Photo credit: CBC
With a few days until kick-off and thousands of tickets still available for the six matches Toronto is hosting, many of the city’s soccer fans appear to be giving a definite answer to whether they would rather buy a ticket to a \World Cup match or pay a month’s rent at a condo near BMO field.
CBC News reports that as of Wednesday, there were still plenty of tickets available for the first \World Cup match in the city, featuring \Canada against Bosnia and Herzegovina. The cheapest tickets, for nosebleed seats, were $1,370. The best remaining seats were just over $3,100.
Locals like Cam Sharpe told \CBC News they would never pay those kinds of prices for a sporting event, once-in-a-lifetime or not.
FIFA has faced criticism over the prices it set for the World Cup since tickets were first released late last year. But the federation may not be concerned with selling out matches, says Moshe Lander, a sports economist at Concordia |university.
If FIFA can make money selling seats at a higher price, even if fewer people can afford it and some tickets aren’t sold, that might still be more profitable than selling out the stadium at a more reasonable cost to ticket holders, Lander said.
Fans worldwide reacted with shock and anger in December after seeing that FIFA’s ticketing plans gave participating teams no tickets in the lowest-priced category. Their standard allocation is eight percent of stadium capacity per team.
In December, backlash led FIFA to promptly slash prices on some tickets for each participating country.
Some resale tickets to Toronto matches were going for tens of thousands of dollars before Ontario capped ticket resales last in April. FIFA then temporarily removed tickets from its official resale platform to get in line.
Meanwhile, hotel bookings in Toronto haven’t surged for the World Cup. Destination Toronto executive Kelly Jackson recently said hotels in the city are seeing an 80 per cent occupancy rate in June and July, roughly what’s expected in summer months.
Local soccer fans are more likely to show up at watch parties, backyard screenings, and bars around the city.
But even the city’s fan festival near the stadium, which was initially advertised as a completely free event, is now charging for 20 percent of its tickets. Toronto reversed a controversial plan to also charge $10 for general admission tickets after strong public criticism.
