Margin Points - Arnold Engel<br>World Cup isn’t 104 Taylor Swift concerts<br>June 4, 2026 · Essay #74<br>FIFA was accused this week of dumping tickets onto third-party ticket resale sites below the face value cost—an increasingly desperate measure to sell inventory.

Large blocks of tickets are now available at 30% discounts from the face value. FIFA is allegedly using these third-party sites to avoid lowering the costs on its own sales channels and potentially having to offer discounts to existing customers who purchased at the higher price.1 We wouldn’t see that happen to Taylor Swift concert tickets.

Set aside FIFA’s chicanery, which has attracted lots of unwanted attention. It’s a good reminder to not just assume things are a sure thing—lots of people thought prices would just keep going up. In fact, a private credit fund in Connecticut was so confident that it couldn’t help but crow to the Financial Times in April:

“Normally you would never lend at 100 per cent [loan-to-cost],” said Thomas Majewski, founder and managing partner of Connecticut-based Eagle Point, which manages $14bn in assets.

Always noteworthy when these proclamations start with “normally you would never.” The fund is lending to Sports Illustrated Tickets who owns and resells the tickets. He continues:

“But World Cup tickets are typically worth up to three times their face value, so the reality is that we are lending at a 35 per cent loan-to-value ratio. Of all the things I’m worried about, World Cup tickets selling below face value isn’t one of them,” Majewski said.

A lot of people weren’t worried that oil could trade under $0 a barrel temporarily and that happened. I can’t imagine a world where it didn’t cross Eagle Point’s mind that maybe World Cup tickets could dip below face value because not enough people wanted to trek to a stadium to watch Congo play Uzbekistan when a great game between Colombia and Portugal is played at the exact same time.2

There can be major downsides to assuming a basket of different games is all going to behave the same way.

While there are obviously some amazing first-round matchups, there are some clear duds beyond the paint-drying Congo vs Uzbekistan: Austria vs Jordan, Bosnia vs Qatar, and Saudi Arabia vs Cape Verde. Close your eyes and imagine what price you would pay to sit through any of those games and deal with traffic and logistics. It is most certainly less than what tickets are selling for. Is Congo vs Uzbekistan enticing enough to miss work? Travel 3 hours by car? Get a babysitter? Put off going to the dentist? Probably not.

When Taylor Swift comes to town, there is a consistency of experience in the show. While there is some variation night-to-night, the bar is high. This mix of the World Cup does not deliver that across all games. There is a different social element that comes up as a result.

The natural follow-up question when you tell your friends you are going to a World Cup game: “Who is playing?” When the response is Saudi Arabia and Cape Verde, it may not have the desired social effect. When you tell a friend you are going to see a Taylor Swift concert, there is no follow-up question inquiring as to the quality of that particular night or venue. The headline is the headline.

Might Eagle Point recover its losses with outsized action on the knockout rounds and final? Certainly possible. One explanation for boasting back in April to the Financial Times would be to drive more commercial ticket speculators to reach out to the firm for lending. Hanging out a shingle probably brought in more tickets to underwrite.

It’s also possible that Eagle Point’s partners are the ones—not FIFA?!—dumping some of these tickets now on the third-party reseller sites, anticipating further drops. A nice summer sweat for the ones who assumed prices only go up.

Footnotes

From The Sports Business Journal:

“Boston Univ. Questrom School of Business Economics Professor Florian Ederer, who posted on X a seat map for the group game between Saudi Arabia and Cape Verde in Houston on June 27, highlighting how “huge swathes of tickets had appeared on SeatGeek priced at $200,” less than on FIFA’s official resale platform at $700. In some examples, “complete blocks of as many as 18 empty rows were available to buy.” Ederer claimed that this was “inconsistent with individual fan behaviour or that of commercial touts and was indicative of event organiser involvement.” ↩

Maybe they could show the Colombia vs Portugal game on the stadium screens to boost attendance? ↩

Email addressSubscribe

Font sizeDark modeReading mode