The sports economy is unaffordable at the bar, let alone the stadium

Sports fans aren’t just being priced out of the arena anymore — they’re being priced out of the bar. A new Intuit Credit Karma survey of 1,747 fans, conducted by The Harris Poll, found that one in five say rising costs have pushed them out of watch parties and sports bars entirely. Not the $67,000 World Cup final ticket. Not the $279,804 courtside Knicks seat. The $12 beer. So it’s not all that surprising to see sports fans tightening their belts and spending less money not only on tickets, but also going out to bars—or the opposite end of the spectrum, where sports fans are more willing to take on credit card debt to see their favorite team in action. According to a new Intuit Credit Karma survey of 1,747 sports fans conducted by The Harris Poll, the uptick in ticket prices is forcing a large split in the sports world: people are either eating the increased cost to go see a game in person, or they’re skipping out on the consolation prize of a sports bar entirely. “Obviously it’s much cheaper to go to a bar and have a couple of beers than go to Madison Square Garden,” Courtney Alev, Consumer Financial Advocate at Intuit Credit Karma, told Fortune. “But even that has gotten really expensive for a lot of people—even those are becoming hard to overcome for a lot of consumers, even if they are fans.” This is the split defining sports fandom in 2026: record ticket prices at the top, and a vanishing floor at the bottom. The cheapest seat to the World Cup Final in New York on July 19 costs $10,329—more than four times the city’s median monthly mortgage payment of $2,523, according to a Rocket Mortgage analysis of resale prices from TicketData. Rocket The Harris Poll, conducted between June 17–22, paints a picture of a fandom economy splitting in two. At one end: nearly half of sports fans (47%) say they’d attend a championship involving their team “no matter the cost,” with one in five saying the