For years, I have allowed myself to be swayed by the populist whining of the global sporting public. Whenever I sat on panels at Davos or shared a helicopter ride with a European central banker, I would occasionally play the devil’s advocate, gently suggesting that perhaps FIFA had gone too far. Perhaps charging working-class families the equivalent of a monthly mortgage payment to sit in the nosebleeds of a Qatari desert or a Houston parking lot was, in fact, a bit crass. I fancied myself a man of the people, a defender of the beautiful game’s pure, untarnished soul.
I was wrong. I was so profoundly wrong.
This week, my assistant placed a folder of wire-service photographs on my mahogany desk documenting the so-called "passion" of the 2026 FIFA World Cup fans. What I saw in those images cured me of my empathy instantly. I am now utterly convinced that FIFA is not a predatory monopoly, but rather a necessary instrument of wealth redistribution, surgically extracting capital from a demographic that has absolutely no business managing its own finances.
Let us begin in Rio de Janeiro on May 18. According to the photographs provided by Getty, a grown Brazilian man was captured cheering. He was not cheering a spectacular goal. He was not cheering a hard-fought victory. He was standing in a room, visibly sweating with euphoria, cheering a press conference announcing the 26-player squad.
If you are willing to rupture your own vocal cords over an administrative reading of a list of names, you have forfeited your right to complain about the cost of living. A person who experiences genuine emotional rapture at a human resources announcement is a person who fundamentally desires to be exploited. When FIFA charges this man $300 for a commemorative plastic cup, they are not robbing him; they are safely sequestering funds that he would otherwise clearly spend on something entirely untethered from reality.
But the Brazilian situation is mere child's play compared to the horrors unfolding in the Mediterranean. Consider the photograph of the fans in Antalya, Turkey. Thousands of them gathered in the historic Antiphellos theater—a 2,000-year-old architectural marvel built by the ancients to honor the gods and stage classical tragedies—just to watch a giant LED screen broadcasting a Group D match between Australia and Turkey.
Let that sink in. These people occupied an irreplaceable bastion of human antiquity, a space where the ghosts of Hellenistic empires still whisper through the stonework, and they used it to watch a broadcast of a soccer game taking place 6,000 miles away at the BC Place Stadium in Vancouver, Canada. This is a level of civilizational disrespect that demands financial retribution. If you are going to treat a sacred relic of the ancient world like a Buffalo Wild Wings, FIFA is morally obligated to charge you $4,000 for a premium ticketing package. It is a stupidity tax, and it should be doubled immediately.
The global dysfunction only metastasizes when we look at the host nation of the United States. In Arlington, Texas, throngs of Japanese fans were photographed screaming in the stands at Dallas Stadium for a Group F match between the Netherlands and Japan. In Kansas City, Missouri, a man was documented standing on the sweltering asphalt outside Kansas City Stadium waiting for Argentina to play Algeria.
This man was wearing a full-body llama costume.
I want to be very clear about the economic implications of this. A grown adult woke up in the state of Missouri, looked at a suitcase, and decided that the most logical attire for an international sporting event in the American Midwest was the suffocating fleece of an Andean camelid. When my good friend Gianni Infantino looks at a man suffocating in a novelty llama suit outside a stadium in Kansas City, he does not see a victim of corporate greed. He sees an individual with a dangerously high tolerance for pain and a complete lack of impulse control—which, in macroeconomic terms, is known as a perfectly inelastic consumer.
When we see a grown man weeping because a 21-year-old winger strained his hamstring, we don't see a fan. We see a highly motivated, friction-less revenue vector who requires immediate financial discipline.
And finally, we arrive at the apex of this collective psychosis. Reuters published a photograph of a figurine of the Baby Jesus. The Son of God, the savior of the Christian faith, sitting in his holy manger.
He was wearing a brightly colored replica soccer jersey.
I am not a particularly religious man—my primary spiritual practice consists of checking the Nikkei 225 over morning espresso—but dressing the infant Christ in polyester sportswear crosses a line of basic human dignity. If your surplus capital is being utilized to purchase athletic apparel for a ceramic deity, you have entirely lost the plot of the global economy.
This is why I will no longer tolerate any criticism of FIFA's revenue models. The media loves to paint these executives as cartoon villains, counting their Swiss francs while the poor, noble fans empty their piggy banks just to catch a glimpse of the pitch. But look at these people. Look at the llama man. Look at the thousands of Turks desecrating an ancient amphitheater to watch a screen. Look at the man screaming at a press conference.
These are not victims. These are people crying out for the loving, stabilizing hand of exorbitant corporate pricing. By pricing them out of their own lives, FIFA is doing the only responsible thing a governing body can do: protecting the global economy from the catastrophic consequences of unregulated passion. I, for one, hope the tickets for the final cost a million dollars each.