The Foxboro Fares Kerfuffle Fits U.S. Realities To A ‘T’

by Jim Mathews / President & CEO

So, in just 69 days the biggest, splashiest sports tournament on the planet will take place in the U.S., drawing about six million attendees to 16 World Cup host cities, and it’s ostensibly an opportunity to show the world our very best.

But the Athletic last week broke the story that the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority -- which we all know and love as simply “The T” -- intends to charge World Cup “soccer” fans $75 to take a roundtrip train to Gillette Stadium in Foxborough to watch Haiti take on Scotland in the first match of Group C on a warm June Saturday night. [UPDATE: After this blog item was posted, MBTA made it even worse, announcing an $80 fare.]

(“Soccer” appears in quotes because for the remainder of this commentary I’ll be using the correct word to describe the beautiful game, which is “football.”)

For context, if you wanted to take a one-way journey between Foxboro and Boston’s South Street station right now, it’s a four-zone ride priced at $8.75. MBTA routinely charges a premium for special-event express trains between South Street and Foxboro, generally around $20. And for last week’s friendly between Brazil and France -- two football superpowers if there ever were any -- 2,300 fans paid $30 for a standing-room-only ride.

But $75? [No, wait, $80?!]

MBTA is quite transparent about why they’re doing that.

"The MBTA has taken on a $35 million project to upgrade Foxboro Station in advance of this World Cup, including making it fully accessible," the agency said in a statement. "The T plans to run an unprecedented amount of service for the World Cup, mobilizing up to 20,000 riders to and from each match, and we're excited to serve the global community of soccer fans coming to Massachusetts."

Gotta pay those bills.

I am a football fan and have been for the better part of half a century. In my lifetime I’ve followed the New York Cosmos, Leeds, and Fulham, but my softest spot for decades has been for Manchester United. And, of course, I’ll also support whatever obscure non-league team that comes along during the FA Cup in England to wallop a top side out of nowhere (Exhibit A: Macclesfield in January. That was awesome.). Your Association staff also includes German Bundesliga and MLS fans, too.

While on paper I can understand the desire to cover the cost of that giant investment in Foxboro station and the extra costs of operating the system, I think charging nearly four times the typical fare for special express trains is a mistake. We want to encourage people to use trains, for lots of good reasons, like getting people out of cars, like reducing congestion, like improving emissions, or simply moving masses of people much more efficiently at a time when travel of all kinds will be crushed.

This doesn’t do that.

We’ve chatted about this as a staff, and we agreed that the $75 fare puts a lot of other issues in sharp relief, things like underinvestment in capital improvements and lack of commitment to alternative travel modes. If the T had enough capacity to move the entire stadium's worth of people in and out of Foxboro before and after the game, not only would they not need to jack up prices by an order of magnitude, but the surrounding community wouldn't have to face the dual economic burden of game-day road traffic and the T being unusable as an alternative.

This $75 fare represents all of those forces coming together in a way that's not just extortionate for football spectators but hurts anyone else who needs to use the T to get from A to B for all the normal reasons people ride trains.

My contention, however, is that this is not just an MBTA thing; this is what happens when the most marketing-driven economy in the world hosts a greatly expanded World Cup tournament that will draw millions to our shores for just a shade over a month’s time. Capitalism dominates worldwide, and I’m not here in this piece to bash capitalism. On Sirius XM radio's Sirius XM FC football channel, TalkSport's Tom Rennie has accused Chelsea in the English Premier League of becoming a hedge-fund experiment that dabbles in football, and that’s probably a valid critique. UEFA’s Champions League in Europe is also a giant moneymaker. Even so, there’s a peculiarly Amerian version of sports business that elevates money far, far above all other considerations -- including the tournament itself.

Consider this: FIFA, the sport’s world governing body, had to concede to U.S. demands to include more TV ad breaks than ever before. So now we’ll see each fast-moving 45-minute half arbitrarily stopped midway for three minutes. They’re calling it a “hydration break” but it will happen regardless of weather or temperature conditions.

This is no minor thing. The momentum in football can change in the blink of an eye, and a missed pass or bobbled move can mean the entire arc of a match can change within seconds. Three minutes in football, especially world-class football, is an eternity. It will absolutely change the results of matches, in ways we don’t necessarily know just yet. Essentially the entire world will come to the U.S. and alter their game from a two-halves contest to a four-quarters contest, all so that we can sell more beer and pickup trucks.

It’s the designated hitter rule on steroids. Another football-mad Association staff member puts it simply: "Everything about the [U.S. World Cup] is an ugly anti-fan mess."

Gouging fans who really have no choice may help pay, in the short run, for getting those extra trains over the road. But it doesn’t do much for what should be our long-term objective of encouraging more rail travel. Six million football fans who have already spent small fortunes to come here and sit in seats that aren't the ones they were promised are also now going to be disappointed by their rail experience, too, as we pick their pockets for every last penny.

Fun and profit can and absolutely should co-exist. Champions League football makes a lot of money for all concerned, while also giving attendees a wonderfully exhilarating experience (unless you’re a Spurs supporter). But when it comes to the U.S. World Cup project, fun isn’t the objective, money is. Whether it’s an outrageous fare or game-altering ads, it’s driven by financial concerns, not game concerns.

In today’s economy where fun and spectacle are byproducts rather than objectives, nobody should be surprised that when a giant event comes to the U.S., football takes second place behind an unprecedented money grab. As does, apparently, the efficiency of moving many people over rail and the opportunity to improve rail’s image in the minds of the fare-paying public.