FIFA’s Bigger World Cup May Come With A Bigger Cost For Fans

The 2026 FIFA World Cup is being promoted as the biggest and most inclusive tournament in the sport’s history.

For the first time, the field will expand from 32 teams to 48. The tournament will feature 104 matches spread across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. FIFA has described the changes as a way to grow the game globally and create more opportunities for nations and fans around the world.

On paper, that sounds difficult to oppose.

More countries participating should mean more cultures represented, more fans engaged, and more communities connected through the world’s most popular sport.

But as the tournament grows larger, another reality is becoming harder to ignore: the modern World Cup increasingly feels designed to maximize commercial opportunity at nearly every level, often at the expense of the ordinary fan.

The problem is not soccer. The problem is accessibility.

Attending a World Cup match has never been inexpensive. But the combination of premium pricing, resale markups, service fees, travel costs, and hospitality packages is creating an environment where many families simply cannot participate in the event they are supposedly helping support.

Ticket concerns surfaced with less than a month to go before the tournament was set to begin.[1]  Fans have been watching prices climb while navigating increasingly complex sales structures and secondary-market systems. Some reports have raised questions about FIFA’s financial participation in portions of the resale ecosystem as prices continue to rise.

Whether technically permissible or contractually disclosed is not really the point.

The larger issue is perception.

When consumers see a sports organization benefit financially from both the original ticket sale and the resale market while prices spiral upward, many begin to question whether the event is still centered on fans or primarily on revenue extraction.

That concern becomes even more significant in a tournament that is being marketed as a celebration of global inclusion.

Because inclusion means more than expanding the number of teams. It also means preserving realistic access for ordinary people.

Right now, many fans are confronting a very different reality.

A family hoping to attend multiple matches may face airfare, hotel costs, transportation expenses, dynamic ticket pricing, resale premiums, and service fees that together push the experience into luxury-vacation territory. Even fans who live near host cities may find that attending marquee matches is financially unrealistic.

That creates a strange contradiction at the center of the modern World Cup.

The tournament is becoming broader geographically while becoming narrower economically.

The expansion itself also raises practical concerns that deserve honest discussion.

More teams and more matches mean longer travel schedules, increased logistical complexity, greater strain on host infrastructure, and a tournament that risks becoming diluted by sheer scale. One reason World Cup matches historically carried such intensity was scarcity. Every match felt consequential because the tournament moved quickly and space was limited.

A 104-match event spread across three countries inevitably changes that dynamic.

There is also the practical and operational reality. Moving millions of fans, teams, media personnel, and support staff across North America for more than a month carries enormous logistical and environmental consequences. Host cities will absorb significant transportation, policing, and operational burdens in exchange for projected economic benefits that may or may not fully materialize.

None of this means expansion is automatically bad.

There are genuine positives to broader participation. Smaller soccer nations will gain visibility. More players will experience the sport’s biggest stage. Fans around the world will see countries represented that historically had little chance of qualifying.

But growth alone is not proof of progress.

At some point, every major sports organization faces the same question: how much expansion still serves the integrity of the event, and how much simply serves the business model surrounding it?

That is not a cynical question. It is a necessary one.

Sports leagues and governing bodies increasingly operate as sophisticated global entertainment corporations. They negotiate media rights, sponsorships, licensing deals, hospitality packages, and secondary-market arrangements worth billions of dollars. Revenue growth becomes constant pressure. Expansion becomes tempting because more games create more inventory to sell.

More broadcasts. More sponsorship windows. More tickets. More premium experiences. More opportunities for monetization. It is understandable that the World Cup is very much a for-profit event. We get this. But there were things that could have been done, such as issue non-transferable tickets to avoid the resale market or a certain number of tickets that could only be purchased by the countries in a given match. All of this would have helped the current reality, that of fans noticing when every aspect of the experience begins to feel optimized for extraction rather than enjoyment.

The World Cup occupies a unique place in global sports because it has traditionally felt larger than commerce alone. Even people who rarely watch soccer are drawn into it. Entire countries stop to watch. Families gather around televisions. Communities rally around players and flags and moments that feel shared across borders.

That emotional connection is valuable precisely because it feels authentic.

The danger for FIFA is not that people will stop loving soccer. They will not.

The danger is that the tournament slowly becomes perceived as something built primarily for corporate partners, wealthy travelers, and premium consumers while ordinary fans are pushed further to the margins of the event they helped make globally important in the first place.

Bigger is not always better.

Sometimes bigger simply means more expensive.

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Michael J. Epstein, a Harvard Law School graduate, is a trial lawyer and managing partner of The Epstein Law Firm, P.A., a law firm based in New Jersey.