‘Buy a ticket for 60 bucks and resell it for $6,000’: NYC Mayor Mamdani criticized FIFA’s resale market, but his jersey drop created the same thing

For two months, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul have been building the infrastructure FIFA wouldn’t. Mamdani negotiated 1,000 World Cup tickets at $50 each with free roundtrip transportation for working-class New Yorkers, after N.J. Transit initially priced a match-day rail ticket at $150 to get to Met Life Stadium. The state then committed $6 million for a free watch party for 50,000 New Yorkers on Central Park’s Great Lawn, plus fan fests in all five boroughs. The city launched its most expansive ferry schedule in NYC Ferry history. All of it amounts to a publicly funded workaround for a tournament whose final tickets climbed to $32,970 on FIFA’s own portal—an event the New York and New Jersey attorneys general are now investigating for allegedly inflating prices by design. That’s why it was so confusing for many New Yorkers when the city seemingly used the FIFA playbook. In a GQ article published on Thursday, Mamdani announced an exclusive run of New York City-inspired World Cup jerseys. There would be only 1,500 shirts available to the public, and anyone who wanted to grab one had to go in person at the city’s official CityStore when it opened at 9 a.m. on Friday morning. Catherina Gioino for Fortune Less than 24 hours after the article went live, New Yorkers began camping outside the CityStore in the wee hours of Friday morning, according to The City Reporter‘s Katie Honan. Before the store even opened, people had formed a line that snaked around the David Dinkins building (where the CityStore is located) through a plaza behind the storied landmark, then up and around to the federal courthouse located a few blocks away. As the temperatures reached past 92 degrees and the line didn’t get any shorter, the $50 jerseys were selling on eBay for up to $1,150 a 2,000% markup. The markup is exactly what Mamdani spent his campaign railing against. In September, the then-candidate launched his “Game