# Evidence Package — "FIFA Promised You a $1,550 Ticket. Then Charged You $32,970."

National Ledger Report · Published 2026-07-11

This is the full research record behind our video on FIFA's World Cup
2026 ticket pricing and the multi-state, multi-country investigations it
triggered. We're publishing it so you can check our work directly, not
just take our word for it.

## This is a live story — read this before anything else

Unlike our other investigations, the event this video covers was **still
happening** when we published: the tournament runs through July 19,
2026, and every investigation named in this video — the joint New York/
New Jersey subpoena, the California and Texas probes, the British
Columbia inquiry into StubHub, and the European Commission's monopoly
complaint — was **open, with no finding or resolution**, as of our
research date. Treat every status in this package as "as of 2026-07-11,"
not as a final outcome.

## What's in here

- **CASE_FILE.md** — our complete research file: every claim in the
  video, where it came from, and an explicit accounting of exactly how
  we decided to handle real, viral, ordinary-person content (see the
  "Decision (locked 2026-07-11)" section) — including two real Reddit
  comments the video quotes, and why we deliberately chose *not* to use
  a separate viral claim we couldn't verify.
- **SOURCES.md** — every outlet cited, by name, with links.
- **recreations/** — the two graphics recreated for this video from
  independently verified numbers: a World Cup ticket stub (based on
  Newsweek's reporting on a real family's seat reassignment) and a
  stadium concession receipt (based on ESPN's own itemized reporting).
  **Both are explicitly labeled on screen as recreations, not real
  photographs** — we rebuilt the numbers in our own visual style rather
  than using anyone's actual photo, out of respect for other people's
  copyright, even when the underlying facts are fully verified.

## A note on how we handled "viral" content in this one

This video covers a story that a lot of ordinary people were already
filming, screenshotting, and posting about. We made a deliberate choice
not to re-post anyone's actual photos, screenshots, or video clips —
even with credit — because attribution doesn't erase someone else's
copyright in their own content. Instead, every real creator or account
quoted in this video (a TikTok creator's price comparison, two Reddit
users' comments) is credited by name/handle for the specific claim they
made, recreated in our own on-brand graphic style. The full reasoning is
in `CASE_FILE.md`.

## Our standard

We follow the money, not the politics. If we got something wrong, tell
us — this package exists so you can find out if we did.
