How FIFA is turning the World Cup into an entertainment platform
There was a time when the business model of live entertainment was simple. A music festival sold concerts. A football tournament sold matches. Everything else — merchandise, hospitality, sponsorships — existed to support the main event rather than define it. That distinction has quietly disappeared.
Over the past two decades, the world’s biggest entertainment businesses have stopped thinking of themselves as organisers of events and started thinking of themselves as designers of experiences. The concert, the race or the match remains at the centre, but it is now only one element within a much broader commercial ecosystem. Revenue no longer comes solely from what happens on stage or on the pitch, but from every interaction before, during and after the event.
A logic football once considered someone else’s
Few industries illustrate this better than live music. Coachella, which began in 1999 as a music festival, is now one of the world’s most valuable cultural brands, built as much on fashion collaborations, influencer content and exclusive merchandise as on the performances themselves.
Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour made the same logic measurable. Across roughly 149 shows in more than fifty cities, the tour generated an estimated $4.6–5 billion in direct consumer spending in the United States, on top of about $2.2 billion in ticket sales — the highest-grossing tour in history. The average attendee spent around $1,300 locally on hotels, food and merchandise, comparable to Super Bowl-level spending repeated across dozens of cities. This was anticipated more than twenty-five years ago by B. Joseph Pine II and James Gilmore in The Experience Economy: as products commoditise, companies compete by selling how consumers feel, not just what they buy.
Football long appeared immune. It was commercial, but the product itself stayed stable — broadcasters bought rights, sponsors bought visibility, fans bought tickets and shirts. Commercial activity revolved around the game rather than redefining it. The modern World Cup suggests that is changing.
The arithmetic of expansion
FIFA’s 2023–2026 commercial cycle was revised upward to nearly $13 billion, more than 70 percent above the previous cycle and roughly double the 2018 figure. The 2026 tournament alone was expected to bring in close to $9 billion, with US broadcast rights up an estimated 94 percent and matchday revenue — tickets and hospitality combined — projected to triple compared with Qatar, from around $950 million to as much as $3 billion.
FIFA is no longer maximising the value of football matches. It is maximising the value of the entire World Cup experience. Expanding from 32 to 48 teams created forty additional matches to sell to broadcasters and sponsors — what Gianni Infantino has called, only half-jokingly, the equivalent of 104 Super Bowls. Dynamic pricing treats tickets as assets whose value fluctuates with demand, a practice long perfected by airlines. An official resale platform, on which FIFA keeps roughly 30 percent of every transaction, turns the secondary market into another revenue line. Even authenticated pieces of the pitch, sold as collectibles, show how grass has become intellectual property — valuable not for what it is, but for the emotion attached to it.
A football match lasts ninety minutes. A customer journey can last months.
Pricing the unpriceable
Nowhere is the shift from event to journey more contested than in ticketing. Category 1 seats for the final rose more than 70 percent between October and April on demand alone, and resale listings for the last seats were reported near $2.3 million each on the eve of the match — prompting Infantino to joke he’d deliver a hot dog to anyone who actually paid it. FIFA calls this “variable” rather than “dynamic” pricing, a distinction that keeps it outside disclosure rules regulators imposed on ticketing platforms after a similar Oasis-tour controversy in 2024, but it means little to a fan watching a price change mid-queue. Consumer research is clear on the psychology: when people buy something rarely and can’t see how its price was set, they don’t just feel it’s expensive — they feel cheated, and disengage. Fan groups across Europe called the model a “betrayal”; FIFA’s response, a $60 entry tier covering roughly 10 percent of allocations per federation, absorbed some criticism without changing much.
The platform playbook
This is the logic that reshaped music. Live Nation closed 2025 above $25 billion in revenue, driven mostly by concerts — but its most profitable division by far is Ticketmaster, smaller in revenue yet running margins near 37 percent, well above the concerts business itself. Through ticketing, hospitality, sponsorship and data, Live Nation controls multiple layers of the fan relationship, and the layers furthest from the stage generate the richest returns. FIFA, once dependent almost entirely on broadcast rights, now runs its own resale marketplace, its own pricing engine and an expanding menu of hospitality and collectible products — the same playbook, applied to football.
What the growth doesn’t show
Seen this way, the World Cup no longer competes only with the Champions League. It competes with Netflix for leisure time, with Disney for immersive experience, with Formula One, which reinvented itself through Drive to Survive. But the gains are not distributed evenly: even as FIFA collects an estimated $8.9 billion from the tournament, the eleven US host cities together face a combined shortfall of up to $250 million once security and infrastructure costs are counted. When an event becomes a platform, the platform owner and the venues it plays in don’t necessarily share the upside.
Music festivals still exist because of the music. Formula One still depends on the racing. Disney’s stories still matter more than its gift shops. The same will always be true of football.
Ninety minutes are no longer enough
The World Cup remains compelling because twenty-two players step onto a pitch with no guarantee of what happens next. Everything else — the hospitality lounges, the rings, the premium packages — derives its value from those ninety unpredictable minutes. But those minutes are no longer considered sufficient on their own.
The future belongs not to those who organise the best events, but to those who build the richest ecosystems around them. Football remains at the centre; increasingly, the business lies in everything that surrounds it. Not that the game has become more commercial, but that it has embraced the logic of the experience economy — where the match is no longer the entire product. It is only the beginning.
This piece is published as the 2026 World Cup draws to a close — a tournament whose final ticket, on FIFA’s own marketplace, closed at a price higher than most stadiums cost to build.