👋 Good morning! It’s Saturday 13 June 2026. I’m Neil McIntosh, editor of The Early Line, and it’s great to have you here.
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☀️ The weekend’s weather: Showers today but brighter tomorrow for Glasgow, Aberdeen and Inverness, while Edinburgh should be dry both days. London is set for a fine weekend. (Here’s the UK forecast).
SIX THINGS TO TALK ABOUT
The expensive business of being in the Tartan Army | Musing on patriotism | Tech company ‘interfered in poll’ | SpaceX, and its vast numbers explained | Meet ‘Europe’s new Machiavelli’ | The Dundee semi with a pub in the garden
🍸 Being a footsoldier in the Tartan Army is an expensive business. Scotland fans are shelling out like few other nations’ fans to see Scotland perform at this summer’s World Cup. Analysis shows tickets for Scotland games are among the most expensive on resale platforms, while their host cities - Boston and Miami - are charging some of the highest hotel rates.
Why is this World Cup so expensive? As this excellent, brief, BBC explainer sets out, it’s largely down to FIFA: they’re “experimenting” with American football-style dynamic pricing for tickets, which has seen prices soar.
Fans are not, of course, being deterred. Boston was heaving last night, according to multiple reports, ahead of tonight’s game against Haiti. It’ll stay that way for the rest of the week and a game against Morocco on Friday, before the whole circus moves to Miami to take on mighty Brazil.
Reports Bloomberg: “The Tartan Army, determined not to miss a long-awaited opportunity to see their team on the World Cup stage, is one of the few groups that’s not letting the expense or the logistics stand in their way.”
Boston has attracted controversy for upping transport charges to actually get to the game - when, traditionally, transport within host cities would be free for fans. Again, blame FIFA: they’re not sharing revenues with host cities as they used to, which has incentivised those cities to charge fans through the nose for transport.
The Tartan Army has responded by putting on its own buses to the game.
“I keep thinking if FIFA arranged a World Cup on the moon, there would be a member of the Tartan Army putting on space shuttles,” Gordon Sheach, who runs the Tartan Scarf social media site, tells Bloomberg.
A BBC investigation found it would cost the average Scotland fan more than £7,500 just for the group stage of the tournament, assuming they attended all three matches. For a family, this would rise to £25,800. And yet that’s exactly what 20-30,000 supporters are doing.
Some estimates say up to 50,000 people will turn up, the balance of fans arriving in hope, without a ticket, but ready to party.
Upgrade to read the full Party Line, including
The verdict on Spielberg’s new space alien conspiracy thriller
A columnist’s smart musing on the changing faces of patriotism
Divided opinions on a controversial new TV comedy
An invitation to meet Europe’s “new Machiavelli”
The chance to buy a Dundee semi… with a pub in the garden
PLUS: find top TV, film and sporting picks for the weekend.
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