A World Cup seat now costs a median of $900. The world’s top tours gross 60 percent more than they did in 2019. And in Bangladesh, the official price of recreation is climbing faster than the price of almost everything else. Inside the inflation that only touches the things we enjoy, and what it tells brands about where attention is worth paying for.

BBF RESEARCH DESK

Inflation is supposed to be indiscriminate. It is not. Over the past three years, one category has pulled steadily away from the rest: the things people do for pleasure. Concerts, matches, festivals and holidays have been rising in price faster than the goods sitting beside them in the basket, and economists have given the pattern a name. Funflation is now a measurable line in the price data of two continents, and in 2026 it is accelerating again.

The clearest example is playing out right now. FIFA’s first 48-team World Cup, co-hosted by the United States, has fetched a median ticket price above $900, according to TicketData. Asked by CNBC about the cost, FIFA president Gianni Infantino called attending a match a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” with demand far beyond that of past tournaments. He was describing the pricing model out loud.

Brian LeBlanc, senior economist at PNC Financial Services, gave CNBC the summary this month: “Funflation is back in 2026.” PNC’s data show prices for sporting events and amusement parks climbing fast enough to push up core PCE, the inflation gauge the US Federal Reserve watches most closely. Fun has grown large enough to move a central bank’s favourite number.

Why fun inflates faster than everything else

Begin with what an experience is. A phone that gets expensive can be manufactured more cheaply next year. A Friday-night stadium cannot. Live events carry labour, security and production costs that no automation dividend reduces, and their supply is fixed by definition: one final, one reunion, one tour date in your city.

Scarcity is the product rather than a side effect of it. Alan Krueger, the late Princeton economist who spent years studying the music business, showed that by the mid-2000s live performance had already overtaken recorded music as the main income of performers. That turned the concert from a promotional expense into the business itself, and pricing followed the logic airlines discovered a generation earlier. Move from fixed fares to yield management, sell the same seat at whatever each buyer will bear, and let the queue sort the room.

Every force that eventually brings down the price of a television works in reverse on the price of a ticket.

The boom is real, and the numbers are remarkable

Pollstar’s year-end accounting for 2025 put the worldwide top 100 tours at $8.9 billion in gross on 67.3 million tickets. That is 6.1 percent below 2024’s record, and still 60.8 percent above 2019. The average ticket for those tours has risen from $96.17 in 2019 to $132.62 last year, peaking at $135.92 in 2024 before easing by 2.4 percent, the first cooling of the post-pandemic run.

Then 2026 opened at full sprint. Pollstar’s first-quarter box office recorded the strongest opening three months since the pandemic, with the top 100 artists grossing $1.36 billion, up 15.7 percent year on year, at an average ticket price of $108.63.

Source: Pollstar year-end and quarterly box office analysis. Quarterly and annual averages are not directly comparable.

The averages conceal where the money actually collects. Stadium tickets averaged $216.13 in 2025, up 18.3 percent on the year and 29 percent on 2023, while the average stadium show grossed $7.11 million. At the other end, venues holding 750 people or fewer averaged $34.74 a ticket and sold 278 seats a night, 3.5 percent fewer than the year before. The industry is growing at the top and thinning in the clubs. Premiumisation, in other words, is doing most of the work.

Two cases: Manchester and Mumbai

When Oasis announced their reunion, British fans watched standing tickets advertised at £135 climb past £350 while they queued online. Ticketmaster had released the cheaper tiers first and the dearer ones as those sold out, so the queue itself became the pricing mechanism. Demand ran so far ahead of supply that waiting cost money.

Mumbai ran the more instructive experiment. When Coldplay announced their first Indian shows in nine years, BookMyShow’s app buckled under the load and one fan found 700,000 people ahead of her in the queue. Face values ran from roughly $30 to $417. A Delhi student told CNN that he and his friends had worked out that flying four hours to see the band in Abu Dhabi came in cheaper than buying at home. Fans were arbitraging concerts across borders the way traders arbitrage currencies.

The lesson global promoters drew from Mumbai was not about chaos. It was about depth. At Pollstar Live! in 2026, agents and promoters described India and Latin America as core touring markets rather than exotic stops, and tours that once played 40 North American dates now play 30 at home and 10 abroad. South Asian demand has become visible on the routing map, and it is being priced accordingly.

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

Gianni Infantino, FIFA President, on World Cup ticket prices, speaking to CNBC, July 2026

The surge followed people home

Staying in was always the cheap alternative to going out. In 2026 it stopped being cheap. Netflix, Amazon and Spotify all raised subscription prices this year, following Disney and HBO Max in late 2025, and Apple has now lifted the price of TV+ in three consecutive years. Nintendo raised the US price of the Switch 2 by 11 percent. Apple, announcing device increases in late June, conceded in a statement that this was “not welcome news.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers show how uneven the squeeze has been. Subscribing to or renting videos and video games costs 53 percent more than it did in 2019. Electricity, which powers all of it, is up 45 percent. Recreational books, meanwhile, have fallen 4 percent, which is one reason some households have quietly gone back to reading.

Home leisure is no longer the discount option. PNC found Gen Z and Millennial consumers each cut home-entertainment transactions by about 4 percent in June 2026.

Dhaka’s own funflation, and what it proves

Bangladesh does not need to import this story. It is already in the national statistics, and it has been for months.

The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics compiles the CPI across twelve categories, and one of them is recreation and culture. Since March, that category has run above headline inflation every single month: 9.26 percent against a headline of 8.71 percent in March, 9.85 against 9.04 in April, 10.09 against 9.42 in May, and 9.80 against 9.16 in June. Restaurants and hotels touched 10.88 percent in April. National wage growth over the same stretch has sat around 8.18 percent.

The space between the red line and the navy line is Bangladesh’s funflation, in the government’s own numbers.

Read that gap as a demand signal, because that is what it is. Prices rise fastest in the categories people are least willing to give up. Recreation and culture is behaving like a category with genuine pricing power in a market where households are otherwise counting every taka, and it is doing so while the ticketing infrastructure to support it (Shohoz, Tickify, Eventa and a widening set of local platforms) has only existed at scale for a few years.

For organisers and brands, the strategic reading is straightforward. Bangladeshi consumers are not abandoning experiences. They are concentrating a squeezed budget on fewer, better ones, which rewards whoever can make an evening feel unrepeatable. And it hands marketers something increasingly rare: a setting where the audience chose to be there, paid for the privilege, and is giving its attention voluntarily. Very little media buying can claim as much.

What brands should take from the price of fun

Publish the tiers and label them honestly. A young market’s cheapest asset is trust, and the fastest way to spend it is to let a buyer discover after the fact that the seat was not what the name implied. Visible cheap sections cost a promoter some surplus this season and keep the room full next season.

Sell the memory rather than the seat. Live Nation told investors that concerts are “one of the last experiences fans will cut back on,” and the behavioural reason sits behind every number in this piece. An experience now doubles as a social asset, the post functions as the receipt, and missing the event means missing the conversation about it.

Watch the middle of the market most closely. Every dataset here tells the same story of growth at the top and thinning at the bottom, and the seats that vanish first are the ones an ordinary household was going to buy. An organiser reading only the revenue line will not notice the room narrowing until the crowd that made the event worth attending has stopped turning up.

Author
Fariha Jahin