World Cup ****show latest: FIFA requested that Gianni Infantino be given police escorts everywhere he goes for the whole tournament
The Canadian police told them to **** off
The Canadian police told them to **** off
Off Topic International Break Thread
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Well on the plus side, Richy has no reason to try to avoid heavy challenges...
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Delighted and entirely unsurprised to read about the current surplus of tickets and hotel rooms for the world cup.
Apparently all but one host city have reported a shortfall in hotel room sales.
It could well be that private rentals like Airbnb or simply couch surfing account for the shortfall, but the likelier and simpler explanation is that the vast majority of football fans cannot afford to watch live football.
The American Hotel & Lodging Association has accused FIFA of artificially bloating room costs and massively overestimating demand.
Hopefully the Great Orange One will have a tantrum and have that belled Infantino thrown in jail for some made-up narcotics charge.
Apparently all but one host city have reported a shortfall in hotel room sales.
It could well be that private rentals like Airbnb or simply couch surfing account for the shortfall, but the likelier and simpler explanation is that the vast majority of football fans cannot afford to watch live football.
The American Hotel & Lodging Association has accused FIFA of artificially bloating room costs and massively overestimating demand.
Hopefully the Great Orange One will have a tantrum and have that belled Infantino thrown in jail for some made-up narcotics charge.
Is that across all 3 countries or just data from the US?
Personally hoping that the tournament is a disaster, but if it just ****s up in the middle country then that would be just fine too.
It's a bit of a perfect storm....Not only the ridiculous pricing already in place for tickets, ground transport and accomodation, there's now the added complication of skyrocketing air fuel prices.
The data is currently only from the US.
It seems the hospitality industry was made certain promises by a certain bellend who heads FIFA, without which they would have pushed back on the country's eagerness to host it.
It's an absolute mess. $150 for a train ticket from Penn to MetLife (that's a half an hour journey). Just disgusting.
Let's be honest, there may (guess which word is doing a lot of legwork?) be a somewhat reasonable answer for some of this
So many of the the stadiums are exactly in the suburbs of places people would actually stay, i.e. East Rutherford is 25 minutes by public transport from NYC, Inglewood is 40ish minutes from LA, Foxborough is a 45 minute commute from Boston, Miami Gardens is a 60ish minute commute from Miami, while Santa Clara is a 70+ minute commute from San Fran (or, to be fair, a 5 minute commute from San Jose) - while there is no public transport from Dallas to Arlington, which is total WTAF
Some stadiums are downtown or at the very least downtown adjacent - Seattle, Toronto, Vancouver, Philadelphia, and Monterrey all are - but compare this to the venues from 2006, which were (mostly) a doddle to reach from central Berlin/Munich/Dortmund/Hamburg/Frankfurt/wherever
Yeah this is the strongest theory. FIFA block booked thousands of inner city hotel rooms assuming public interest would be along the lines of "well now that I've flown all the way here, I might as well make a trip out of it and stay downtown to do some sightseeing".
This artificially drove prices up. Since then, thousands of rooms have been cancelled and left vacant, probably because the actual public interest outside of FIFA's very, very myopic bubble is: "having spent the last of my savings on the tickets and actually getting to and from the stadium, I will stay an hour away from the city and walk to the game if I have to. I will also be eating gravel and drinking my own piss, so in between vomiting this up I won't have time for sightseeing."
We were discussing this in the politics thread a few weeks ago. There are huge logistical costs placed on that transportation system by adding in several hundreds of thousand additional pax for those games. The local state authority would have had to either charge that to the local ratepayers or up the transit ticket prices. They rightly picked the latter.
As you say, this whole cluster **** comes down to two of the most corrupt individuals on the planet engineering a deal. We all thought his predecessor was a crook, but Infantino has taken corruption to a whole new level.
And when there's no public transport between Dallas and Arlington, that's going to make getting tot he games a LARP of The Long Walk
Says a lot that the Canadian venues are likely to be least affected, as BMO Field is 15 minutes by public transport from Toronto's main train station, while BC place is a 20 minute walk from Vancouver's main train station