⚽ Priced Out of the Game
Pricing for travel to and from football matches, in fact for any major event, is more complicated than you think, as it brings to the fore questions of fairness, covering costs, and governance
Good day my good friend.
I’m starting this week with a couple of public service announcements. I am going to be at two conferences in a single week. On Monday 13th July, I will be at the Active County Cambridgeshire conference in Cambridge, giving a presentation on work that I did with the Transport Expert Group on Forest City. While the title of my talk is on planning, its more about governance and whether good today is good enough for tomorrow.
Later that week, on Wednesday 15th July and Thursday 16th July I will be at the Transport Practitioners Meeting in Manchester, presenting the work with I did with Jenny Milne and Alex Reid on the Future of Water Transport (i.e. ferries).
This year, Mobility Camp is coming to Sheffield on 30th September, and it promises to be another amazing day of discussion, debate, and taking action. Anyone with an interest in transport should be there, and so should you. You can get tickets here.
When New Jersey Transit announced in April that a round trip to a World Cup match at MetLife Stadium would cost $150, the reaction was swift and unforgiving. The same nine mile ride from New York Penn Station to East Rutherford normally costs $12.90. Charging fans almost twelve times the standard fare for a fifteen minute journey looked, to most people who heard about it, like straightforward gouging. New York Governor Kathy Hochul said on social media that more than $100 for a short train ride sounded awfully high. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was considerably less measured. FIFA itself piled in, warning that elevated fares would push fans towards other modes and create congestion the region would regret.
Over the following weeks the price came down, and it came down in public. By early May NJ Transit had cut the fare to $105. A week later, with the help of corporate sponsors, Governor Mike Sherrill announced a further reduction to $98. On the New York side, the express bus fare was slashed from $80 to $20. The episode is worth dwelling on, not because the numbers are shocking, but because it exposes a question that transport authorities almost never have to answer in public. When a stadium empties tens of thousands of people onto a public transport network in the space of an hour, who should pay for moving them, and how much?
It’s worthwhile dwelling on why NJ Transit did what it did, as the position it was in was unique. FIFA designated MetLife Stadium a no parking, transit only venue for security and congestion reasons. Much of the stadium’s enormous car park is being used for a fan village, staging areas and shuttle operations. The practical effect is that around 40,000 fans per match must arrive by public transport, roughly four times the matchday rider volume the Meadowlands line normally handles. NJ Transit put the additional cost of running that service at $48 million.
Under the terms of the agreement for hosting a World Cup that host nations sign with FIFA, the host nation bears almost the entirety of the cost of hosting the tournament, while FIFA makes all of the money - around $11 billion this time around. Normally, the promise of extra visitors to a country and the ‘feel good factor’ of hosting the tournament promises an increase in spending, which makes the business case for hosting such a tournament marginally less bad, or at least justifiable. But during this tournament, things are slightly complicated.
This cost for hosting the tournament is often shouldered by state agencies, including public transit agencies like NJ Transit. To make things even more complicated for NJ Transit, much of the uplift in spending is in fact expected to take place across the Hudson river in New York, which is an entirely separate transit agency. So the State of New Jersey faces a situation where they bear most of the cost of hosting matches at the Met Life Stadium, while the State of New York benefits the most from it.
So NJ Transit had a decision to make: should people going to matches at Met Life Stadium shoulder the cost, or New Jersey taxpayers? NJ Transit’s chief executive, Kris Kolluri, framed the surcharge as cost recovery rather than profit, arguing that the $48 million bill should not fall on the commuters who rely on the network every day. Governor Sherrill, who inherited the FIFA agreement from her predecessor, made the same case more pointedly, insisting that New Jerseyans would not subsidise World Cup ticket holders. There is a genuine principle buried in here. The fans attending a one off mega event are not the same population as the daily riders who fund and depend on the system, and asking the beneficiaries of a temporary surge to cover its marginal cost is, in the abstract, a coherent application of the user pays idea.
FIFA’s response is also worth taking seriously, because it points to the central weakness of the strategy. Heimo Schirgi, the tournament’s chief operating officer, warned that high fares would have what he called a “chilling effect,”1 pushing fans towards cars, rideshares and informal options that would undermine the transit only plan central to the operation of the tournament. This is the contradiction in using a fare surcharge to manage demand at a venue where the whole point is to force people onto public transport. Price the train too high and you encourage exactly the modal choices the event was designed to prevent. The fact that fans cannot park at the stadium does not make them captive. It makes them resourceful, and a $150 fare gives them a powerful incentive to find a way around it.
Strip away the politics and the World Cup glamour and what remains is a textbook case of peak demand. A stadium event generates a sharp, predictable spike in travel that lasts a few hours and then vanishes. As the classic peak load pricing framework set out by Marcel Boiteux and developed in studies such as this analysis of Stockholm’s network makes clear, the short run marginal cost of carrying an extra passenger rises steeply during the peak period.
This sounds counter-intuitive, as surely public transport authorities should be making money during peak periods. So let me break it down for you. The entirety of the operation of a public transport network is driven by something known as Peak Vehicle Requirement. This is as simple as it sounds - the number of vehicles you have in a fleet is determined by the number that you need to cater for peak travel periods, plus some allowances in case of breakdowns and repairs. All of those vehicles cost money to own and service.
Furthermore, when a public transport authority needs to increase the number of vehicles on a network during a peak, that in itself has running costs. Staff and fuel are the most notable, with the former sometimes having to be offered enhanced rates of pay to work unsociable hours.
Finally, there is also the marginal costs associated with crowding. Extremely high demand at specific periods not only means higher costs associated with running more vehicles, but you may need specific vehicles just for this purpose. Like double-decker buses or longer trains. Furthermore, the cost of this whole service needs to account for the fact that for half of its mileage, these vehicles will have to run nearly empty as the demand will likely be in a single direction at any one time.
What this means that even if you charge peak hour fares, they may not cover the additional costs of running peak hour services. Off-peak this is not an issue, as the capacity is available within the existing services. But when you have 80,000 fans trying to get to one point within a two hour time period, this places an extreme demand on the network that can only be covered in an expensive way.
This is why three goals pull against one another:
Affordability and access, the principle that getting to a match should not be priced out of reach for a sport with deep working class roots;
Demand management, the need to shape when and how people travel so the system can cope; and
Revenue and cost recovery.
A surcharge of the NJ Transit kind serves the third directly and the second incidentally, but, as FIFA pointed out, it damages the first and can backfire on the second.
A further complication is the price elasticity of sports fans. Fans are somewhat unusual in that they are price inelastic at the higher income ends, but price elastic at the lower income ends. An international visitor who has paid thousands of dollars for flights, hotels, food, and tickets won’t be happy with an extra $100 to pay for the train, but they will likely pay it. But locals working on a modest budget who want to come and see a once-in-a-lifetime tournament in their city will likely not.
The real question is whether the peak can be managed and the cost recovered without loading it onto the fans least able to bear it. And as always when it comes to doing the right thing by fans in football, there is one country we look to for the way forward. Germany.
The German Bundesliga2 has arrived at almost the exact opposite of the New Jersey approach, and it is worth understanding why. At most German clubs, your match ticket is also your travel ticket. The Kombiticket, short for Kombinationsticket, automatically includes free travel on local public transport within the regional transport association’s zone, covering trams, buses, the U-Bahn and the S-Bahn, typically from a few hours before kick off until the early hours of the following morning. The fan does nothing. There is no separate fare, no validation, no queue at a ticket machine. The cost of travel is bundled invisibly into the price of admission.
This is not a recent innovation. German footballing giants Borussia Dortmund and the local transport operator DSW21 introduced the model in 1990, and Dortmund has since extended the benefit so that a match ticket is valid for travel from anywhere in North Rhine-Westphalia. Around eleven Bundesliga clubs now offer some version of the scheme. It depends on something the United States and much of the United Kingdom lack, namely dense regional transport associations such as the VRR in the Rhine-Ruhr or the MVV in Munich, which already integrate ticketing across operators and can therefore fold a stadium into an existing zonal structure without much friction.
The reported outcomes are striking. A club survey at 1. FC Köln found that around 40 per cent of fans use public transport to reach matches, and Eintracht Frankfurt have reported figures above 60 per cent. I would treat these numbers with care, since they are self reported by the clubs that operate the schemes, and clubs have every reason to publicise high modal shares as evidence of their environmental credentials. But the direction of travel is consistent with the wider integrated ticketing literature. Removing the friction of buying a separate ticket genuinely changes behaviour.
The crucial point is that the German model does not make the cost vanish. What the Kombiticket does is reassign the payment, building it into the admission price so it is shared across every ticket holder rather than charged at the point of travel, and channelling it through a transport association that already has the commercial relationships to settle the bill. This is based on a simple understanding that all fans benefit from having as many of them travel to the stadium using public transport as possible, therefore they should all chip in to cover the cost.
This is where the boring world of transport governance comes into its own. New Jersey, lacking that integrating institution and facing a one off event with no established cost sharing arrangement, had to charge the cost explicitly and visibly at the fare gate. The difference between a celebrated model and a vilified one is partly a difference of plumbing.
Before we hate on New Jersey too much, its worthwhile remembering that they are hardly an outlier here. For the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the Île-de-France transport authority nearly doubled the price of a single metro ticket, from €2.10 to €4.00, for the duration of the Games. A ten ticket carnet rose from €16.90 to €32. The regional president, Valérie Pécresse, justified the surcharge in language almost identical to Governor Sherrill’s, declaring that it was out of the question for the residents of Île-de-France to finance the Games.
The Paris scheme is instructive because it shows a more refined version of the same instinct. The surcharge applied to single tickets bought by visitors, but holders of the monthly and annual Navigo passes, overwhelmingly locals, were shielded entirely. The authority also introduced a dedicated Paris 2024 pass at €16 a day or €70 a week, partly to manage the queueing problem that a surge of one off ticket purchases would otherwise create. This is price discrimination in the technical sense, and it is doing something New Jersey’s flat surcharge did not. It separates the captive daily user, who is protected, from the visiting event goer, who pays the premium. The principle that residents should not subsidise a transient mega event is preserved, but the burden is aimed more precisely at the population that can absorb it.
That said, Paris was not spared criticism. There were objections that the measure penalised volunteers and lower income residents who lacked a Navigo pass, and the advice to locals to stockpile cheap tickets before the surcharge took effect rather gave the game away. A two tier fare is administratively neat, but it still rests on a judgement about who counts as a visitor and who counts as a resident, and that judgement is rarely as clean as the policy implies.
The obvious question for a British reader is why the English game, with a fanbase every bit as large and loyal as Germany’s and home to ninety-two professional football clubs, has nothing resembling the Kombiticket. The answer is that the Premier League and the Football League have largely left matchday travel to individual clubs, and the results are a patchwork. The Campaign for Better Transport, in its Door to Turnstile report, pointed out that in the Premier League alone more than 650,000 fans travel to matches every week, a movement of people on the scale of a small city, yet no league wide framework exists to help them do it without a car.
A few clubs have built something good. Newcastle United’s Magpie Mover gives season ticket holders matchday public transport across Tyne and Wear for around £25 for the whole season, which is about as close to the German model as English football gets. Arsenal, working with Transport for London and others, cut the share of fans arriving by car from roughly 30 per cent to 10 per cent after moving from its historic home at Highbury to the Emirates, largely through transport planning rather than pricing. At the other end, the same research found that Old Trafford, the home of my club Manchester United, is not well served by high capacity public transport and at the time of the research was operating on a travel plan nearly a decade out of date. The contrast with Dortmund, where a single integrated arrangement covers every fan automatically, is stark.
I want to be fair to the clubs, because the fragmentation is not entirely their fault. The German model is enabled by regional transport associations that pool operators under one fare structure, and the fractured British public transport system offers no equivalent partner to negotiate with. A club that wanted to replicate the Kombiticket would have to strike separate deals with multiple train operators, a bus company and, in the larger cities, a tram network, each with its own commercial incentives.
It is worth pausing on what the evidence says supporters themselves want. The Door to Turnstile research, which surveyed more than a thousand fans, found that rail is comfortably the mode supporters most wish they could use more, with thirty-six per cent naming the train as the option they would like to use more often, ahead of the bus on twenty-three per cent and the tram or tube on seventeen per cent. For away games, fifty-seven per cent already take the train for at least some fixtures. The appetite is clearly there, but so are the barriers.
Fans reported being put off rail by rising ticket prices, inflexible booking arrangements and engineering works, and one barrier is peculiar to football. Because kick off times are frequently moved at short notice to suit television audiences, supporters often cannot commit to the cheap advance fares that make rail affordable, since booking early risks holding a ticket for a train that no longer fits the times of kick off and full time. The result is that the fans most willing to take the train are penalised by the very flexibility that television broadcasters demand. Campaign for Better Transport’s proposed remedies followed directly from this. It called for a One-Two Ticket that would let a match ticket double as a local transport ticket, explicitly modelled on the German Kombiticket, and for a dedicated football supporters’ railcard to soften the advance fare problem. Neither has been adopted at any scale.
There is an environmental dimension too. A study of spectator travel to English football by Dosumu, Colbeck and Bragg, drawing on more than 1,600 respondents, documented a heavy dependence on the car and limited car sharing among fans, with the associated emissions scaling up substantially at national level. The lesson is not that fans are indifferent to sustainability, but that they default to the car when the public transport offer is fragmented, expensive or unreliable, which is exactly what an integrated matchday ticket is designed to fix.
Set these cases side by side and a pattern emerges that the academic literature has been describing for years. The foundational synthesis is Graham Currie and Amer Shalaby’s review of transport planning for the world’s largest events, published in Transport Reviews, which treats demand management rather than raw capacity as the core discipline of event transport. The most effective interventions are those that flatten or redistribute the peak, through staggered arrivals, expanded service windows and behavioural nudges, rather than those that simply price people off the network.
In a funny way, football clubs in the English game have been doing this already, even if they don’t know it. In recent years, there has been a commercial push by clubs to hold more activities before and after matches, with the intention to bring in additional commercial revenue for the club. The prime example of this is Tottenham Hotspur, where their new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium keeps concession stands, bars, and food outlets open before and after the match to encourage people to stay. These are often supplemented by tours of parts of the stadium, the museum, and even talks from former players. It is also home to an F1 Driving Experience, and a Skywalk of the stadium roof. All of which do their little bit to encourage fans to arrive earlier and leave later.
Currie’s later work with Adam Jones and Janet Woolley on the London 2012 Olympics introduced the memorable idea of the “big scare,” the observation that much of the demand management success in London came not from the formal plan but from sustained public messaging that persuaded regular travellers to stay away or change their routes. London managed a far larger peak than any World Cup match, through information and capacity, without resorting to a punitive matchday fare.
The integrated ticketing evidence points the same way. A stated preference study of car commuters in Sweden found that integrated ticketing had a positive effect on the willingness to switch from car to public transport, and cited a UK Department for Transport estimate that national integrated smart ticketing could be worth over £1 billion a year. The repeated finding, across that work, the German Kombiticket experience and the Department for Transport’s own appraisal, is that bundling and simplifying fares increases public transport use, whereas adding cost and complexity at the point of travel suppresses it. If the goal of a transit only event is to maximise the share of fans arriving by public transport, a high, visible, separately purchased fare is close to the worst available instrument. It manages the peak by deterring travel altogether, which is effective only in the perverse sense that the empty trains of priced off fans are indeed less crowded.
Britain has its own unresolved version of this crowd management issue, and Wembley is the sharpest illustration of it. The national stadium handles upwards of 80,000 people on event days with no general spectator parking and, in practice, near total dependence on a single London Underground station. Wembley Park, on the Jubilee and Metropolitan lines and connected to the stadium by the wide pedestrian sweep of Olympic Way3, does most of the heavy lifting. The other two stations are far more marginal than the stadium’s own literature implies. Wembley Stadium station, served by Chiltern Railways from Marylebone, is unstaffed and effectively closed except on event days, and for the very largest crowds Chiltern has shut it entirely when it lacks the trains and crew to run it safely. Wembley Central is a secondary option subject to managed queuing. And when engineering works take out the Underground lines through Wembley Park itself, as happened before a National League play off final in 2025, the whole crowd is thrown onto the two lesser stations at once. The system copes on most days through capacity and crowd management rather than any thought out pricing strategy, and on the wrong weekend it does not cope at all.
Nearly two decades ago the London Assembly produced a report, A Question of Sports Travel, that looked into matchday travel to the capital’s stadiums and concluded that integrated ticketing, of broadly the German kind, should be introduced so a fan could buy a single ticket covering both entry to the match and travel. That recommendation has largely gone nowhere.
This is where I come down, and I want to state it as a judgement rather than a certainty. Pricing public transport for sporting events is a legitimate tool, and the cost recovery instinct behind both the New Jersey and the Paris surcharges is defensible. There is nothing inherently wrong with asking the beneficiaries of a temporary surge to contribute to its cost, and the symmetric version of this argument is one I would apply across the board, including to events I happen to like.
But the evidence is fairly consistent that a high, visible fare charged at the point of travel is a clumsy instrument that achieves cost recovery at the expense of access and, often, at the expense of the modal shift the event was supposed to deliver. The German model is more attractive not because it is free, which it is not, but because it resolves the same cost allocation question through integration and bundling rather than through paying at the station ticket office or ticket machine as a penalty. The supporters’ own stated preferences point in exactly that direction.
New Jersey’s climbdown from $150 to $98 is being told as a story about political pressure and corporate sponsorship riding to the rescue. I think it is better understood as a transport authority discovering, in real time and in public, that it had reached for the wrong instrument. The cost of moving 40,000 people in an hour is real, and someone has to pay it. The question the Bundesliga answered thirty five years ago, and the one the London Assembly posed and Britain never resolved, is whether you make fans confront that cost at the turnstile of the railway or quietly fold it into the price of the game. The places that chose the second answer have, on the whole, moved more people more cheaply with less acrimony. That is the difference between treating transport as a barrier to be priced and treating it as part of the event itself.
This final point is much more important than many transport professionals think it is. Travelling to and from the stadium is part of the experience of going to match as much as the ninety minutes of action. As a Manchester United fan who goes to watch his team at least once a season, I can tell you the experience without missing a beat. Once I board the tram at Piccadilly, it is often busy with expectant fans. Some friends are in the corner discussing whether Bruno Fernandes will be asked to play in the Number 10 role or drop deeper into midfield. A father is with his excited son taking him to his first match. Another group at the far end of the carriage has started a rendition of United Calypso.
Then, at the Old Trafford tram stop, we all pile off. As we walk past the cricket ground everyone’s pace picks up. During midweek games, the light from the floodlights of the stadium glows above the houses in the distance. Just before we head onto Sir Matt Busby Way, I hang a left and pick up some fish and chips at Lou Macari’s Chip Shop. As I leave and head towards the stadium everyone is excited, with people pouring out from streets and back alleys to walk to the stadium as one. Horns blowing, chants becoming louder, the conversation quick and excited by what lies ahead.
While Manchester United do not have a combined match and travel ticket, this is what taking public transport to the stadium offers the match-going fan. It builds the anticipation and atmosphere, and the excitement in a way that driving in a car cannot. This is why, for me, no matter the merits of the NJ Transit and Paris approach, spreading the cost and reducing the barriers to using public transport in the way that Germany does makes the whole experience of going to match a much better one for all involved. No matter what the result is.
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👩🎓 Further Reading
The clever clogs at our universities, government departments, and other clever people have published the following excellent research. Where you are unable to access the research, email the author – they may give you a copy of the research paper for free.
The clever clogs at our universities, government departments, and other clever people have published the following excellent research on moving crowds to and from major sporting events. Where you are unable to access the research, email the author, as they may give you a copy of the research paper for free.
TL:DR - Published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, this paper runs a stated preference survey and two mixed logit models to work out which bundled MaaS packages spectators would actually subscribe to when travelling to the Hangzhou Games. It finds strong behavioural inertia and wide variation in what different fans want from a bundle, which is a useful corrective to the assumption that offering an integrated travel product is enough on its own to shift behaviour.
Understanding changes in traffic demand during the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games
TL:DR - This study in Transportation Research Part A uses disaggregated trip records and a difference-in-differences design to isolate the effect of the expressway toll surcharges applied during the Games. It estimates that the surcharges cut passenger vehicle demand by 25 per cent on weekdays and 36.8 per cent at weekends, and because freight was exempt it can separate the pricing effect from everything else going on, which is exactly the kind of clean identification the field usually lacks.
TL:DR - A mixed-methods evaluation in Case Studies on Transport Policy combining metro ridership data with resident surveys, reporting a 73 per cent jump in metro ridership and a fall of 2.8 car trips per week per resident during the tournament. The honest limitation, which the authors flag themselves, is a reliance on self-reported behaviour and the exclusion of tourists, so the resident-side findings are stronger than the visitor picture.
TL:DR - Also in the Journal of Cleaner Production, this one takes a single Bundesliga-level case, Rapid Vienna, and quantifies the emissions attached to how fans actually travel to a home game. The striking headline is the asymmetry, with the 42.4 per cent arriving by car producing 71.6 per cent of emissions while the 52.8 per cent using public transport account for just 27.1 per cent, which makes the case for modal shift about as vividly as a single club study can.
TL:DR - The supply-side companion to the Tokyo demand study above, also in Transportation Research Part A, evaluating physical traffic system management such as onramp closures and junction control against a constructed counterfactual. It finds delays cut by nearly 27 per cent on weekdays and argues for intensifying these measures during peak hours, a reminder that pricing is only half the toolkit and that managing the network itself does a lot of the work.
😀 Positive News
Plenty of good news on getting fans to the big occasion without a car lately, much of it prompted by a World Cup summer and a Winter Olympics that both leaned hard on public transport. Here are a few from the last few months that caught my eye.
Free rides home on SEPTA after every World Cup match in Philadelphia
The City of Philadelphia confirmed on 10 June 2026 that, through a partnership with tournament sponsor Airbnb, the ride home on SEPTA’s Broad Street Line would be free after all six of the city’s World Cup matches, with late-night service added on every match day and trains running every 30 minutes overnight. With Lincoln Financial Field sitting inside the city on a direct metro line, Philadelphia has quietly ended up with the cleanest fan-travel offer of any US host, and the free return is a neat nudge that removes the one friction point, the journey home, that most often pushes people back towards cars and cabs.
Los Angeles runs direct, car-free transit to every World Cup match
In the run-up to the tournament LA Metro and a dozen regional partners set up direct, nonstop bus and rail service to every World Cup match at SoFi Stadium, with no transfers and no expensive stadium parking, alongside commemorative World Cup TAP cards and enhanced Metrolink trains. For a region with a reputation for car dependence, persuading fans to reach a major venue entirely by public transport is a genuinely notable shift, and one Metro clearly hopes will leave a habit behind after the final whistle.
Kansas City’s ConnectKC26 offers free airport buses and low-cost tournament passes
Kansas City built a dedicated ConnectKC26 motorcoach network for the World Cup, with a free Airport Direct service linking the airport to the downtown fan festival, a flat $5 fare from the fan festival to Arrowhead Stadium, and unlimited regional passes at $5 a day or $50 for the whole tournament. It is a rare example of a mid-sized, car-oriented American city standing up a genuinely affordable, integrated event-travel product from scratch, and the pricing is deliberately pitched to keep fans out of their cars rather than to recover costs from them.
The South Tyrol Guest Pass puts Winter Olympic travel in the room rate
During February’s Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, South Tyrol leaned on its Guest Pass, a scheme that folds the cost of regional public transport into the price of accommodation so that visitors travel on trains and buses without buying a separate ticket. The province reported 5.7 million passes issued and 7.85 million public transport journeys in the previous year alone, and Trenitalia used the Games to trail new cross-border high-speed links to Munich with Deutsche Bahn and ÖBB. It is the accommodation-bundled cousin of the German Kombiticket, and a reminder that the most effective way to get people onto trains is often to make the fare invisible.
Everton’s new waterfront stadium leans on foot, rail and the Mersey ferry
Everton’s move to the Hill Dickinson Stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock for the 2025/26 season has been built around a deliberately car-light matchday model, with road closures creating safe walking routes from the city centre, enhanced Merseyrail services to Sandhills and neighbouring stations, cycle parking along the dock wall, and a matchday Mersey Ferries cross-river shuttle from the Wirral. Coordinated through a Liverpool City Region transport working group, it is a rare chance to design fan travel around walking, rail and water from day one rather than retrofitting it, and a useful English test case as the same stadium prepares to host UEFA Euro 2028 matches.
💻 Hard Work
This week has been an unspectacular one, as I have had my head in developing PowerBI dashboards to support the development of a transport strategy. I wish I could say it was more thrilling than that.
🎶 Musical Finale
Every World Cup has an unofficial anthem, and for England, this time its Wonderwall. I remember belting this out in my room at home over the Christmas of 1995, much to the annoyance of my mother who came to hate the song because of it. Good times.
🪧 Notices
This section is intended to notify you of important things that may or may not annoy you, depending on your view of the world. But these are things I feel it is worthwhile pointing out.
Regarding Artificial Intelligence. For my newsletter, I use AI like a research assistant. I get the AI (in my case Claude Opus 4.8) to find for me well-cited and evidenced research in the subject matter, focussed on academic journals with a high impact factor. I follow this up with my own research, and I check each source myself. Where I have the time to, I contact domain experts or seek out their published works to validate the findings. The words written here are my own, spelling mistakes and all.
Regarding my expertise. I am a transport planner, so my realm is public policy, how people and things move, and their impacts. While I research everything in a manner I consider robust, there may be some instances where my lack of domain expertise fails me. That’s on me, but that’s all part of learning. I always encourage any reader to do their own research on the subject matter.
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I personally would say that FIFA as an organisation has a chilling effect on everything it touches, but this article is not about my personal view of that money grabbing bunch of charlatans.
For those of you who are not football fans, the German Bundesliga is the domestic football league for football clubs in Germany. It is one of the five biggest domestic football leagues in the world, along with the English Premier League, the Spanish La Liga, the Italian Serie A, and the French Ligue 1.
I know this is the actual name of it, but it will always be Wembley Way to me.