Even Fifa’s president can’t bluster his way out of empty seats. No manner of artistic licence or that creepy smile-speak-nod move can magic a person into an empty space and then do the same trick several hundred more times. After the first match of the World Cup not involving a host nation, Fifa has been embarrassed.
Gianni Infantino was in Guadalajara and presumably winced. On the opposite side to where the television cameras were based, on the halfway line, a block barely half full and with entire rows of red seats empty. On US TV, Fox did its best not to scan and reveal the whole truth. You can’t pull the wool over reality forever.
Each empty seat represents one of two things: a choice not to be there or an inability to afford it. Both are unacceptable. We may never know the exact attendance, for this has been an opaque dance rolling on for months.
Back in February, Infantino was busy telling us that every match at this tournament would be a sellout, alongside his claim that there had been 508 million requests for seven million seats.
“Obviously the price is a consequence of that,” said Fifa’s president. “77 out of these 104 matches have received requests for over one million tickets. Every match is already sold out. We keep some tickets back for some last-minute sales, of course, but every match is sold out.”
Perhaps this was one of those matches without one million ticket demands – a mere 600,000 for the 45,664-seater Estadio Akron, do we think? Maybe hundreds of supporters were on the same badly delayed train or merely came in fancy dress as red seats? Or perhaps Infantino was wrong.
What Fifa actually meant is that the current batch of tickets had sold out. To generate a perception of fever, there were staggered releases. The problem with that? People who might travel to this tournament from abroad have to make plans early. And clearly many locals had been priced out. That empty area on the halfway line, the conspicuous red void, was a high-priced section.
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The retort from some will be thus: it’s a lower-value group game. The Czech Republic have not taken a large travelling support. Lots of local supporters will have watched the Mexico game earlier in the day and will likely have blocked out the whole day for that purpose.
Which, fine. But that’s the point: if you consider that certain matches will be less popular than others, why on Earth wouldn’t your prices reflect that? Why would you continue to parrot a message of “sold out, move on” when the empty spaces in the stadium were clearly going to prove you wrong. This is either a failure in pricing – blocking out locals – or a failure in process (if Fifa believe these tickets really were sold).
And for all the caveats, Guadalajara is in the most football-adjacent host country and this is the second smallest stadium by capacity at the World Cup, ahead of only Toronto. There is no excuse for the second match of the tournament to not be full in a football-mad nation of 133 million people. There is no excuse for us to be having this conversation now.
Now focus must switch to other non-premier group matches, particularly those in the largest US stadia – New York-New Jersey, Los Angeles, Dallas, Kansas City. Make no mistake: each empty seat is a small defeat for Fifa’s pricing and sales strategy and the rhetoric of its leader.
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