FIFA lawyers force B.C. charity to scrap World Cup ticket raffle

A B.C. charity was forced to cancel a fundraising campaign after FIFA pulled out a red card and ordered them to stop.

Spinal Cord Injury BC was raffling off a pair of tickets to the New Zealand versus Egypt World Cup match at BC Place on June 21.

The tickets were valued at about $500 each and the charity was hoping to generate between $3,000 and $5,000 for each ticket.

“The nine-page letter from Lipkus Law was a bit of a surprise to us,” Chris McBride, executive director of Spinal Cord Injury BC, told Global News.

“We were clearly, we were a little naive, I think, when we entered into this raffle. We just saw it as a fun way to earn a little bit of really valuable revenue for our organization, but also to provide a fun way for our supporters to engage in a raffle that could potentially see them go to a World Cup match that they probably couldn’t otherwise afford.”

The letter stated that the campaign violated ticketing and trademark laws.

The charity had no choice but to cancel the fundraiser and refund the money to anyone who had bought tickets.

“We’ve done 50-50 raffles online for a little while now, but we just saw this as a unique opportunity,” McBride said.

“I mean, the World Cup coming to Vancouver, and it’s getting harder and harder to raise revenue these days. And we thought this was a unique opportunity to make a modest amount of revenue for our services.”

Spinal Cord Injury BC is a community-based charitable non-profit that provides peer support and information services to people and their families affected by spinal cord injury.

“We understood what the letter was telling us, what the rules and regulations were around trademark and ticket policies,” McBride said.

“And we really didn’t see a path forward to working with FIFA to allow for us to go forward. So, you know, we have very limited time and energy that we could spend on things like that. We have to focus our energy on delivering our services and raising funds in other ways. Yeah, we just made the calculation that it was better to shut it down.”

In a statement, FIFA said that tickets may not be used for any advertising, promotional or competition purposes, including raffles, sweepstakes or similar activities, without FIFA’s prior written consent.

McBride said it is unfortunate what happened.

“I think FIFA is very good at extracting resources from host communities,” he said.

“I don’t think there’s very good mechanisms for giving back to communities in meaningful ways, and … we feel that’s like a very unfortunate missed opportunity.”