How the geopolitical landscape and war in Iran are making sports fandom even more expensive

Morgan Campbell · CBC Sports

· Posted: Apr 02, 2026 10:56 AM EDT | Last Updated: 2 minutes ago

When the U.S. men’s national flag football team walloped a group of NFLers in a mid-March tournament at BMO Stadium in Los Angeles last month, the outcome was a surprise but not a plot twist. 

As 11-on-11 tackle football players, these guys might have peaked years ago, but without pads and collisions football is a different sport. Younger NFL stars haven’t played no-contact football for stakes since high school 7-on-7 leagues and guys Tom Brady’s age have only ever played that way in practice. The national teamers have been treating it like a full-time job this whole time, and we all figured it out watching the U.S. national team win the Flag Football Classic on March 22.

The setting — sunny Los Angeles and not sunny Saudi Arabia — represented a late game change of plans, but shouldn’t have shocked anyone. Not since U.S.-led military attacks on Iran, which began Feb. 28, triggered retaliatory strikes across the Middle East. One target — the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, the Saudi Arabian city originally slated to host the football jamboree.

Before the first U.S. missiles hit Tehran, maybe you couldn’t have located the Strait of Hormuz on a map. But five weeks later you can draw a straight line from there to your bank account, which is likely feeling the effects as Iran restricts traffic on the critical shipping route, raising the price of petroleum and all its derivatives.

As for celebrity flag football, the spectre of Iranian attacks made hosting it in Riyadh a non-starter. So the games landed in Los Angeles, where people interested in watching in person could do so for the cost of tickets, parking and time spent battling Southern California traffic.

Otherwise, according to a search on Skyscanner.ca, a round-trip flight from L.A. to Riyadh would cost about $2,000 Cdn in economy, while first-class flights start at just under $30,000, and climb to $75,000 if you really want to ride in style.

In other words, the flag football fiends in the BMO Stadium stands were about the only sports fans on the planet to benefit from the ripple effects of this war.

For everyone else, the conflict is already reshaping the sports calendar, casting a shadow on this summer’s FIFA World Cup, and threatening to raise the ceiling on the already sky-high cost of sports fandom. U.S. President Donald Trump rambled through a Thursday night address in which he said the hard part of the war was over, without declaring either surrender or victory.

WATCH | Upcoming World Cup facing a geopolitical crisis:

But from here, for the sports world, it’s tough to see any winners.

The Trump regime’s objective for the latest of military attacks on Iran remains murky.

Preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons?

Trump told us the U.S. obliterated Iran’s capability last June.

Regime change?

Iran’s previous leader, Ali Khameni, was killed in a U.S. air strike; his son, Mojtaba, has taken his place. 

World peace?

A tough case to argue as casualties pile up on all sides, and as the U.S. threatens to leave NATO because other members won’t join the attacks.

But maybe you don’t care about how many non-combatants die in a war the U.S. started on a flimsy premise, or the potential rupturing of a previously rock-solid military alliance, or the dominoes that can topple when the world’s greatest military power acts like a rogue state. You’re here because you like sports, so I’ll stick to them.

The Formula One season is on an unplanned five-week hiatus after cancelling scheduled races in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, and can you blame them? Yes, the sports economy depends heavily on our bad bets, but with missiles and drones flying, why would F1 want to gamble with catastrophe? 

As for the World Cup, it’s scheduled to kick off in 10 weeks, with Trump threatening to impose the equivalent of a head tax on spectators and athletes from five African countries, calling the $15,000 charge a “bond.” 

That threat hangs over Iran’s presence at the tournament. They’re slated to play opening-round matches in L.A. and Seattle, and a round-of-32 showdown with the U.S. is possible. The spectrum of possible atmospheres for that matchup runs from awkward to tense to disastrous. Factor in the president’s grandstanding and we’re left with more unsavoury scenarios. It’s tough to envision exactly how geopolitics might affect the World Cup, but easy to imagine that they will.

We don’t have to forecast other ripple effects of the war in Iran. They’re already here.

That steep upward spike in this graph measuring average gas prices in Canada? It corresponds with the start of the war, which prompted Iran to choke off the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 per cent of the world’s crude oil travels.

Trickle-down effect

If you’re paying more for fuel then so are airlines, which are raising prices in response to inflated petroleum costs. 

And you know who consumes massive quantities of jet fuel?

The charter companies shuttling your favourite sports teams across the continent.

According to the International Council on Clean Transportation, which tracked fuel usage among the five major North American men’s pro sports leagues through 2018, the average NBA team burned 269,521 gallons of jet fuel per season. 

If the required amount of travel has held steady since then, the cost of fuelling planes hasn’t. In January 2026, jet fuel averaged $0.55 US per litre, but by late March that figure had risen to $1.22. (Hat tip to Paul Krugman, whose daily newsletter linked me to these stats.)

Extreme back-of-the-envelope math incoming, but the logic stands. If a season of NBA team travel cost $148,000 at previous fuel prices, it’ll run a shade under $329,000 at today’s rates. If those carriers are like any other business they’ll pass that price bump on to their clients, who will in turn offload that burden to their customers.

And by “their customers,” I mean you and me, and anybody else buying tickets and merchandise and ballpark food, which is subject to the same price pressures as our groceries. The fertilizer that helps grow the vegetables we eat and the feed that bulks up livestock; the diesel powering the trucks hauling food and beer to the arena; the plastic pylons teams use at practice – it all comes from petrochemicals, which means it costs more now than it did six months ago.

Eventually, if team owners want to protect profit margins, which they almost always do, all those added costs will appear in the prices we pay. 

So if you thought sports fandom was expensive before, wait till this year.