Vancouver: In June 1994, soccer’s bold attempt to break into the North American market seemed to have been derailed by O.J. Simpson and his white Ford Bronco.
While FIFA hoped all eyes would be on reigning champions Germany playing Bolivia in the opening match of the 1994 World Cup at Chicago’s Soldier Field, Americans instead were transfixed as the former footballer and actor turned suspected killer led police on a bizarre, two-hour, low-speed chase across Los Angeles.
Even without the O.J. pursuit, FIFA was up against it trying to penetrate a market dominated by American football, baseball, basketball and athletics. British-born football fan Roger Bennett, who moved to the US just before the tournament began in 94, said most Americans didn’t know the event was happening.
“I remember watching [the first night of the 1994 tournament], thinking, ‘Oh my god, the World Cup’s never going to make a dent on the American consciousness,’” said Bennett, the creator of Men in Blazers, the biggest independent soccer platform in the US, and author of We Are the World (Cup): A Personal History of the World’s Greatest Sporting Event.
“But what happened was the second day of the tournament, Ireland played Italy in the meadowlands, and everyone in New Jersey turned up, half of them Italian American, like the cast of The Sopranos, half of them Irish American, looking like they’d just been ripped out the pages of Angela’s Ashes.
“That was the match that lit up the World Cup, giving Americans permission to connect to their complex hybrid identities, and scream and … savour and make memories with the rest of the world.”
Thirty-two years on, the World Cup returns to America, which will co-host with Canada and Mexico, a much larger event and with a far more receptive audience. But high ticket prices, border restrictions and a host nation at war with a participating country have hijacked the pre-tournament headlines.
Mexico will host South Africa on Friday morning (AEST) to kick off a tournament that has expanded from 32 to 48 teams, allowing the likes of Jordan, Uzbekistan, Cape Verde and Curacao to compete for the first time. The increase has shaken up the tournament’s structure, size and timeline – the final match is on July 21 at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. A total 104 games, up from 64 at the last World Cup, in 39 days.
That’s not the only notable change. This will be the first time a host country has been at war with a competing nation. The 2026 World Cup is also the most politicised in history and the most expensive – ticket prices for fans have in many instances more than doubled since Qatar four years ago.
Soccer is the US’s third most popular sport, a recent survey for The Economist found, having overtaken baseball, long regarded as “America’s pastime”. That is in large part due to seeds planted during the 1994 tournament, which Bennett says didn’t turn the country “into an instant football-loving nation” but help set it on that path.
Yet despite the rise in popularity, days before the US’s opening game against Paraguay in Los Angeles on Saturday (AEST) the stadium is not yet sold out, with even more seats available for Canada’s first game against Bosnia and Herzegovina in Toronto on the same day.
The problem has been pricing – more specifically, the decision to adopt dynamic pricing for the first time. When tickets went on general sale in January they ranged from $US140 ($200) to $US8680 ($12,360). While some have since been made available for less, others have risen significantly, including up to $US32,970 for the final. Many tickets cost twice as much as an equivalent ticket in Qatar four years ago. Fans have accused the governing body of a “monumental betrayal”.
Fearing the cost had risen beyond the reach of many, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a deal to allow that city’s residents to buy 1000 World Cup tickets for $US50 each. Even US President Donald Trump, who has a close relationship with FIFA boss Gianni Infantino, baulked at the prices. “I would certainly like to be there, but I wouldn’t pay it either, to be honest with you,” he told the New York Post in a recent interview.
Resale prices are even higher on the secondary market, and while FIFA does not control those prices, it does take a 30 per cent commission from each resale. Parking at stadiums for games can cost as much as $US175, and there has been outrage after train tickets from New York’s Penn Station to MetLife Stadium rocketed from the usual $US12.90 to $US150 a ticket. The price has now been lowered to $US98.
FIFA defended the ticket prices, claiming sports fans in North America will happily pay hundreds of dollars for other events and profits would help develop soccer around the world. Infantino said demand was equivalent to “1000 years of World Cups at once”, adding that all 104 matches would be sold out.
Those unlikely to be troubled by prices are fans who wanted to travel from Iran, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Haiti who have unprecedented blanket World Cup travel bans due to Trump administration policies. In fact, reports suggest fans from more than a quarter of the 48 nations taking part are also facing tight restrictions and high visa rejection rates. In previous World Cups, Brazil passed a law granting free temporary visas to ticket holders in 2014, while Russia and Qatar used Fan IDs and Hayya cards of visas (which also included free public transport) to bypass traditional border friction.
Then there are the players and officials. On Monday, top Somalian referee Omar Abdulkadir Artan became the highest-profile World Cup victim of the US border policies after being denied entry. The Iranian football team relocated their base from Arizona to Tijuana, Mexico, after their visa conditions dictated that the squad must fly in and out of the US on the same day as their three matches there.
Iran qualified for the World Cup in March 2025, almost a year before the US military launched strikes on the country, and Trump has suggested the Iran team should skip the tournament for their own “life and safety”, before greenlighting their involvement. Hopes that the fragile ceasefire between the countries might hold have been tested on the eve of the tournament after Iran downed an American Army helicopter and the US launched retaliatory strikes.
Depending on how results fall, there is the possibility that the US could face Iran in a round of 32 knockout game, possibly in Texas on July 4 (AEST), if both countries finish second in their respective groups. Andrew Giuliani, head of the White House Task Force on the FIFA World Cup 2026, this week understated that such a match would be “one heck of a storyline”.
Former England player turned pundit Ian Wright took to social media on Tuesday, describing the tournament and the lead-up to it as “a World Cup of chaos”.
“Every few hours it’s another story, another story about fans denied, players denied, officials denied, journalists denied, now refs,” Wright said.
“You know something, I’m laughing, but it’s not funny, it’s actually not funny and something has to be said. The expensive tickets, the most expensive tickets ever, expensive accommodation, transport through the roof. It has to be said.
“Is this how the hosts behave really for the greatest game, the greatest tournament in the world, is this how the hosts behave?”
Days out before the Socceroos play Turkey in the first of seven matches in Vancouver there are signs of World Cup fever – even if it hasn’t truly ignited. Shopfronts have cheap flag bunting hanging in their windows, construction work outside the city’s BC Place Stadium competes against the clock and the inclement weather, and the city’s harbour-front Science World building has been transformed into a massive, 360-degree, 40-metre-diameter recreation of the Adidas Trionda, the official match ball of the tournament.
Much of the chatter in bars and pubs, though, is on the Stanley Cup, the NHL play-offs, which doesn’t feature a Canadian side but does involve the nation’s favourite pastime – ice hockey. Bennett says it is similar in the US, where the NBA play-offs, featuring the New York Knicks chasing their first championship since 1973, is grabbing the attention.
But just give it another day or two.
“The mood in the United States is as it is for any massive sporting event – the event begins almost the night before it begins,” Bennett said.
“Our sporting appetite is immense. Sport is the one thing that still creates national discourse, a sense of unified focus, a sense of prime-time viewing and sharing and making memories together, but the American sporting appetite, as ferocious as it is, it covers so many sports.
“Even the World Cup has to wait its turn … but I have no doubt that on the eve of the World Cup we’ll flick a switch and go to 11.”
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Nick Ralston is the deputy editor and investigations editor for The Sydney Morning Herald. He has previously spent time as news editor, justice editor and world editor.Connect via X or email.
