In Dallas, football is everywhere, but World Cup tickets are barely affordable

Out of breath, Kennedy Ikechukwu (29) drops into the barren lawn at an abandoned high school. The eight others with whom he has just played football for fifteen minutes also lie on their backs, sweating. A pot is much longerpickup soccer‘ on a Saturday afternoon in Texas, even in the mild spring. Hip-hop and Latin music alternately plays from a speaker next to one of the orange cones that mark the improvised field.

When Ikechukwu gets up again to drink water, he sees a lonely soul in red football boots kicking a ball against a tree. “Hey, dude, would you like to join in?” he calls. „Hell yeah“, answers Haissan Aparicio (19). With five players with and five without yellow vests, they kick off for the next fifteen minutes.

In Dallas, the Texan city where the Dutch national team starts the World Cup on Sunday, football is everywhere. For children at schools and football academies for which parents pay large sums. For adults in endless games of pickup soccer, an American form of schoolyard football whose name is borrowed from semi-spontaneous games on public basketball courts. That pastime has also been commercialized: indoor sports halls have been built for such games and special apps have been developed that charge players 10 to 15 dollars (an average of more than 10 euros) per evening. “I play pickup three times a week,” says Ikechukwu, “so that’s quite an investment.”

Anyone who drives on the toll roads and wide streets around Dallas will see in parks and fields that people kick a ball at least as often as people hit a baseball or throw an American football. If only because men and women participate, sometimes together.

The North Texas metro area has grown enormously over the past decade grown — already struggling downtown Dallas with vacancy and impoverishment. Just like the Randstad, the area has approximately 8.5 million inhabitants, spread over an area twice as large. Football’s popularity is partly driven by the fact that one in five residents was born outside the US. Only a few of the group that meets on this Saturday are American. Aparicio, the latest addition, is an electrician from Venezuela. Ikechukwu is originally Nigerian.

Prefer European football

A culture of watching football does not exist in this city, where a total of nine World Cup matches take place. The local FC Dallas plays in the Major League Soccer (MLS), but – partly due to a renovation – barely attracts ten thousand spectators. For television viewers, the top division is behind the Apple TV paywall. “The MLS is also not something to look at,” says Ikechukwu, who has made it his business to individually guide children with great football ambitions.

The average sports bar prefers to show European football. This is of a higher level and is broadcast in the mornings and afternoons, so it does not compete with American spectator sports that do matter. Dallas has many teams with a large fan base: the Texas Rangers (baseball), Dallas Mavericks (basketball), Dallas Stars (ice hockey) and, most importantly, the Dallas Cowboys (American football), the most valuable sports club in the world. Forbes estimates its value at 13 billion dollars (11.3 billion euros).

For comparison: Real Madrid, the most expensive football club, is only worth half: 6.75 billion. Mainly because of the difference in the revenue from television rights. The club’s value and profits defy the idea that Americans only like winners: the Cowboys last reached and won the Superbowl in 1996.

Zoom in

The pecking order can be noticed during a tour of the Cowboys stadium, where the Dutch national team will play against Japan. For the World Cup it was renamed Dallas Stadium. At the end of March, the dark blue chairs were covered with construction material and boxes of bright pink LED lights were installed to encourage the grass to grow. “We are growing grass in this stadium for the first time,” says guide Ronald Sexton, after he explains that the stadium is higher than the Statue of Liberty.

Except for a Brit staying with a cousin in Dallas, none of the visitors know that the World Cup will be played here just over two months later. “Never heard of it. How nice!” says a loyal Cowboys fan from Alabama.

The Cowboys play less than ten games a year here for an audience of almost a hundred thousand people who pay hundreds, if not thousands of dollars per ticket. The cheapest ticket available at the moment resale marketwhich can be obtained for Sunday’s World Cup match, costs almost 700 dollars (more than 600 euros).

For locals, the ticket prices are not so absurd, says professor of sports entertainment management Bob Heere (50). “Americans spend much more on sports than Europeans, partly because they go on holiday much less.”

‘More fanatic than elsewhere in the country’

The Dutchman’s first memory of Dallas was a traumatic one. “I cried as an 18-year-old when we lost to Brazil here in 1994. So unjustified!” Eight years ago he started working at the University of North Texas. And discovered: “The passion for sports, any sport, is incredibly strong in Dallas. They are more fanatic here than almost anywhere else in the country,” he says.

From the tenth floor of a glass office building where he advises sports technology start-ups, he points to a stadium across the street. That regularly sells out the 12,000 seats for a game when a local high school plays football. How can watching sports and being a fan be so important to Dallas residents?

“Look around you,” Heere points to the horizon. Except for more of the same high-rise buildings, new residential areas full of detached houses and endless asphalt with a few patches of greenery, there is very little to see. Exactly, Heere confirms: “There is virtually nothing else to do. There are some nice restaurants and museums, but no nature, no beaches and no mountains.” Dallas is a major financial and economic hub, but outside Texas it is best known for the fact that President John F. Kennedy was shot here in 1963.

Zoom in

Moreover, for a large part of the year it is far too hot to do anything other than sit in front of the television, whether or not having a barbecue with the neighbors. Or to go to an air-conditioned stadium with the whole family in an air-conditioned car. Heere: “I thought for a long time that sport in the US was just about entertainment, but it is also very much about identity and a sense of community.”

Due to Trump’s negative international image, Heere expects fewer tourists in the US than was originally expected for this World Cup. “I also hear from friends that they don’t think this is the time for a nice road trip through the US where they can also see a few matches.” But many residents of Dallas and beyond will try to attend a game, he believes. “Just to experience it, even if football is not their sport.”

Squeeze

Fans of FC Dallas, people for whom football is very much their sport, say before a match of their club that they are looking forward to the tournament and the celebration surrounding it. But few plan to go to a match. Here they are used to buying a ticket for 50 dollars and they can easily ‘tailholes‘ — drinking and snacking from the trunk of a car.

At the World Cup stadium, parking only at a considerable distance from the stadium costs three times as much and is allowed not just like that be tailgated. “FIFA thinks they can squeeze Americans for a thousand dollars,” says Jim Kimberly (58) sulking. “Football should be affordable.”

Kennedy Ikechukwu still has doubts, he says on the phone at the beginning of June. “You probably only experience this once, a World Cup in your own city.” Finally better live football than the MLS. “My ten-year-old son keeps asking if we are going, so I check online every day to see if cheaper tickets become available.”

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