There were large sections of empty seats at the Akron Stadium in Guadalajara as South Korea beat the Czech Republic 2-1 in the second game of the World Cup. In fact, there were very large sections of empty seats across the whole stadium.
Now, we have all heard the complaints about prices: ticket prices, travel prices, visa prices etc etc, but somehow those organising the show held the view that if the fans wanted to be there to see it, they would find a way.
So it rather looks as if they didn’t really mind not seeing it, after all. Indeed, rather than living with the motto, “I’ll get there whatever the cost,” some of those who might have gone to games if the prices had been reasonable have instead responded, “At those prices? You must be joking!” Maybe they went for beer instead, preferring to watch it all on TV.
Certainly, it is true that the cost of watching a sporting event in America tends to be more than watching it in Europe, but then of course it is up to the Americans to know their market both in terms of their audience and what they have to offer. And it appears they have overestimated the willingness of football fans to pay to see an international match. Especially an international match, which is played in an atmosphere that suggests visitors are not always welcome.
Of course, one of the clues to the fact that there is a real problem with getting people to the games is when the organisers repeat the same mantras rather than suggesting that they are going to fix the problem. Hence, we have Infantino saying, “Until today, we have sold over six million tickets. The demand has been unprecedented, not by a little bit, but by a factor of 10 or more.”
That was drivel. Or to be more polite, it was palpably untrue; the cry of a man who has no idea what is going on, and has a puppet master behind him whispering, “Tell them it will all be all right.”
And there is a real problem with this, because once you have lost the trust of the public, it is hard to find a way back. And when you lie through your teeth about a ground being sold out, and there are vast arrays of empty seats at Akron Stadium, you’ve lost not just your local and national audience, you’ve lost your international audience too. Worse, when your own VIP section is pretty well empty, you know you’ve lost the hoi-poli as well.
Now, a sensible person would at this point admit there was a problem and say it is being fixed. The idiot says there was no problem. Anyone watching TV saw thousands of empty seats, heard the denial, and knew for sure who they were dealing with.
Now, some more curious people might have wanted to know why it was like this. What had gone wrong? Was the weather bad? Were there protesters outside, not letting the crowd in? Was this a reserve fixture?
The answer, sadly for the President and his followers, was that the game was as advertised. Tickets in the lower tier cost $500, while those with a less fulfilling view cost $400. Tickets in the hospitality zone started at $5,000. No one seemed interested except the corporate sponsors, and they looked embarrassed as they welcomed the few guests they persuaded (and quite possibly paid) to come along.
And that is really a major point here. If you have bought seats at a big event in order to impress your customers and thank them for their trade in the past year, you need to show your customers that this is the real deal, the big event, the show of a lifetime. And with empty seats everywhere, you couldn’t blame the invitees for thinking they’d been invited to Tottenham Hotspur’s under-21s match against Reading, rather than a World Cup event.
So, as many of us believed all the way through the build-up, Trump was not the master salesman who could sell a fishtank to a pair of goldfish. This was a game between two lowly ranked countries that was free to watch in the cool or your own home, where the beer cost the regular price it always costs.
So how could the President get it so wrong? Well, I don’t want to be arrested next time I visit the USA, so I won’t put the answer here, but you can make it up yourself. But you may choose to put a vegetable somewhere in your answer.
But worse than all that. Having let us all see a two-thirds empty stadium, Fifa then told us that all but 700 seats were unsold. This was not just mindless gibberish; this was calling me, and anyone else who bothered to have a look at the crowd, a total idiot.
So what makes people such as the President of the United States and the Head of Fifa ignore the old adage and start believing that you can fool all of the people all of the time?
Presumably, it is simply because they have been encouraged to believe it by the sycophants. Still, you have to feel a bit sorry for the copywriter who set out the report in the Guardian, which then included the sub-heading, “Never miss a single moment.” One can only say I wish I had. When’s the next Arsenal reserve game?