After weeks of increasingly severe blowback over 2026 World Cup ticket costs, much of it from within the soccer community, FIFA has relented, somewhat, and is introducing a new, lower-cost level.
The global governing body said Tuesday that it is creating a new “Supporter Entry Tier” for World Cup tickets that carry a fixed price of $60 per match, including the tournament final. That cost is a marked difference from dynamically priced tickets for much of the World Cup inventory that have soared into the hundreds of dollars, even for group-stage matches, and beyond $4,000 for the July 19 final at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.
Football Supporters Europe estimated it would cost at least $6,900 for a single fan to follow their team from the group stage through the final. The new FIFA ticketing tier is designed to address that, to a degree.
Inventory Issues
The lower-cost tickets will be limited to about 500 seats per participating team, per match. FIFA is designating that 10% of each ticket allocation to a Participating Member Association (PMA), such as U.S. Soccer, will be in the new Supporter Entry Tier. The PMAs were each already set to get 8% of the total ticket inventory for each match, so the new, low-cost tickets will be a small subset of that.
FIFA said that inventory “will be allocated specifically to supporters of qualified teams, with the selection and distribution process managed individually by the Participating Member Associations.”
The move follows increasingly withering criticism around the world about perceived greed on the part of FIFA—particularly as the upcoming World Cup tickets will cost about five times as much in Qatar in 2022. FSE had called FIFA’s original pricing “extortionate.” Scotland, in thrall over its first World Cup berth since 1998, had to go so far as to warn fans not to incur excessive debt to watch the club.
FIFA also said Tuesday that it has now received more than 20 million ticket requests for the World Cup during an ongoing, lottery-based phase of its ticketing. That figure is quadruple the level from the end of last week, and adds to the nearly 2 million tickets sold during the two prior phases.
FSE, for its part, said there is more work to be done by FIFA to ensure proper treatment of fans.
“While we welcome FIFA’s seeming recognition of the damage its original plans were to cause, the revisions do not go far enough to reconcile,” the organization said in a statement. “The vast majority would still have to pay extortionate prices, way higher than any tournament before.”
Olympic Strategy
Organizers for the upcoming 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, meanwhile, also plan to begin registration for their ticketing on Jan. 14.
Officials said there will be at least 1 million tickets sold for $28, tying into the year of the event, and a third of the overall ticket inventory for those Games will be priced at $100 or less. The pricing plans have been long in development, and they are not a direct response to what’s occurred in recent days and weeks in and around the World Cup.
There is an unmistakable contrast, however.
“That’s not just lip service to a couple tickets in the corner of some venue, but a meaningful number of tickets,” LA28 SVP Allison-Katz-Mayfield said of the push for lower-cost access.
