Tickets, please?

Here's one thing I would not want to be doing this month: trying to get someone to buy tickets to international sporting events hosted by an authoritarian government where some participating countries are banned from entering, other participating countries are being actively invaded by said authoritarian government, and still other participating countries are watching people of their nationality be brutalized, kidnapped, and murdered by a heavily militarized federal police force that's set to receive billions more in funding specifically to patrol those international sporting events.

But that's exactly what's been happening right here in the United States of America, as FIFA closed its ticket draw for this summer's World Cup on Tuesday and LA28 opened ticket registration for the 2028 Summer Games on Wednesday.

The timing for the ticket draws is awkward, to say the least. Earlier this week, a group of British leaders called on FIFA to expel the United States from the World Cup until we show "clear compliance with international law and respect for the sovereignty of other nations." (Kind of hard to expel yourself when you're hosting!) The White House has yet to respond, but here's a live shot of FIFA president Gianni Infantino that's all the response you need. And the IOC isn't taking a hard line, either. Earlier this month, IOC president Kirsty Coventry confirmed that Russian athletes can't compete under their flag in next month's Winter Olympics because their country invaded another country, but the IOC ruled this week that the U.S. won't be banned from competing in Milan Cortina even though our country invaded another country. (And might invade yet another country? Way to make it weird to have Denmark's tall ship parked in the Long Beach harbor, guys.)

The World Cup will sell a total of 7 million tickets across 16 venues, four of which are in Canada and Mexico, and while FIFA isn't providing a ticket breakdown by city, the eight matches happening at SoFi would be roughly a half-million tickets. (This is a nifty presentation from the LA host committee with information about what's happening this summer if you need a little backgrounder.) World Cup tickets use dynamic pricing and can be notoriously expensive — calls for reform made it into a certain NYC mayoral platform — but some tickets will be available for as low as $60. LA28 says around 14 million tickets will be for sale across all events and venues, with one-third of all tickets priced under $100, and locals get first dibs. Starting on April 2, people who live in Southern California (and Oklahoma City???) will get special presale access on a million tickets priced as low as $28. (I'm told this might be verified using your ZIP code of your credit card but curious how easy it is to spoof.) Organizers of these big events say they're planning for a crowd that's one-third local, one-third national, and one-third international. The bigger question is: will any of those people from outside the U.S. actually come?

Over at Los Angeles Magazine, Chris Nichols looks back on the ticketing process of 1984, which offers delightful details — you bought a catalog at Sears and mailed in a check! — with some useful precedent for our contemporary geopolitical quagmire. When the then-U.S.S.R. and a slew of other countries announced their boycott in May 1984, 10,000 more tickets were suddenly made available to Angelenos at service centers all over town, with even more released at the last minute. (Organizers, who went into crisis mode, claimed the boycott may have made the games even more of a success.) But this will be what happens if/when countries boycott the U.S. in 2028. More locals will simply snap up those seats. We'll miss out on the international visitor spending, but the venues will likely get filled.

And here's a positive way of looking at it — selling out these stadiums might directly help bail LA out of its fiscal crisis. As Nichols notes, 1984's tickets included a 6 percent tax, producing $8.5 million for the general fund way back then. There's been talk of LA proposing a 6 percent tax on 2028 tickets that would put an estimated $100 million in the city's general fund. Or, one year's worth of debt service on that convention center expansion that may or may not be ready by the Olympics. Wheeeeee!

Finally, a bit of debunking. There are a lot of social media posts floating around that people are canceling their World Cup tickets in protest of U.S. policies. The memes all list a range of very specific numbers, between 16,500 and 17,000 tickets — although it would technically be ticket requests, as most of the tickets, aside from some presales, have not actually been sold yet — supposedly canceled "overnight." (This is being picked up everywhere; Occupy Democrats, you know better than to publish rumors... don't you?) FIFA did put out a statement in this case, saying the rumors were false, but even if 17,000 people did cancel their registrations, that's like a single parking space in Stan Kroenke's 2.7 million-acre land holdings: FIFA just announced that there were 500 million ticket requests received over the month-long window. No first-day numbers from LA28 yet, but the ticketing system told me "demand is high" as it looped me back into the waiting room for over an hour. I had to give up and come back later, when it worked right away. The draw is open until March 18. 🔥