Zohran Mamdani Is Right to Call Out FIFA. But He Doesn’t Go Far Enough.
Mamdani is right to hold FIFA accountable for fleecing its fans. But cheaper prices won’t matter if you end up in the back of an unmarked van.
You can tell the world is going to hell when politicians seize the circus. That a mixed martial arts show will soon take place on the White House lawn to commemorate the Declaration of Independence and an autocratic buffoon’s birthday is the sign of a country in grotesque decay.
Then there is FIFA chief Gianni “Johnny Boy” Infantino playing the supplicant, flattering his new fave authoritarian—which has been humiliating to watch, in advance of the 2026 World Cup being hosted by the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Every time Johnny Boy fails to say a word about the compromised safety of international travelers or even players—including after the ICE gestapo shot a protesting pastor in the head with a potent “less lethal” weapon—is a glimpse in the mind of someone who inhabits a moral sewer. To see a country that has been committing a genocide—that would be Israel—welcomed into his tournament is to see just another example of Johnny Boy clapping his hands and doing a dance to an autocrat’s tune.
Enter Zohran Mamdani, who stood up and said that Johnny Boy may not care that family members of players are being disappeared from this country, but the people of New York do. In a recent appearance on The Guardian’s Football Weekly podcast, the leading candidate for NYC mayor—an avid soccer fan and longtime supporter of Arsenal FC of the Premier league, the top tier in English football—expressed concern that ICE will violate a sporting event that unites the world. “I have heard from so many already who are terrified of the prospect of being in public life during the World Cup,” he said. “I have long been quite troubled by how the supposed stewards of the game have opted for profit time and time again at the expense of the people that love this game.”
Whatever one’s thoughts on Mamdani at the moment, on this issue he is putting his mouth where the money is. It’s not just podcast shit talking.
In September, his campaign launched a “Game Over Greed” campaign that slammed FIFA for pricing out most New Yorkers from attending the World Cup, another echo of Mamdani’s mantra that the city faces a crisis of affordability. The Game over Greed webpage eviscerates the Infantino plan to operate what’s called “dynamic pricing,” which allows FIFA to jack up ticket prices on the fly, based on demand—like when a rideshare app increases the price in bad weather. Mamdani is calling this out as a high-tech grift that allows FIFA to “raise prices, in real time, depending on how much profit they think they can make off of us.” Mamdani’s team also noted that those same tickets “can then be resold on an official FIFA platform with NO price cap—yet another method of gatekeeping the game.” As if that weren’t enough, FIFA is not setting aside tickets for local residents, as it did for the three most recent World Cups.
FIFA’s call for dynamic pricing sparked immediate outrage, but so far Mamdani is the only politician trying to do something with that anger. The campaign announced that it was issuing a “demand on FIFA to put game over greed, and to end dynamic pricing, to end this idea of a resale market with no caps, and to finally put 15 percent of its tickets aside for local residents.” He also noted that in Mexico, FIFA was allowing for a resale market with a price cap.
For a nonprofit organization, FIFA is incredibly profitable. The 2026 World Cup is on pace to become the most lucrative event in the history of sports, with a whopping $10 billion projected to slide into FIFA coffers. This dwarfs the $7.5 billion that FIFA gobbled up during the four-year cycle leading to the Qatar 2022 men’s World Cup and more than doubles what the group hauled in during the cycle ahead of Russia’s 2018 tournament. Soccer historian David Goldblatt told The Nation that “FIFA is one of the most hypocritical, self-serving organizations in the world.”
He is, of course, correct. What is jarring is that Infantino now has the benefit of a US leader who is just as amoral and sleazy: Johnny is allowing Trump to use the Cup openly for his own political ends, including favors both above and certainly below the table. While oligarchs and world leaders ooze from one owner’s box to the next, the host cities below militarize even more visibly against regular people, advancing Trump’s vision of putting US urban areas under his iron heel. Mamdani’s voice is a welcome one, but what he’s calling for and calling out is insufficient. Better ticket prices and the killing of dynamic pricing, while politically very savvy, is not enough. Cheaper prices won’t matter much if you end up in the back of an unmarked van.
People of the world should gather for the greatest of all sporting events. But they should go to Mexico and Canada. Stay away from the United States. In our circus, the elephants run loose. To paraphrase Trump’s 2015 racist froth about Muslim people: The world needs to stay away from the United States for their own safety, until “we can figure out what is going on.”
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