Paul Rouse: ‘The People’s Game’ has priced its greatest competition for very few people
The fact that Ireland did not make it to the FIFA World Cup continues to nag away.
But what if the only antidote is to head to America to see a match?
A lot of the first round matches are unexciting as prospects; that’s one consequence of expanding the competition to 48 teams.
If you’re going to go that far, you might as well see something worthwhile. How about Brazil versus Morocco at 6pm on Saturday, June 13, in the Met Life Stadium in New Jersey.
This stadium has been renamed the New York/New Jersey Stadium for the World Cup.
Tickets for that match are no longer on sale from the official Fifa website.
On that website, you can actually get a ticket for the Brazil v Haiti game in Philadelphia, the following Friday (19 June). It will cost you €2,280 dollars. It is a Category One ticket and if you bring your boots you might even get a game.
As a comparator, you can also get from the official FIFA website a Category One ticket for the Met Life Stadium (New York/New Jersey Stadium) for the match between Norway and Senegal on 22 June – it will cost you $1,550.
But for the Brazil v Morocco game there appears to be no official tickets unsold.
Which means heading to the resellers. This is as rough an experience on the wallet as you might expect.
If you’re happy to sit behind the goal, high up in the back of the stand in the nose-bleed zone, you can get a ticket for about $1,300. A middling enough ticket will cost you around $5,000. And a Category One, centre-of-the-field, down-near-the-front ticket, will cost you more than $30,000.
The good news is that once you secure the ticket, there are flights available. For some extraordinary reason, people don’t seem to be heading to America in the same numbers as was once the case.
If you’re happy with just a carry-on bag, you can fly out from Dublin to JFK on the Thursday afternoon and come back on the Sunday night and it’ll cost you €606.49.
In the greater scheme of things, that’s not too bad at all.
I’ve left aside the cost of getting to and from both airports, and any parking costs that might be involved in Dublin. It’s worth noting in passing, however, that one of the great rip-offs in modern Ireland is the cost of leaving a car at Dublin Airport. It’s a proper kick in the gut.
Unless you are blessed to have cousins with spare rooms, a very basic hotel for three nights will set you back the guts of $300 a night in the city. Again, there is plenty of availability.
The other basic is food and drink.
It probably isn’t sustainable to bring enough sandwiches for the four days, including the travel.
Anyone who has ever been inside an American stadium knows well that it is vital to eat before you go there (just as with Croke Park now). The prices are eye-watering.
Which means buying food and drink somewhere else, either from street sellers or restaurants, with a nod also to grocery shops.
The choices here are extensive; the restriction being that of price.
There is no denying that eating in New York and New Jersey is not cheap. You could keep it fairly basic and hope to do it on $100 a day (allowing for a bit of a treat or two thrown in). In fairness, it's impossible to be too precise about the cost of food, given the wide variety of tastes that must be encompassed.
Which then leads us to getting the train or the bus out to the stadium from the middle of New York. The numbers involved here are stunning – and their meaning has been set out by some excellent dogged reporting in the by Adam Crafton.
On a normal day, the cost of taking a train from Penn Station in Manhattan out to the stadium is $12.90. It is a journey that takes around 15 minutes or so. New prices have been set for matchday trains, however. They go on sale in mid-May and have been raised to some $150 for a round-trip.
As an alternative, tickets for the same journey by bus went on sale this week at a cost of $80. Again, a dramatic increase.
It was amusing in recent days to hear officials from FIFA hammering local authorities in America for price gouging on transport costs. This takes the sort of brass neck that appears to be a prerequisite for anyone in the upper echelons of sports administration.
The bottom line, however, is anything but funny. It means another way to fillet a soccer fan.
When you put together the overall costs here, on the premise of buying the cheapest matchday ticket, eating moderately, not drinking, taking the bus not the train, and getting to dropped to Dublin airport, the core cost of this trip for one person is at least $3,500.
In practice, of course, it will cost a good bit more than that. It is not a city or an event in which it would be possible to leave without bringing home souvenirs and presents (merch!). There are official FIFA keyrings for just under $20, a poster for a little more, water bottles for around $50, jerseys for between $100 and $200, and a ‘FIFA World Cup 2026™ USA Host Country Emblem 3D Wood Art Frame’ for $352.56.
It should also be acknowledged that the basic cost does not include the price of a New York lawyer if the men and women from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) decide to provide you with their own version of hospitality.
It would be cheaper – and safer – to go to Mexico and Canada.
But even then, this is a World Cup that is designed for the elite of the world. What some people call ‘The People’s Game’ has priced its greatest competition only for very few people. And that is plain wrong.
