LOS ANGELES — The U.S. Men’s National Team opens the 2026 World Cup against Paraguay on Friday night, and ticket prices remain sky-high.
Over the last three days, the get-in price for the game has increased by more than 50% on secondary resale sites, according to TicketData. The cheapest available get-in price as midday Friday was $1,205, and later more than $1,300, the site said, although FIFA’s own official resale site has tickets available for around $800. (TicketData does not list single tickets, a company spokeperson told Front Office Sports, while the cheapest FIFA resales were for singles.)
FIFA has kept its own prices for remaining inventory stubbornly high. Earlier Friday, more than 150 tickets remained available for the game on FIFA’s primary sale site, with a get-in price of $1,120.
On FIFA’s official resale site seats below $1,000 were few and far between, often offered as just a single seat.
From the start of the sales phase, FIFA priced the opening matches for the three host countries as some of the most expensive of the tournament. When FIFA first released tickets in the fall, prices for the U.S. opener ranged from $560 to $2,735.
Ticketing experts and hopeful fans alike expected prices across the board to fall once the tournament kicked off, but that drop has not yet happened. Resale ticket prices for group stage matches are up across all 16 host cities in three countries.
FIFA president Gianni Infantino defended the governing body’s ticket strategy in his opening press conference for the tournament on Wednesday. He argued that if FIFA had set prices lower, the tickets still would’ve been expensive on resale markets, and then the money would’ve gone to scalpers rather than global soccer.
“In this situation they could’ve gone down as well, they didn’t really go down, shows maybe the price point was the right one,” Infantino said, referring to FIFA’s dynamic pricing model.
FIFA Gets Defensive
Thursday’s tournament opener between Mexico and South Africa at Estadio Azteca sold out, but many empty seats were visible on the broadcast for South Korea’s 2–1 win that night over Czechia. The match’s official attendance was posted at 44,985 fans; FIFA on Wednesday posted the stadium’s capacity as 45,664 people.
On Friday, FIFA defended the empty seats, saying the official numbers “reflect the number of tickets scanned and spectators present within the stadium footprint, rather than visual assessments of seating occupancy at any given moment during the match.” FIFA went so far as to say “several ticketed fans could be seen standing in concourses rather than staying in their assigned seats.”
