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Comment by tedggh | Hacker News Reader

Why is this out of the gate bad? Note that this is not taking FIFA to private equity, but creating an investors owned subsidiary to run events and commercial operations where the non profit arm will still own 80% of it. With the right protections it could help FIFA make more money and reinvest in the sport, particularly women’s football. FIFA currently makes 40% of what the NHL makes, not the NFL, not NBA. Soccer is by far the most popular sport on the planet, the fact that it makes a lot less money than hockey is insane.

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Why is it bad to sell 20% of the biggest tournament in the world to a private company lead by people involved with the most corrupt administration in the history of the US? The model has been working fine for decades, why does it matter that it makes less than american sports?

The most beloved, most watched sport in the world making less than the American/Canadian hockey league is a commercial failure. Non profits are generally inefficient at running businesses. With the right guardrails a private arm that knows how to run a business could help FIFA make a ton of money. And yes a lot of rich guys will become even richer too, so what?

guardrails, yea pedotrump pissed all over existing guardrails in this wc. and you want to sell him a piece of fifa :D

> help FIFA make a ton of money

It's a non-profit. So who cares? Why is more money automatically good?

> making less than the American/Canadian hockey league is a commercial failure

They aren't alike. The NHL doesn't happen once every 4 years.

The point of Fifa is not to make money. The point of it is to further the interests of the sport.

Besides, your tally of sports incomes is wrong since you didn't include UEFA revenue, which is also football money, in the count.

FIFA controls the largest event, so it should be the driving force for revenue but it’s not. But even if you add UEFA the whole thing still less profitable than an American professional and barely surpasses hockey. By the way, UEFA crying about this while they are the owners, regulators and revenue distributors is pretty crazy. It seems to me they are more concerned about not being able to hop on the FIFA deal themselves.

FFS this is getting fucking tiresome.

Do you not understand that FIFA and UEFA are a small component of the actual revenue of football? They are not all of football. This is not complicated.

And his claim is fundamentally incorrect. The latest edition of the WC made more money than the NBA, leave alone the NHL.

> a commercial failure

Not everything has to have the teeth of capitalism continually biting down harder and harder. Plateaus are ok (and this is nowhere near a plateau)

Good thing it's a sport and not a commercial operation then!

But FIFA is the governing body of a sport, not a business.

Hearing you say this is like hearing someone say that the United Nations is a commercial failure.

Its purpose is to regulate and administer international football on behalf of its member associations, enforce compliance with its regulations, organise international competitions to relieve the member associations of the hassle, administer anti-doping programmes and related integrity measures (lol), and, through its membership of IFAB, help determine and promote the consistent application of the Laws of the Game worldwide. Its revenues only exist to support those functions.

Is there a need for it to have profit motive? Would the world be better if it decided it should have one? I don't see how the answer could be yes to either question.

The mention of guardrails is a little Onion-esque given the organisation and people in question

The UN is a poor analogy. The UN does not operate a large commercial business like FIFA which exploits the World Cup, Libertadores and other events. The only strong similarity they have is their non profit status. You should have used the IOC as analogy.

> The most beloved, most watched sport in the world making less than the American/Canadian hockey league is a commercial failure.

Fortunately the English top division alone makes a similar amount to NHL (from a quarter of the matches) and the English second tier makes a similar amount to the Super Bowl[1], which is why football's governing body doesn't particularly need lessons on how to commercialize stuff from people in the United States who probably also don't understand football's financial centre of gravity, but will happily buy commercialization rights for a quadrennial tournament if sold to them in a backroom deal at a sufficiently low price...

[1]yes, I know the Super Bowl is only the one game. But if you can compare a 1400 game annual league to a 104 game quadrennial tournament, then I can compare an entire season to a single big game :D)...

> The most beloved, most watched sport in the world making less than the American/Canadian hockey league is a commercial failure.

Soccer leagues make a total of about 5-6x as much as the NHL. The Premier League alone makes 25% more than the NHL.

Ha! Model has been working for American s.. more and more we are seeing signs of a falling empire. Not reading the room - I mean global - temperature is nothing new to the US foreign policy office. They’ve done it for decades, but these days the confidence in leadership has fully eroded trust. Before there may have been closed door jokes made US leaderships expense, now it’s out and in public.

Market Strategists are going to study this one. It’s a potential inflection point. Cant think of any other event or entity as globally galvanizing that football.

You are comparing apple and oranges, it makes no sense.

> Soccer is by far the most popular sport on the planet, the fact that it makes a lot less money than hockey is insane.

Soccer makes much much more money than the NHL, it just doesn't all go to FIFA because the vast majority of matches are not organized by FIFA.

The premier league alone makes more than the NHL and that's just one of the european countries. La ligua, bundesliga also each make close to what the NHL makes with much smaller populations.

The fair comparison to FIFA is the IIHF. They make $35M for the hockey world championships vs 15B for the football world cup, you are slightly off, a rounding error.

> FIFA currently makes 40% of what the NHL makes, not the NFL, not NBA.

FIFA holds one significant money-making tournament for a month every 4 years (all due respect to the Women's World Cup in terms of prestige, but its revenue is a small fraction of the Men's World Cup). The NHL runs 6 months a year annually.

That’s part of their poor commercial vision. Even the World Cup brings less revenue than one season of the NBA. Doesn’t even make sense to compare it with the NFL.

Again, it doesn't last as long as one season of the NBA or play as many games.

A single NBA season has over 1200 games - over 12 times as many games as the most recent World Cup (104). And that was already the largest-ever WC. Does the NBA have 12x the revenue of the WC?

> Even the World Cup brings less revenue than one season of the NBA

This isn't even true btw. The 2026 WC made $15b and the 2025-26 NBA season made $14.3 billion. [1][2]

Most of the WC's participating teams represent places poorer than the places NBA teams hail from.

You can't run the World Cup like the NBA. That's not how the sport works.

1. https://www.sportico.com/leagues/basketball/2025/nba-revenue...

2. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/jul/18/fifa-record...

So what. The point of the World Cup is a worldwide celebration of soccer, interchange of culture. It belongs to the people.

It's one of the only things left whose purpose is not just to make as much money as possible.

The Qatar World Cup tournament was obviously such a thing. The place had the money to build all the stadiums, but has never qualified legitimately and is a tiny country. Thousands of people died building those stadiums in Qatar.

Plus there is advertising all over the players' clothing, the pitch, the pitchside hoardings etc. There is high rent advertising in every break. Even more so since theze silly hydration breaks.

I mean, of course you're right about all of that. (The Qatar world cup was more for 'sportswashing' than extracting profit, although FIFA itself still made plenty of money. And, the hydration breaks will hopefully be a thing of a the past, because it was so obvious what they were really for. But I'm not betting on that.)

It just sucks that everything good and sacred in the world (soccer and everything else) is being squeezed and shittified for profit. So if FIFA is prevented from converting from a non-profit with the nominal purpose of being a steward of the game for its own stake into a fully explicit for-profit capitalistic enterprise, then I'll take the victory. Even if the current system is far from perfect.

Football has had a major profiteering issue since at least the 1970s. The clubs always had to support themselves, but since then you have advertising everywhere, footballers in moronic adverts themselves, broadcasting rights, players being paid (and being worth) obscene amounts of money...

In recent years, there has been a clear movement away from the physical fanbase towards merchandise and broadcasting. It often feels like clubs are embarrassed by the people who turn up at games (sometimes with good reason to be fair since some of the fan behaviour and chants are indefensible).

Closer to 10 months actually - Oct (Sept if you include the pre-season) through June.

But just to add on for comparison, the NHL has 1312 regular season games. Plus 4 rounds of best-of-7 playoff series with 16 teams making the playoffs. Let's say an average of 5.75 games per round, that's 86 playoff games bringing us to ~1400 games per year.

Over 4 years, that's 5600 games. The FIFA World Cup had 104 games this year. It's actually pretty impressive that the WC can even make 40% while hosting < 2% of the games that the NHL has. Or put another way, 1 WC game is equivalent to 54 NHL games - 2/3 of one team's full regular season.

> Soccer is by far the most popular sport on the planet, the fact that it makes a lot less money than hockey is insane.

FIFA is (1) on paper, not there to make money, but (2) in reality, obscenely corrupt.

Worldwide, association football makes more than all other sports you referenced, combined.

I hope this is UEFA taking a principled stand, but maybe there's some weird scheme going on, let's see what happens next.

NHL/NFL/NBA are national leagues, the FIFA world cup a tournament that takes place every four years. You’re comparing apples and pears.

> Soccer is by far the most popular sport on the planet, the fact that it makes a lot less money than hockey is insane.

Maybe fans would prefer that it stayed that way.. making just enough money to keep the sport going, without the profit motive.

As a pundit - more 'water works', the addition in the last world cup was beyond lame.

>FIFA currently makes 40% of what the NHL makes,

That's entirely irrelevant, if FIFA even makes zero - most of the money is in the local leagues. FIFA is just there for the world cup

> Soccer is by far the most popular sport on the planet, the fact that it makes a lot less money than hockey is insane.

The NFL makes much less money than nVidia The world has gone mad! That's just insane.

don't be naive. Never in the history of humanity did corrupt billionaire pedophiles do anything help the sport/fans/women/..... They want a piece to get the foot in the door. 10 years from now, we wont even recognise football anymore.

I don't care what american billionaires make with nhl/nfl/..., hands fucking off of football.

Association football is more marketable than certain North American sports. For a start, the jerseys are covered in sponsors, even the shorts, socks and shoes. American football and basketball, for whatever reason, haven't done that yet.

It looks like this world cup may have introduced shirt sponsorship to US and Canadian sports. Soon their shirts will resemble Formula One drivers'. In return, association football will keep hydration breaks etc.

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