Saturday marks the last global football spectacle before the World Cup starts riding the news waves for six weeks starting June 12 (India time). But for both the Champions’ League final in Budapest and the Fifa event hosted across North America, fans have a common complaint: the unprecedentedly high price for getting into stadiums. The grumbles are so loud that a small airline in Canada, one of the World Cup co-hosts, is turning heads with a clever ad showing that the cost of ‘watching Portugal’ (at a match) is almost five times that of ‘seeing Portugal’ (on a visit). Even the penny-pinching US President said he would not have paid $1,000 to watch his country’s opener. Football’s overlords must remember that the sport derives its power from its wide appeal across economic layers and geographies.
