MEXICO CITY (AP) — Priced out of stadium tickets to the FIFA World Cup their country is hosting alongside the U.S. and Canada, many Mexicans are celebrating the tournament on the streets, in plazas, below highway underpasses and at taco stands. The spectacle has been turned into a paywall, and the people shut out by the price structure have responded by building their own public celebrations in working-class neighborhoods and other shared spaces.
Fans have gathered around televisions set up on plastic tables in a working-class neighborhood in downtown Mexico City and in other public places across the country as Mexico’s national team wins matches. Esmeralda Serrato said she preferred watching in the street with dozens of neighbors. “Honestly, there’s nothing like going to the stadiums, but I prefer being here in the street. … For me it’s like watching the game from my living room,” Serrato said. “I feel the blood rushing through my veins saying ‘This is the World Cup.’”
Who Gets In, Who Gets Left Out
The celebrations come after months of scrutiny over soaring World Cup ticket prices. In Mexico, where the average worker earns around $433 a month, the gap between who can and cannot get into games has been felt acutely, according to Diego Merla, fiscal justice coordinator for Oxfam Mexico. Merla said many Mexicans feel as if “it’s a party we weren’t invited to.” He said, “The World Cup is built around the logic of squeezing as much value out of it as possible. It’s about getting those who are willing and able to pay the absolute maximum. And that ends up excluding a lot of people.”
Earlier this year, tickets went on sale at prices ranging from $140 to $8,680, and some tickets to the World Cup final later rose to around $32,970. FIFA President Gianni Infantino defended the prices as fitting the U.S. market. “You cannot go to watch in the U.S. a college game, not even speaking about a top professional game of a certain level, for less than $300,” Infantino said. “And this is the World Cup.”
People Build Their Own Viewing Spaces
Fans such as Guillermo Ramírez have taken celebrations into their own hands. Ramírez, 49, is a native of Tepito, the working-class Mexico City neighborhood known for sprawling street markets packed with pirated World Cup jerseys. In Tepito, soccer is described as a symbol of resistance and local identity in an area most commonly associated with crime. A soccer field there is named after Bernardo Manolete Hernández, a renowned Mexican soccer player born in the neighborhood.
Just a block away from the field, Ramírez, wearing a bright green and white Mexico jersey, set up a TV screen and speakers on top of two plastic tables in front of his house and small corner shop before Mexico faced South Korea. He said he remembered watching the 1986 Mexico World Cup as a young boy from TVs set up by neighbors who could not get into stadiums. “There are a lot of us who simply can’t afford to go to the stadium,” Ramírez said. “Tepito is a soccer barrio, and when there’s a match on, everyone takes out their TVs to watch, especially now during the World Cup.”
Neighbors crowd around his screen wearing green and red lucha libre masks, holding their children and drinking beer from Ramírez’s corner shop. When Mexico wins, tens of thousands of people flood the streets and gather at Mexico City’s central monument, the Angel de la Independencia.
The Official Response Still Runs Through Institutions
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has criticized the costs and said last week that FIFA leaders should reflect on their pricing decisions. “Soccer has to be something else,” Sheinbaum said. She has encouraged fans to attend free public watch parties set up by local governments and FIFA in Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey. Nearly 20 such venues are in the Mexican capital, including in lower-income areas.
For one game, over 200,000 Mexican and foreign fans packed into the city’s main plaza, the Zocalo, where a sea of Mexico jerseys threw crowd surfers into the air. Armando Soriano, his wife and two children traveled from the fringes of the city to a smaller Fan Fest in a plaza about a mile from Ramírez’s home, where locals arrived on motorcycles and beer, tequila and snacks were sold from plastic tubs strapped to moving carts. Soriano said the event felt more Mexican than the central FIFA event. “I want (my family) to be swept up in the spirit — to feel, more than anything, what it means to be Mexican, and to experience the traditions that people here live and breathe,” Soriano said.
The contrast is plain: a global sports machine priced for maximum extraction, and ordinary people turning streets, plazas and neighborhood corners into their own commons. The official venues, the corporate pricing, and the public watch parties all sit inside the same structure, but the people at the bottom are the ones making the event livable at all.