At MetLife Stadium in New York, once the World Cup final is over, every patch of the pitch will end up sealed in an acrylic case, engraved with the date and the score. It will go on sale online, somewhere between 450 and 3,000 dollars depending on the booking. Projected revenue: over 11 million.
It's a small detail, almost comic. But it says a lot about the logic running Gianni Infantino's Fifa. Anything can become merchandise, if there's enough demand, or if demand can be manufactured.
Expansion as a voting strategy
Since becoming president, Infantino has moved in one direction only: bigger. The World Cup grew from 32 to 48 teams this year. Talk of reaching 64 has already started, as soon as 2030. The official justification never changes: every country deserves the chance to dream. A nice line. Behind it sits a more concrete calculation.
Every participating federation gets a minimum payout, regardless of what happens on the pitch. This year that figure is 12.5 million dollars each, 871 million distributed in total. For a small federation, that sum covers an entire annual budget.
«Fifa money is your money.»
Infantino said this in the speech that got him elected president, back in 2016. It has stayed the real political programme of these ten years. Fifa's congress runs on one country, one vote. Small federations carry the same weight as Italy, France, or Germany. More teams means more federations get paid. More money means more votes get secured and held. Expanding the tournament isn't just generosity, it's also a rather effective tool for maintaining consensus.
The price of watching
While federations collect, spectators pay more. Tickets for this edition hit 1,200 dollars, under a dynamic pricing system that adjusts to demand in real time. On the official resale market, buyers and sellers both pay a commission of around 15 percent.
Even playing time has been rearranged around sponsors. The hydration breaks, three minutes at the midpoint of each half, turned into prime advertising real estate, one that drew plenty of criticism. For the final, there's talk of stretching the usual 15-minute interval to something closer to 25, Super Bowl style.
On the pitch, the first 48-team edition didn't win everyone over. The great upsets that once gave us stories like Morocco 2022 or Croatia 2018 never showed up here. A hundred and seventy-six thousand tickets went unsold.
Attention to the fans, to the spectacle, to football as a sport, all of it slipped down the list of priorities, sacrificed to economics and power. None of this is new, none of it is something Infantino invented from scratch. Football is part of the world, and the world runs this way. This World Cup just made it more visible than usual.
Gianni and Donald
There's another register here, a little less economic, a little more personal. In December, Infantino handed Donald Trump the Fifa Peace Prize, an honour created just months earlier, with no public criteria for how it gets awarded.
During this World Cup, the suspension on American player Folarin Balogun was effectively lifted under murky circumstances, including contact between Infantino and Trump, setting a precedent with almost no parallel. Uefa fired back with a sharply worded statement. Fifty members of the European Parliament called for Fifa's ethics committee to step in. The ties between football and politics, or between Infantino and Trump, have been stirring up plenty of controversy these past few years.
What's left of the game
Gianni Infantino has already announced he'll run again in 2027. He's working on a second Club World Cup in the United States, planned for 2029. Meanwhile, Fifa is weighing whether to expand the 2030 tournament even further, to 64 teams.
Every new expansion carries the same promise: more countries, more opportunity, more collective dreams. But as the number of teams grows, so does the distance between the people who run football and the people who play it, or who watch it, ticket in hand.
What's left to figure out is whether this model, built on turf sold by the square foot and peace prizes handed out like party favours, is still really about sport. Or whether the ball is just an excuse for something else.