By Cassandra Garrison and Diego Delgado
MEXICO CITY, June 17 (Reuters) – Born in 1986, the last time Mexico hosted a World Cup, Eduardo Marin likes to joke that he’s measured his life not in years, but in soccer tournaments.
In 1994, as a young kid, he watched with his family as Mexico crashed out on penalties to Bulgaria. In 2006, by then at college, Marin recalls the heartbreak of Argentina’s Maxi Rodriguez smashing home a volley from outside the box in extra time, knocking out one of the best Mexico teams in recent memory. And in 2018, in his early 30s, Marin and eight friends painted a bus in Mexico’s green, white and red and drove from Germany to Russia in support of ‘El Tri.’ The bus appeared on TV channels across the globe and secured the friend group, for a moment, viral fame.
Now, the World Cup has come to Mexico, but Marin is staying home.
He’s not attending a single game, and the bus is gathering dust. Ticket prices, he said, have soared beyond reach, and the atmosphere feels different from the grassroots, anything-is-possible spirit he remembers from his youth.
“It used to be for the people,” he said, describing what he sees as a shift toward a more elite event similar to Formula One racing.
Marin said the total cost for his trip to Russia, including tickets to three games, was about $5,000. For this tournament, some fans paid that for a single ticket to Mexico’s opening match against South Africa.
Across Mexico, Marin’s sentiment is widely shared. Despite the World Cup returning to their country for the first time in four decades, many in Mexico said they feel excluded, priced out of stadiums, forced to pay for expensive TV subscriptions and constrained by strict licensing rules that have limited the number of bars — particularly in less well-off areas — showing the games.
Tensions have also flared over attempts to beautify host cities for visiting fans. In Mexico City, residents criticized the painting of axolotls, the cute native salamander, on everything from murals to train cars. Around Monterrey, authorities erected walls along roads leading to the stadium and airport, blocking poor neighborhoods from view. “They don’t want anyone to see us,” said San Juanita Barrera, 71, a longtime resident of the Nuevo San Rafael neighborhood.
The Nuevo León state government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
SIDELINED AT HOME
Mexico will host only 13 of the 104 World Cup matches, with the lion’s share played in the United States. For lifelong fans like Ricardo Arafat Garcia Tagle, a 42-year-old graphic animator from the working-class Mexico City neighborhood of Coapa, that imbalance stings.
“When they made it 13 matches, it felt insulting,” he said at his apartment as he watched the group stage tie between Brazil and Morocco. “Of the three countries — Mexico, the United States and Canada — this is the football nation!”
The cost of watching games at home has also soared. Unlike past tournaments, widely available on free-to-air television, viewing many matches now requires a paid subscription.
At the grounds, things are even more out of reach. For the World Cup opener in Mexico City, fans at the Azteca stadium said they paid between $3,000 and $5,000 for a ticket. That’s nearly 10 months’ wages of a median Mexican salary. FIFA has defended ticket prices, saying they are in line with other major sporting events. Mexico’s next match is June 18 against South Korea in Guadalajara.
Mexico’s government, when asked about high ticket prices, has said free, public screenings have been put on around the country.
LICENSING LABYRINTH
For businesses, barriers are steep too.
At Salon Casino, a historic cantina in the Doctores neighborhood of Mexico City, manager Luis Bernot said preparing his bar for the tournament has meant navigating a maze of restrictions imposed by FIFA, the governing body for international soccer.
The bar has long relied on sports to draw crowds, but this year, Bernot said, his team had to repeatedly redesign promotional materials as new rules emerged, including bans on using terms such as “World Cup” or images associated with the tournament.
Outside the cantina, a banner now reads: “Soccer is lived and drunk,” alongside a soccer ball covered in international flags, a careful use of vocabulary and imagery not prohibited by rights holders. “They want to profit from everything,” Bernot said of FIFA.
The fees for bars and restaurants to broadcast the entire World Cup range from about 4,000 Mexican pesos ($233) for businesses with fewer than five tables to 22,000 pesos for bigger establishments with more than 20 tables, according to a Televisa spokesperson.
In a response to Reuters questions, the spokesperson said TelevisaUnivision is broadcasting 32 matches for free, including all Mexico games and the final. The spokesperson added that FIFA had “significantly increased the cost of broadcasting rights compared to previous World Cups.”
Mexico’s restaurant organization CANIRAC has warned in a notice on its website that members must pay for a commercial license and that using personal subscriptions for public viewing could lead to fines or sanctions.
At Las Delicias de la Obrera, a hole-in-the-wall place in Mexico City’s Obrera neighborhood, manager Julio Mendoza said paying for a commercial TV package was never an option. The restaurant will show only the small number of games available for free.
On a Saturday evening, while Haiti played Scotland, a TV showed a telenovela instead. Mendoza had hoped the World Cup would boost business, particularly by attracting tourists, but he’s been disappointed. “It’s not great,” he said, as he served up bowls of pozole, a rich Mexican soup.
For Marin, who traveled around the world watching Mexico play, it’s hard to accept he won’t be going to any games in his home country. But it’s not just him missing out, he said. The whole tournament has lost something.
“I feel like it just doesn’t have the same energy anymore,” he said. “It’s not the same.”
($1 = 17.2143 Mexican pesos)
(Reporting by Cassandra Garrison and Diego Delgado in Mexico City; additional reporting by Laura Gottesdiener in Monterrey and Emily Green in Mexico City; editing by Stephen Eisenhammer and Padraic Cassidy)
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