I stayed up late last night reading through the notes from a fascinating podcast conversation about FIFA’s financial transformation, and I’m still thinking about it this morning. Not because of the numbers themselves, though a jump from $7 billion to $13 billion in one World Cup cycle is certainly eye-popping, but because of what those numbers represent about the future of football as we know it.
Here’s what caught my attention: FIFA isn’t just making more money. They’re doing something fundamentally different, something that Carla Bilsch, a marketing professional writing from Buenos Aires, calls “revenue maxing.” And no, that’s not just a fancy term for “making lots of money.” It’s something more structural, more deliberate, and frankly, more interesting.
Think about it this way. For decades, FIFA generated revenue. They sold broadcasting rights, they signed sponsorship deals, and they sold tickets. Pretty straightforward stuff. But what’s happening now is different. FIFA is optimizing every single layer of the commercial experience. They’re not just selling access to the World Cup; they’re controlling the entire value chain around it. Broadcasting, sponsorship, hospitality, ticketing, premium experiences—every touchpoint is being engineered for maximum extraction.
Sound familiar? It should. This is the Apple playbook.
I don’t mean FIFA is becoming Apple in terms of ownership or product quality (though we’ll get to stadium quality in a moment). I mean they’re behaving like a platform company. They control the packaging, the rules, the commercial interface, and the global positioning. They’re not just organizing a tournament; they’re managing an ecosystem. And like Apple capturing revenue that used to go to app developers and accessory makers, FIFA is plugging the leaks by pulling money back from StubHub, Ticketmaster, and third-party hospitality companies like On Location.
FIFA President Gianni Infantino’s argument, as relayed in the podcast, is actually quite compelling if you’re willing to hear it: better that money stays in the football ecosystem than leaks out to secondary markets and corporate middlemen. FIFA is a nonprofit, after all, and that revenue theoretically funds football development in Africa, Asia, Oceania, and parts of South and Central America. The political legitimacy of the FIFA system, being one federation, one vote, depends on the flow of development money.
But here’s where it gets complicated, and why I can’t stop thinking about this.
The 2026 World Cup is happening in the United States, and the US offers something that no other market can: commercial infrastructure at scale. The corporate hospitality buyer. The premium experience economy. Stadiums like Hard Rock and AT&T, which are objectively superior to most European equivalents, all provide better facilities, better food, and better hospitality. The richest sports market in the world, ready to be tapped once in a generation.
And FIFA is going all in.
The problem, and it’s a big one, is that this shift fundamentally changes who the ideal customer is. It’s no longer the lifelong fan who saves up for years to attend a World Cup match. It’s the corporate hospitality buyer. The premium package purchaser. The person for whom $300 isn’t a month’s minimum wage (as it is in Argentina) but a line item on an expense report.
This is the tension at the heart of revenue maxing: premiumization versus cultural integrity.
I’ve written before about how technology transforms industries by changing the relationship between creators and consumers. Blogging democratized publishing. Streaming fragmented television. Social media turned us all into broadcasters. But what happens when the transformation goes the other direction? When the product becomes more exclusive, more expensive, and more corporate?
Football isn’t just a business. It’s a social institution. It’s singing in the stands, emotional connection, and the unpredictability of the underdog. It’s the possibility of a team like Ivory Coast making the semifinals against all odds. It’s the cultural fabric that binds communities together across continents.
Can that survive when the stadium experience is optimized for corporate buyers who don’t sing?
The podcast guests, Joey Durso, a Times journalist who wrote “More Than a Shirt,” and Carla Bilsch, both expressed a kind of cautious optimism on this point. They believe the core magic of the World Cup is fan passion, sporting unpredictability, the sheer emotional weight of it all, which resists full commodification. I want to believe that too. I really do.
But I’m not entirely convinced.
Here’s what gives me pause: the governance fragmentation. In England, fans direct their anger at FIFA. In South America, it’s aimed at CONMEBOL and local federations like Argentina’s AFA. There’s no unified pushback because the resentment is scattered across different targets in different regions. This fragmentation is precisely what enables revenue maxing to continue unchallenged. It’s a feature, not a bug.
And then there’s Infantino himself, a figure who now has unprecedented White House access (under Trump, notably; not under Biden), who operates at a head-of-state level of influence, who seems driven as much by the personal allure of power as by any institutional mission.
The podcast raised a question I can’t shake: is this accumulation of personal power a necessary evil for global football development, or does it risk corrupting the institution entirely?
I don’t have an answer. But I know this much: when individuals accumulate that kind of power, accountability tends to evaporate.
There’s another wrinkle that fascinates me: the sustainability question. The US market can support this premiumization model because of its unique commercial infrastructure and purchasing power. But what happens in 2030 when the World Cup goes to Spain, Portugal, and Morocco? The stadiums aren’t as good. The local consumer purchasing power is far lower. Can FIFA maintain this revenue trajectory, or is 2026 the peak?
My guess? We’re about to find out whether revenue maxing is a sustainable strategy or just a one-time cash grab enabled by American exceptionalism in sports commerce.
What strikes me most about this whole conversation is how it mirrors broader trends I’ve been tracking for years. The platformization of everything. The tension between democratization and premiumization. The way technology and market forces reshape cultural institutions in ways that feel both inevitable and deeply unsettling.
I remember when Google and Facebook were underdogs. Both scrappy startups with mismatched socks and big dreams. Now they’re the incumbents, the destroyers of worlds (okay, I’m being dramatic, but you get the point). FIFA was once just a governing body. Now it’s a platform business optimizing every commercial layer of a global cultural phenomenon.
The question isn’t whether this transformation will happen. It’s already happening. The question is what we lose in the process, and whether the things we care about most, the things that make football matter, can survive the optimization.
I’m hopeful, like the podcast guests, that fan passion and sporting magic are resilient. That Ivory Coast can still shock the world. That the underdog story still matters. That the game itself, unpredictable, emotional, communal, resists the spreadsheet.
But I’m also watching closely. Because once you start optimizing for revenue instead of experience, once you shift from serving fans to serving corporate buyers, once you become a platform instead of a steward, well, there’s usually no going back.
The 2026 World Cup will be the test case. And I, for one, will be paying very close attention.
Even if I have to watch the games only on FOX, FS One, or Telemundo.