New Jersey may have a 'chilling effect' on the World Cup. Does FIFA have a point?
The battle between New Jersey governor Mikie Sherrill and FIFA is about more than money.
A friend in France recently asked me about New Jersey, indicating my native state’s long-awaited ascension into international renown and respect. Yes, yes, we are, in fact, hosting the World Cup, behind only the Olympics, which Paris recently hosted, as one of the biggest sporting events in human history, and yes, we are hosting the tournament’s final game.
But there was a kicker. There’s always a kicker with New Jersey (sometimes literally).
No, no, you cannot walk to any of the games that New Jersey is hosting—it’s not only illegal but also impossible—and no, it is not a joke: Public transit tickets from New York City’s Penn Station to MetLife Stadium in Jersey do indeed cost $98.
“Well, that’s just being a bad host,” my friend scoffed. It’s a response that’s still rattling around in my brain not because of the typical Parisian brusqueness, but because its criticism is so annoyingly precise and its implications so far-reaching.
On the surface, it’s a sentiment sympathetic of FIFA. “The NJ Transit current pricing model will have a chilling effect,” soccer’s global governing body said last month. “This… creates broader ripple effects that ultimately diminish the economic benefit and lasting legacy the entire region stands to gain from hosting the World Cup.” FIFA is hardly a moral light, though, having long ago sold its soul to placate the ego of Donald Trump, and in its fight with New Jersey it’s wielding the wrong argument.
The economic impacts of sporting events are almost always overstated. That’s because sports are but a fraction of a metropolitan region’s economic activity, and they don’t occur in a vacuum. People with the money to spend on sports would spend that money on something else. Venues booked for the World Cup could have been used for something else. (Looking at you, Monster Jam.)
I will grant that the 2026 World Cup is using facilities that already existed, so the capital expense for host cities is near zero. (Stadium subsidies are the cause célèbre here at Out in Left.) Additionally, the international nature of the tournament will bring to the U.S. tourists who otherwise wouldn’t have visited.
So FIFA is basically claiming that the boost in local incomes and tax revenue from the World Cup will be greater than the operational costs—transit, public safety, fan zones, etc.—of hosting the tournament. Will there be an additive economic impact? If you do the accounting just right, then sure, maybe. Will it be transformational? Almost certainly not.
After the dust settled from the 2024 Paris Olympics, arguably the best, most successful of the modern games, auditors determined that “hosting the 2024 Paris Olympics generated only moderate revenues for France, with an almost negligible impact on [economic] growth.” The organizing committee itself posted a €75.7 million profit. That’s a nice chunk of cheese, but it’s modest in relation to the committee’s multi-billion euro budget. And France accomplished that with 9.5 million tickets sold and 11.2 million visitors overall during the Games. The 2022 World Cup sold a third as many tickets and attracted a tenth as many visitors.
The American public has caught on to this math and hype. The Athletics play in someone’s backyard in West Sacramento because Oakland refused to subsidize a new ballpark. Two years ago, voters in Kansas City rejected a tax measure to replace aging facilities for the NFL’s Chiefs and MLB’s Royals. In 2016, San Diego voters rejected a tax for a new Chargers’ stadium, effectively running the team out of town. From Buffalo to Tampa to Nashville, sports facilities are funded only through legislative means anymore because politicians know subsidies on the ballot are dead on arrival.
There’s also what I’d call a “fair share” populism coursing through politics right now. Cost of living is increasing, sure, but what’s more animating are the inequalities endemic to American life, which seem to be growing more grotesque. Zohran Mamdani rode this wave into New York’s mayorship, and now he’s on a media blitz about holding slumlords accountable to their tenants. More importantly, he used the “tax the rich” slogan like a cudgel in budget negotiations, and ultimately he got a so-called pied-à-terre tax and fended off cuts to city services.
But the negative photo of “fair share” populism is a politics of getting even. It’s a vengeful form of populism, one that believes that oppressing or extracting will lead to personal fulfillment. This is essentially Trumpism, but as with a coin you cannot take just one side. Some politicians, like Mamdani, are better at shepherding the flock towards greener pastures, employing positively valenced rhetoric and achieving positive social outcomes. But we’ve seen and are living the consequences of this kind of politics being wielded by lesser and more sinister hands.
In any case, it makes sense why New Jersey governor Mikie Sherrill makes a show of exorbitantly charging tourists for public transit and refusing to allow her constituents to subsidize the operational costs of the World Cup. It’s simply good politics, and it’s the politics we are familiar with: The math ain’t mathing, so someone must pay. The calculation is made even easier for Sherrill, a Democrat, when the organization she’s sparing with has so cravenly indulged the MAGA-verse.1
These political machinations don’t address my friend’s fundamental concern: What does it mean to be a good host?
If we were hosting a dinner party, then would we charge our guests ten times the normal amount to get to our house? Would we charge them for anything? The Trump administration has limited or eliminated visas for residents of several countries that qualified for the World Cup. He even suggested that the lives of Iran’s national team were at risk if they chose to come to the U.S. and play in the tournament. Would we make our dinner guests attain special passes to enter our home? Would we make attaining that pass difficult and demeaning? And would we threaten the lives of our friends? I hope not, to say the least.
The Paris transit authorities did nearly double fares during the 2024 Olympics, but that was to €4 (or about $4.65) per ride, not $98, and it was to cover the cost of a 15% increase in train services across the transit system for almost two months. NJ Transit is providing extra service only before and after New Jersey’s eight World Cup games, and it’s only for those with dedicated $98 tickets. To continue the strained metaphor, Paris expected their guests to bring a bottle of wine and mingle. New Jersey wants its guests to hand over the keys to their car and shut up.
To put a finer point on it, being a good host is rooted in values—communion, compassion, reciprocity, hospitality, and so on. Holding guests accountable to what they cost is not being a good host, for that’s a calculation sourced in politics, and politics is about power, and power does not—cannot—tolerate values.
FIFA put itself in an impossible position. To extract as much value as possible from the American consumer market, it has hitched its wagon to the ultimate shakedown artist in Donald Trump. In turn, FIFA has no moral or political standing with New Jersey Democrats, who are the people actuating the World Cup. But they, too, put themselves in an impossible position.
They ride the sugar high of Trump’s unpopularity without offering a political vision themselves, so as to put off their own unpopularity. In this sort of quandary, which defines the current political era, the only tactic is getting even in the game which your opposition plays. And in this very public cage match about dollars and cents we are losing so much more than money.
Not unlike a Trump-branded product or service, FIFA has established a ticketing system that is attracting fans’ ire, lawmakers’ concern, and lawyers’ attention. Graft and corruption are inherent to the movement.
I love the beautiful game but honestly, cannot stand the cartel that is FIFA. If I had an Andy Jackson left to give and it was down to the NCAA and FIFA, I’d eat the bill.
FIFA starts with the letter F. So does what I wish to say about it.