HN Reader

“Sports are the opiate of the middle class” as a reframe sucked all the fun out of sports for me. Overvalued to watch in person, too many ads to watch digitally. Not to mention having sports betting rammed down my throat. Professional sports is like any other medium from my childhood, monetized into the abyss and not as fun to interact with.

48 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45174371

Capitalism commiting literal genocides, but that they can get away with. We draw the line when they fiddle with our sports tickets!

So FIFA are shady, disreputable, immoral, greedy and unscrupulous. Nothing new here, though it's good to remember that every now and then. Like many but not all of the mega sporting bodies and club owners, they don't care about football. Just making money.

But there's one important thing the article overlooks; the fans are not owed anything. I guess that's not entirely true because sports does get support from the government. Still it's FIFA's show, they can do what they like with it. Hopefully fans will call them out on it and boycott the world cup. If that doesn't happen (it won't) it proves FIFA right; they can do whatever they can get away with, it's a free society if you don't like it don't pay.

FIFA invented ticket options (they call it RTBs), a ticket derivatives market (their marketplace allowing trades and sales of RTBs), and then cross-bred that with loot boxes (random cheap “cards” that may or may not contain RTBs). I bet that with some effort, you could figure out how to short tickets given the tools they have created.

We finally found a worthy competitor to Ticketmaster in the “worst way to buy tickets to an event” competition, it seems.