One week out from the World Cup, ticket prices are still the single biggest topic of conversation.
Fans who are still hoping to attend the tournament are waiting for ticket prices to fall. FIFA hasn’t started mass-dropping prices on its official site yet, but some close observers of the market believe the global governing body is finding other ways to offload tickets.
It’s hard to know exactly how many tickets FIFA has sold or distributed, and the governing body has not released information about ticket sales. FIFA did not respond to a question from Front Office Sports about how many tickets are already accounted for. The lack of transparency creates a sense of scarcity in the market—exactly what FIFA is going for, experts say.
Unlike other sporting events and concerts in the U.S., FIFA has been adding and taking away inventory in the buildup to the World Cup. About a week ago, FIFA had about 40,000 face value tickets available on its official platform. That number then shot up to about 115,000 before quickly falling to about 20,000, and is now sitting around 30,000 available after a Wednesday bump, according to the ticket tracking website TicketData.
What happened to those roughly 85,000 tickets removed from the platform in the past week? How many tickets is FIFA not listing? And how is FIFA going to sell the 30,000 or so that are still listed?
For the tickets that are still on FIFA’s primary platform, prices remain high, even for matches that don’t include powerhouse teams. For example, hundreds of tickets were still available on Thursday for Austria–Jordan at the get-in price of $380.
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.
“You’ve restricted the market by taking the strategy that FIFA has employed,” Kieran Maguire, author and cohost of The Price of Football podcast, tells Front Office Sports. “American sports fans aren’t dumb. They are fully aware that there is the opportunity to drive these ticket prices lower still.”
With one week until the tournament kicks off on June 11 in Mexico, FIFA still needs to get U.S. fans in seats. One way is giveaways, whether through local governments, host committees, or corporate sponsorships. Another possible way would be increasing the inventory on resale platforms.
Moving Unsold Tickets to Resale Sites
Lowering the prices of tickets on its own primary site is risky for FIFA because it could anger fans (and their lawyers) to see the same expensive seat they bought now listed at a much lower price, although that’s simply the nature of dynamic pricing. Get-in prices crashed ahead of kickoffs at the Club World Cup last year.
What FIFA may do this time around is list tickets on resale sites—either its own, where it takes a 15% cut from both buyers and sellers, or on secondary platforms.
FIFA did not respond when asked if it is moving seats to secondary resale sites, amid claims that it is already doing so.
Earlier this week, Boston University economics professor Florian Ederer posted a screenshot from SeatGeek of the Saudi Arabia–Cape Verde match where entire swaths of sections were up for sale. Ederer claimed in his viral post that many of those tickets were newly placed on the site, and concluded that the only source of that many tickets could be FIFA; he called the maneuver a “shell game.”
“My inbox now is overflowing with various fans contacting me saying that they want to sue FIFA because they’ve paid so much for tickets previously and now they see several of these tickets listed actually at lower prices, and they feel cheated by this,” Ederer tells FOS. The attorneys general of New York and New Jersey announced last week they are investigating FIFA over its ticketing practices, shortly after California’s AG demanded answers to similar questions, and Pennsylvania’s AG told FOS to “expect us to issue something in the future.”
A spokesperson for SeatGeek said in a statement to FOS that “we do not have a partnership or distribution agreement with FIFA” and declined an interview on the record. Ticketmaster also declined an interview, while StubHub did not respond.
Maguire says he’s heard rumors of FIFA unsuccessfully trying to cut deals with the resellers, but FIFA doesn’t necessarily need an official deal with secondary sites to list tickets on those platforms.
Beyond Ederer’s post, there is other evidence on FIFA’s resale marketplace and secondary sites that suggests FIFA may be the seller. On Wednesday, FOS observed at least five separate matches on FIFA’s resale site that all had the identical get-in price of $69. Several games had large concentrations of seats or entire rows for sale, and one had the same pair of seats listed in nine consecutive rows.
Prices aren’t yet falling on secondary sites, although that’s not necessarily the full picture: If FIFA moved a ticket to a secondary site, it could cut the price from face value without making it seem like secondary prices had dropped. The average get-in price for all group stage games on a secondary site is around $600, which is lower than where it was a couple months ago, according to TicketData. The only city where prices have fallen dramatically in the past week is San Francisco, where the average get-in price is under $300, per TicketData. (The Bay Area was saddled with far less appealing group stage games than the other U.S. hosts.) Ederer says he believes ticket prices will go down on both the primary and secondary market, but only in the last 48 hours before a match.
Ticket Giveaways
The second option FIFA has is to give away tickets. This can mean more tickets for corporate partners, or publicly announced programs for certain groups. FIFA has already somewhat started doing this, but it isn’t doing it for free.
Last month, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani coordinated $50 tickets for 1,000 of his city’s residents. This week, Seattle announced more than 1,400 free tickets for local youth and their guardians, and Bank of America said it’s funding 4,547 free tickets for veterans and first responders, including to the semifinal and final.
The New York tickets are being taken from the existing allotment given to the local host committee—though the deal still required FIFA approval—and corporate donations funded both the Seattle youth and veteran tickets.
Even though FIFA isn’t giving the tickets away, the global governing body is clearly open to getting rid of large groups of tickets while taking the good press that comes with it. And, having sponsors funding the giveaways “works within the FIFA narrative,” Maguire says.
“I know some of the sponsors, they are not happy,” Maguire says. “They don’t want their product to be associated with half-empty stadiums.”
Both Maguire and Ederer speculated that FIFA will continue to give away tickets in some form or fashion. The governors of New York and New Jersey have both hinted at doing a discounted ticket program for their residents.
“[FIFA president Gianni Infantino] will try to control the narrative that he’s some sort of cross between Mother Teresa and Santa Claus by having this strategy,” Maguire says. “If the kids go to the football and have a great time, absolutely fantastic.
“But there are many people who have followed their country’s team all over Europe and Africa and Asia through the qualifiers, who have been put off by the lack of faith, the lack of trust that they have in FIFA due to the pricing strategy.”
