FIFA's Ticket Resale Problem Is Pricing Ordinary Fans Out of the World's Biggest Tournament

On FIFA's resale marketplace, in which soccer's organizing body takes an additional cut from transaction fees, prices have soared into four to six figures for consumers. For a tournament that should belong to all fans, the 2026 World Cup has become a wealth barrier rather than a global celebration.

This is the scandal reshaping how we think about access to sport. There have even been tickets listed for more than $2 million on secondary platforms.

The numbers are staggering. In Los Angeles, where the U.S. men's national team will play twice, the average cheapest ticket for group-stage games 60 days out was $1,040.52 on FIFA's resale market. In Dallas, where global icon Lionel Messi will play two matches, the average cheapest ticket for group-stage games was $1,028. That's roughly double what the average American spends on food in a month.

The finals are significantly worse. By its latest sales windows starting in April, the same category of tickets cost $10,990. Overall, average prices across all standard group-stage matches on secondary platforms are hovering between $650 and $1,100, depending entirely on the venue and the popularity of the teams playing.

U.S. President Donald Trump also chimed in, discussing World Cup tickets that could go for more than $1,000. By pricing out ordinary fans, FIFA risks severely hurting the image of the tournament.

For the first time, FIFA has introduced dynamic pricing, leading to sharply higher prices for many World Cup games. This mechanism adjusts prices based on demand—in theory, a market-rate solution. In practice, it weaponizes scarcity.

Lawmakers across the U.S. have questioned FIFA's perplexing multi-category ticket-selling process, leading to a subpoena from the attorneys general of New York and New Jersey, who stated in a joint announcement that tickets have "far exceeded the prices for any previous World Cup tournament" thanks in part to dynamic pricing that can wildly inflate costs.

FIFA's system adds another layer of deception. One of the big peculiarities of World Cup ticket sales is that fans are not able to pick a specific seat until much later in the process. Initially, fans can only pick between four broad ticket categories; later they are assigned specific seats by FIFA.

FIFA reserves the right to adjust seating charts as it wants. That means, FIFA could increase the number of seats considered Category 1, so a fan who thought they were buying in a top-tier section could end up in a previously lower-category seat.

An authorized resale market like FIFA's marketplace enables the seller to control the exchange and charge commissions and is the seller's best revenue-maximizing mechanism. That is the core economic logic behind FIFA's resale platform. FIFA takes a 15% cut from both buyers and sellers, creating perverse incentives to keep prices inflated.

Other major sporting events have shown that restraint is possible. For the 2024 UEFA Champions League final—the pinnacle of club soccer—prices were set between $80 and $1,090. Unlike FIFA's policy, tickets had to be kept at face value on the resale market and had no fee charged to the seller.

There could be Americans who will pay more for a World Cup group-stage game in their own city than a neighbor who crossed the Atlantic to watch Paris Saint-Germain beat Arsenal for Europe's top club honors.

Recent weeks have revealed something darker: In late May, the number of tickets fans were able to purchase from the organization suddenly dropped by 44,000 to under 30,000. Following the sudden disappearance of over 40,000 tickets from the main platform, some have observed an uptick in the number available on the resale marketplace, as well as lower relative prices for certain fixtures.

Florian Ederer, a professor of economics at Boston University's Questrom School of Business, posted a SeatGeek stadium map on X with blocks of what he said were newly available seats for the June 26 Saudi Arabia-Cape Verde match. Ederer said the pattern of available tickets—"large, contiguous blocks of seats"—does not resemble typical fan or commercial scalper resale patterns, but rather that inventory had been dumped in bulk onto secondary markets, at prices below FIFA's official site.

The logic is simple: Official price cuts could trigger refund demands, chargebacks, or consumer-protection headaches from fans who already bought at much higher prices. By quietly dumping inventory on secondary markets, FIFA keeps headline prices high while clearing seats—and pocketing fees on every transaction.

There is one silver lining: Compared with prices 60 days out from the World Cup, the average cheapest ticket price across all 11 U.S. host cities fell by an average of 37%. In the Bay Area, which saw some of the sharpest declines, prices fell 59% on the official resale market.

But this offers cold comfort. At this point, even if prices drop, it's too late for most international fans to make plans to come to North America for matches. The damage is done. Families who cannot spend months planning around fluctuating ticket prices are frozen out. International World Cup visitors expect to spend more than $5,000 per person; 1.7 times more than typical international trips to the U.S.

Instead of a global celebration, FIFA has turned the World Cup into a luxury good, accessible only to corporate hospitality suites and the wealthy.

A generation of children are unable to experience events like the World Cup, the playoffs, or a finals game unless they've been born into enormous wealth. We are fast approaching a time where no kids have seen a sports event live with their parents because ticket prices are so expensive that it's impossible to justify a family night at a game.

The tournament starts June 11. For millions of fans around the world who dreamed of attending, that dream remains out of reach—not because of passion or merit, but because FIFA chose profit over access.

2026 World Cup Ticketing Scandal FAQ