00:00Well, let's get more on this. Tom Basin is Assistant Professor in Sports Management at Coventry University.
00:06Tom, welcome back to the programme. So we're seeing these empty seats yesterday.
00:11Is it all about the prices or was something else going on?
00:15Good evening. I think the price is an important factor.
00:19FIFA price tickets weigh in excess of what we'd normally see at a football tournament.
00:23But it's not just price. I don't think FIFA are very happy with the processes by which FIFA sold the
00:29tickets.
00:30Some of them have paid a fortune for Category 1 tickets, only to end up in areas at a stage
00:35without great views.
00:36And on top of that, you have the logistics of fans travelling long distances, increased costs and the difficulty of
00:43obtaining a visa to get to the World Cup, which we haven't seen in previous instances.
00:47How damaging could this be to FIFA's brand?
00:50I think the big damage is from a reputational perspective.
00:54Commercially, they've still sold a lot of tickets. I don't think that would be an issue.
00:57But FIFA wants football to be the world's game.
01:00Their whole brand is that everyone wants to watch and be at the World Cup.
01:04So I think there's a bit of a credibility gap opening between Infantino spending months saying that the demand is
01:09there,
01:10and then what we've seen so far and the tickets that remain on sale.
01:14We saw similar scenes at the Club World Cup last year, another tournament run by FIFA that happened in America.
01:21Do you think they didn't learn from that?
01:24Yeah, no, it doesn't look like it.
01:26My hunch is that FIFA thought they could explain away their ticketing issues at the Club World Cup.
01:32It was the first edition.
01:34It's not a tournament that has a huge amount of prestige yet.
01:37I think that FIFA probably thought that the prestige of the World Cup would mean that they could have exactly
01:42the same processes
01:43and get a very different result, that people would want to buy tickets for the World Cup in the way
01:48that they haven't for the World Club Cup.
01:50But that doesn't seem to have been the case, really.
01:53This is the biggest ever World Cup.
01:55There's 48 teams.
01:56There's obviously a lot more group stage games than usual.
01:58Could it be that factor as well, that maybe people are just waiting for those later matches,
02:02hoping it's going to involve the bigger teams?
02:05Yeah, I think this is important.
02:06The World Cup's 104 games long.
02:09The expansion to 48 teams means there's a lot more less glamorous teams.
02:13It's a lot easier to qualify at the group stages.
02:16That means that in the group stages, there's a lot more matches with less interest.
02:20I reckon that as the team starts to get whittled down, we'll see fewer seats being available.
02:26But FIFA knew they had this format when they set the prices and when they set their pricing strategy.
02:30This is very much a mess of their own making.
02:32Tom, we spoke before about FIFA slashing the cost of broadcast rights in certain regions.
02:39Now we've got this issue with the tickets.
02:41Is it that perhaps people are falling out of love with football in its current format?
02:48I don't think that's quite the case.
02:50I think the issues with the broadcasting in China and India were largely that they were countries that didn't qualify,
02:55that face significant challenges when it comes to the time difference.
02:59I think beyond those specific contexts, I don't think we're seeing a massive drop-off in attention of the countries.
03:05But I think what we are definitely seeing is more criticism of FIFA.
03:09And I think we're seeing real concerns that international sports is now becoming as commercialised as domestic sports.
03:16What are you expecting from this World Cup?
03:20Well, personally, I'd like England to do well.
03:23I think it's very interesting that we have a country that, well, three countries,
03:28but one main country that's hosting this World Cup that doesn't really need the World Cup in the way the
03:33previous hosts have.
03:35I think it's interesting that we have a country that previously thinks it was liked by everyone,
03:40but actually could actually see this World Cup leading to America's reputation falling in a way that we haven't seen
03:48with previous hosts before.
03:49It's a very interesting one for me to be looking at from an academic point of view.
03:53Yeah, we'll be keeping across it.
03:54Thanks, Tom.
03:55Tom Basin, Assistant Professor in Sports Management at Coventry University.
04:00And more games coming up, we'll be keeping across them.
04:02Sally, back to you.
04:03Thanks so much, Siobhan.
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