Peaceful World Cup is about to face its toughest test

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The word that Fifa chose for its ticket price strategy at this World Cup was, probably understandably, “dynamic.” Other terms were available: rapacious, maybe, or shameless, or possibly venal. Maybe all of the above. But however it was presented, the approach was underpinned by two unspoken assumptions. 

One was immediately picked over and torn apart: the implicit message that football fans would pay whatever was required to follow their team at a World Cup, that passion was something that might be monetised, that the loyalty that draws people across the planet existed so that it might be exploited.

That blizzard of outrage might have obscured the second. It was, admittedly, a little less visible, not quite so naked. The approach that Fifa took to ticketing was rooted in the idea that football – or at least the World Cup – no longer needed to be treated as a mere sport. Instead, it should now be considered just another form of entertainment.

The evidence for this lies in the way tickets were sold. In every game, a comparative handful were set aside for fans of each team, but the vast majority were sold on the open market, released in various batches that were – let’s be clear – absolutely not a way to drive prices up by creating an artificial impression of scarcity.

All of these tickets could then be resold through official channels, with Fifa taking a slice of the transaction. Put more simply: buying tickets was a free-for-all, just as it would be for a Taylor Swift gig, or a festival, or some other major event. The defining and the only consideration was how much you were prepared to pay to be there. Nothing else mattered.

What this approach neglected to remember was that football works differently to other forms of culture. There has always been a natural barrier to exposing tickets to the sodium glare of the open market: the need to ensure some degree of separation between fans of rival teams. Fifa decided, effectively, to abandon that line of thinking.

In mitigation, it is easy to see why that might have been tempting. There has not been widespread disorder at a World Cup since 1998; there has been nothing but an occasional skirmish – provincial town centre on a Saturday night stuff – since Germany in 2006. For reasons that might not be just to do with the changing nature of fandom and the World Cup’s transformation into a high camp pageant of national identities, Russia and Qatar were paragons of law and order.

How wise that might have been will be tested to the extreme in Atlanta on Wednesday evening. As things stand, England’s semi-final with Argentina will see fans mixing not just outside the stadium – where Atlanta’s police department is deploying extra resources to ensure the game passes off peacefully – but inside it, too.

Fifa, as of the time of writing, has not yet suggested that it will be treated any differently to any other game in the tournament. It has, after all, been a resounding success: the United States, Mexico and Canada have hosted 101 games against a backdrop not just of tolerance but active enjoyment. Fans have mingled perfectly happily. 

Whether that can hold for the 102nd is rather more of a challenge. England have not played Argentina competitively since 2002; they have not even met in a friendly since 2005. This is, officially, because they can’t get their schedules to align; the hostility between the two nations could not be less relevant. England, oddly, rarely seem to have logistical issues with Brazil.

The reasons for that enmity are well-known. It is perhaps an oversimplification, but England hold Argentina among the top rank of their football rivals: Alf Ramsey calling Antonio Rattin and his teammates “animals” in 1966; Diego Maradona’s Hand of God and barrilete cosmico in 1986; David Beckham’s fall in 1998 and his vengeance in 2002.

For Argentina, it runs deeper. It is not a coincidence that almost every song bellowed by their huge phalanx of travelling fans contains a mention of los pibes de Las Malvinas; the Falklands loom large in the national consciousness. The story Argentina tells of the Battle of the South Atlantic is not the same as Britain’s version.

Football’s traditional separation of fans was, of course, hardly ideal. It was, though, based on a recognition that such antagonisms can sometimes boil over when tensions run too high, an understanding that certain games – between certain teams – are more than just a high-grade entertainment unit, that football does not stand apart from the world that surrounds it.

If it is more than heedlessness, Fifa’s gamble is that such thinking is outdated. Over the last two days, videos have emerged of a whole concept album’s worth of fan songs detailing Argentina’s grievances around the Falklands; there are (somewhat vague) suggestions in South America that members of several barra brava groups, Argentina’s equivalent of highly-organised ultras, are planning on attending. (Whether they can get into the United States is a different matter.) 

The idea that all of this might mix together, in the open stands and interlocking concourses of the Mercedes-Benz Stadium, while both sets of fans watch a World Cup semi-final, is an obvious risk, but it is also a test. Not just of the fans themselves, but of Fifa’s vision of what their tournament, their crown jewel, should be, of the decision to forget that this is a sport and not just an entertainment, to put money above all else.

Photograph by Elsa/Getty Images