Golden Balls

Ticket prices for this year’s World Cup are already sky-high. But some luxury packages—complete with police escorts, cigar rollers, and Tibetan singing bowls—can turn a trip to the game into a seven-figure spectacle

By Jeanne Malle

Photo illustration by Chop Choppish Shop

The World Cup kicks off in just a few days, and already it has secured one title: the most expensive tournament in history, a fact its organizer, FIFA, seems entirely comfortable with.

In New York, fans have been introduced to the romance of the game with $150 round-trip New Jersey Transit tickets from the ever delightful Penn Station to the exotic climes of MetLife Stadium, 7.8 miles away. In Kansas City, a single ticket for world champion Argentina’s opening match against Algeria was listed at $16,507—a bracing sum to spend for an evening in Missouri. More affordable is the less-than-marquee battle between Ivory Coast and Ecuador (ranked 34th and 23rd in the world), where the cheapest ticket for their Philadelphia match was recently listed on Ticketmaster for $726. (That is roughly two months’ average salary in Ecuador, and more than twice that in Ivory Coast.)