It's 2026, and the familiar ache is back. Ireland won't be at the World Cup. Again. The Boys in Green will be watching from home, just like us. There’s that low hum of what-might-have-been, the usual Irish football fan lament. We know this feeling well, don't we? It's a practiced heartbreak, one we've had more often than the real thing. A whole generation of us has genuinely never seen Ireland at a World Cup. Italia 90, USA 94, Japan 2002. Then, silence. A long, long silence.

So, I won't sit here and tell you it’s fine. It's not fine. It’s miserable. Troy Parrott, Evan Ferguson, Caoimhin Kelleher, they all deserved to be in the mix. We deserved to be in the mix.

But here’s the funny part, the bit that should make you laugh or cry, possibly both. We just dodged the biggest mugging in the history of the game.

While the rest of the world prepares to re-mortgage their houses for a group stage ticket and a return train fare that costs more than the match itself, Irish fans can sit at home with a pint, flick between the games, and watch what happens when FIFA and the United States decide to work together on a football tournament. Spoiler: it’s not just football. It’s a four-week price-gouging festival with a ball in the middle.

Let's talk numbers, because that’s where the absurdity truly hits home. The cheapest ticket to the World Cup final at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on 19 July is $4,185. That's roughly £3,120. For one seat. To watch one game. In the cheapest category. This isn't some black market price; this is through the Participant Member Association allocation, supposedly set aside for the most loyal supporters. The ones who follow their team from the first whistle to the last.

To follow England from their opener in Dallas right through to the final? That’s a minimum of $6,900, or £5,137, according to Football Supporters Europe. That's five times what it cost in Qatar. Five times. We are talking about the basic cost of tickets here, before you’ve even considered a flight, a hotel, a hire car, food, or the $15,000 bond some fans from 50 different countries will have to post just to get a US visa. For context, a "fans first" ticket to follow England through Euro 2024 from the first match to the final cost €375. Three hundred and seventy-five euro. Total. Football Supporters Europe called it a "monumental betrayal." They are being polite.

Then there's the travel, which is a whole other level of fleecing. Imagine you’re an English fan at the World Cup, and you want to get from New York Penn Station to MetLife Stadium for a group game. The train ticket will cost you $150. That's £111. For a fifteen-minute ride. Nine miles. The normal return fare on that same train is $12.90. New Jersey Transit, with a straight face, claimed they're not price-gouging, just "literally trying to recoup our costs." This is despite the US Federal Government handing host cities about $100 million in transport grants. Other cities like Los Angeles and Philadelphia have managed to use these grants to keep fares the same. New Jersey, it seems, worked out they could just charge twelve times the normal rate instead. Clever lads.

Boston is doing it too. The bus from the city out to Gillette Stadium in Foxborough will be $95, with return train tickets at $80 instead of the usual $20. Quadruple the price, same train, same seats, same route. The only thing that’s changed is that World Cup 2026 fans are now on it, and someone decided they look like they can afford it. Even FIFA's own Chief Operating Officer, Heimo Schirgi, said the pricing will have a "chilling effect" on fans and "diminish the economic benefit and lasting legacy" of the tournament. When FIFA is calling something greedy, you know you are in deep trouble.

The hotels, bless them, are already panicking. After the draw in December, US hotels in host cities hiked their prices by up to 300%. They had their calculators out, eyeing up how many jerseys they could see coming across the Atlantic. Five months later, hotel rates on match days have already been slashed by a third. Why? According to Tourism Economics, it's because World Cup 2026 ticket prices are too high, Americans are nervous about the economy, and "anti-US sentiment" is keeping people away. Translation: the world has had a look at what’s going on and decided, actually, no thanks, we’ll give this one a miss.

Scores of seats are still unsold for group games. The USA’s own opener against Paraguay is struggling to shift tickets at $3,000 a pop, which at this point feels less like a ticket price and more like a dare. Compare that to the Congo vs Jamaica play-off last month, with tickets priced at a reasonable $11 to $17, which drew 36,000 fans to a 50,000-seat ground. That was a play-off with a team making history. Now picture Jordan vs Algeria in Kansas City on a sweaty July afternoon kickoff, and tell me those stands are going to be full.

The ticketing system itself tells you everything you need to know about what this World Cup 2026 actually is. There's no set face value. Prices go up and down based on demand, which in practice means they start astronomical and go higher. Tickets for the final that were $6,370 back in October were listed at $10,990 by April. Same seat. Same match. Seventy per cent more, five months later, because FIFA and LiveNation worked out they could. FIFA takes 30% of every resale on its own official platform. They are, in effect, the touts. One ticket for the final has appeared on the official FIFA resale site at $250,000. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. For one game of football. This isn't just about World Cup 2026 prices; it's about a complete shift in how the game is valued.

Fans are already threatening legal action over what they're calling doctored stadium maps. Tickets sold as Category A are turning out to be in Category B sections. A new mystery category called "Front Category A" has suddenly appeared, at three times the original price, in seats where people thought they’d already bought the best option. If this were anything other than FIFA, "consumer fraud investigation" would be in the air.

This is what we are not missing. We're missing the World Cup where your bus to the ground costs more than your match ticket used to at Euro 2024. We're missing the one where a lad from Cork would have had to find $15,000 cash to stand in front of a US Embassy officer and explain his holiday plans. We're missing the one where the final ticket costs more than most people's deposit on a house. We're missing the one where a FIFA employee has to publicly call out his own employer for greed. We’re missing the tournament where the mascot may as well be a dollar bill.

Steve Clarke, the manager of Scotland, a qualifying team, actually told his own supporters to stay home and watch on television. The manager. Telling fans not to come. Because it’s that bad.

The real tragedy isn't Ireland missing it. The real tragedy is that this is what the World Cup has become, and it isn't going back. Qatar 2022 had its own list of problems, of course, and nobody here is going to pretend otherwise. But the tickets were affordable. Ordinary fans could go. The stands were full of actual supporters in actual team colours, not corporate lanyards and empty seats behind the goals.

What FIFA has realised is that there’s more money in turning the World Cup into a festival for the rich and a spectator sport on television for everyone else. The stadiums become backdrops. The fans become extras. The atmosphere becomes something you pipe in through speakers because the real thing couldn't afford the ticket. That’s what the World Cup 2026 is. That’s probably what 2030 and 2034 are going to be too. The people running the game are cashing in and daring the rest of us to look the other way.

So here’s to watching at home. Pull up a stool. Order a pint. Stick it on the telly at Reddan's, or the Long Hall, or the Brazen Head, or wherever your local is. You’ll see every goal, every red card, every bit of drama. Messi’s last dance, whoever wins it, whichever dark horse comes out of nowhere to break a nation’s heart in the quarter-finals. And you’ll watch it with commentary in your own accent, without a fifteen-hour flight, without a border interrogation, and without remortgaging the gaff to pay for a seat.

You won’t be in a stadium that’s two-thirds full because nobody could afford to show up. You won’t be paying £111 for a fifteen-minute train ride. You won’t be handing a FIFA reseller the price of a second-hand Focus for a seat behind a pillar. You’ll just be watching football. Which, when the people running it have stopped pretending it’s about anything other than money, is actually all any of us wanted in the first place.

Ireland aren’t at the World Cup. Turns out, in the summer of 2026, that might be the one piece of good luck Irish football has had in a long time.