A week of this World Cup is in the books, and every team has (finally) played at least one game, which means we have reached the point of the tournament where everyone has begun to forget how they felt about the tournament before it started.

The main storyline before the tournament began could be summed up as, “Which entity will do the most to ruin this tournament: FIFA, the United States government, or FOX?” Leaving the latter two aside for now, the main question regarding FIFA, leading up to the tournament, was just how far they were willing to go to gouge fans.

FIFA’s years-ago promised ticket prices, which themselves were fairly unreasonable, ended up disappearing by the time actual ticket sales rolled around, replaced by prices seemingly designed to cause maximum sticker shock. Which led to two rather incongruous statements that both felt true:

  1. These ticket prices are utterly ridiculous, a pure cash grab by a corrupt organization determined to enrich itself at the cost of fans everywhere.
  2. Everyone that I know entered the ticket lottery, but I don’t know anyone that won.

The one comforting thing for those of us who did not win the lottery was that we had the secondary market to fall back on, which usually has been a reasonably successful way to go about getting soccer tickets. Whether CONCACAF events or last summer’s Club World Cup, we’d seen the same story repeated over and over: tickets go on sale, they’re ridiculously overpriced, then in the lead-up to the game the organization either commits to playing in front of half-empty stadiums (the usual CONCACAF choice) or the organization starts heavily discounting tickets in order to try to fill seats (this is what happened with the Club World Cup).

I figured that, as the games actually approached, ticket resellers and FIFA itself would start getting realistic, and tickets would begin to settle at a “normal” price. Others speculated that there would be unsold seats at games, that the ticket prices were simply too high and that nobody would pay them, that FIFA would face a choice between heavy discounts and empty stands. A week ago, you could see occasional tickets for less than $200, and I wondered if prices might fall even further as demand (for non-marquee games at least) failed to meet the supply of those available from resellers or from FIFA itself.

At least here in Seattle, this possibility has been overtaken by World Cup Fever.

At the moment, you might just manage to scrape a ticket for Bosnia-Herzegovina vs. Qatar next Wednesday for less than $400, if you are on the ball. For Egypt and Iran next Friday, you’ll do well to get tickets for less than $500. And for tomorrow’s game between the USA and Australia…. forget it. Tickets have been selling for more than $2000, with the cheapest current listings, 24 hours before the match, hovering around $1700. This is true on both the FIFA site and in the classic secondary-market places to buy tickets.

I have not done a thorough analysis of the other venues, but in the few I checked, it’s a similar story.

So when it comes to ticket prices, one of a few things is true, perhaps all of them in one way or another:

  1. By setting ticket prices at astronomical levels, FIFA anchored the prices so high that run-of-the-mill soccer fans have been entirely priced out, and the people buying these tickets on the secondary market are purely wealthy idiots who don’t care a bit about the game but do care about doing the latest cool thing. And so the fact that there are any tickets available at all is not a sign that prices were set appropriately, but a sign that FIFA has missed a chance to grow its future market in favor of making a buck now.

  2. FIFA had a better sense of the demand for tickets than anyone, and by setting them initially high, it captured an appropriate amount of that demand for itself, the natural outcome for any business that is in some way a profit-making organization. And so setting the prices high made zero difference in what the prices would eventually become. In this scenario, secondary-market prices would have been the same in any case and setting them low would simply have meant that resellers and not FIFA itself profited.

  3. For every soccer fan that wanted to see as many games as possible at the biggest event in men’s soccer, there were ten people who wanted to make some money, and thought they might be able to do so by re-selling tickets for more than they paid. And so the people that are to blame for the ticket prices are any people that bought a ticket to a game without any intention of actually going to watch the game, which means that the villain is society’s general lust for profit.

Of course, whatever the truth is, it doesn’t change the prices. Which means it may be time to see what the fan zones are like.

It’s a fourth scenario, a personal one, one that is familiar to sports fans everywhere: (shrug, deep sigh) Well, what are you going to do?