moment of it.
Dynamic pricing does not just make tickets more expensive. It changes who is in the stadium. It gradually replaces the passionate supporter with the affluent attendee. It shifts the demographic of the crowd in ways that are visible in the atmosphere and audible in the noise.
Empty seats at the Club World Cup were not an accident or a reflection of insufficient global interest in the clubs involved. They were the predictable outcome of a pricing model that overestimated how much people would pay and underestimated how much the uncertainty of the pricing itself would deter people from committing.
The World Cup cannot afford that outcome. The tournament’s magic is entirely dependent on the atmosphere that supporters create. Hollow that out in pursuit of maximum ticket revenue and you damage the very product that generates the broadcast deals and the sponsorships and the commercial partnerships that FIFA values above everything else.
Enough
The World Cup belongs to football fans. It was built by football fans, sustained by football fans, and derives every last dollar of its commercial value from the passion of football fans across every corner of the planet.
Dynamic pricing is FIFA telling those fans that their passion is a commodity to be priced at whatever the market will bear. That the tournament they have loved and followed and dreamed about attending is available to them at a price that will be determined not by any principle of fairness or accessibility but by an algorithm designed to extract the maximum possible revenue from their desire to be there.
It is the wrong decision for football. It is the wrong decision for the World Cup. And it is the clearest possible signal yet that the people running this sport have fundamentally lost sight of who they are supposed to be serving.
The fans deserve better than this. They always have. FIFA just keeps finding new ways to forget it.
