Dec 16 (Reuters) - Scotland manager Steve Clarke has urged supporters to avoid plunging into debt to attend next year's FIFA World Cup in North America, warning of steep travel and ticket costs.
Last week, Football Supporters Europe (FSE) called on FIFA to immediately halt sales of national team allocations, accusing the governing body of imposing "extortionate" ticket prices that risk shutting ordinary fans out of the tournament.
Ticket prices have jumped five-fold from the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, according to FSE.
Scotland will face five-time winners Brazil, 2022 semi-finalists Morocco and Haiti in Group C, with thousands of fans expected to travel to see the team playing in their first World Cup since 1998.
"Listen, it's expensive to go to America anyway. Even if you're going on holiday to America, you need to save up and you need to save up and you need to save up to get across the Atlantic and have your holiday there," Clarke told Sky Sports on Monday.
"So it was always going to be an expensive World Cup. The ticket prices are set with FIFA. My biggest wish is that people don't put themselves into too much debt trying to get there. If you can afford to go, then great. But if you can't afford to go, then understand it.
"Don't put yourself and your family into debt. I'd like to think that with the smaller allocation that we've got, that a lot of the fans will travel everywhere. I'm talking about going to the far-flung places, but maybe only 1,200 people will turn up."
FIFA has not directly responded to the outcry about high prices, but said last week it received five million requests for World Cup 2026 tickets in the first 24 hours of the latest sales phase.
(Reporting by Aadi Nair in Nashik, India; Editing by Jacqueline Wong)
