Welcome to the scuff podcast where we talk about U.S. soccer.

Our guest today is Henry Bushnell, one of the athletic soccer reporters.

He's been deep on the World Cup ticket prices beat for the past several weeks, maybe even months.

He's one of the premier members of the U.S. soccer press corps.

Henry, welcome back to scuffed.

Bells, thanks for having me.

I want to clarify, I did not get hired specifically as a World Cup ticket beat writer,

but the beat has kind of created itself over the past several months, and we've been running.

For sure, and that's the first thing I want to talk about.

So you have asked FIFA, or you did ask FIFA, to break out the demand for tickets match by match,

you know, because they had this big, Infantino had this big statement, like 500 million

requests for tickets.

Do you think you'll ever get that information from FIFA, the breakdown of like, what,

what are the, which matches are people requesting tickets for no and to

be fair to them like that's not something they've released in the past either right like you know when

i initially when i've gone when i've been badgering them about this or when i was i'm not anymore

like what they have said is like you know tell me what you want that we have released in the past

and they haven't released this stuff in the past what's different is this time they're using

these massive round number like they're constantly putting out these massive round numbers

of how many ticket requests they have,

basically to implicitly say,

to implicitly clap back against all the critics of their prices.

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