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The 2026 World Cup — jointly hosted by Mexico, Canada and the United States — has been met with a barrage of criticism over costly ticket prices, which have been described as the most expensive in the tournament’s near-century-long history.
FIFA tickets started at $140 (€121) for group-stage games, according to the Associated Press, while category 1 tickets — the most expensive general admission type — for the New Jersey final on 19 July started at $8,680, before rising to $10,990 in April and then an eyewatering $32,970 in May.
For the first time, a dynamic pricing system was implemented, meaning that ticket prices were dictated by demand. This system has become commonplace in the US, following its introduction to the US sports market in 2009.
The result of dynamic pricing is a World Cup with significantly higher ticket prices than past editions.
Compared with this year’s prices, category 1 tickets for the 2018 Russia edition cost $1,100. Four years later in Qatar, the equivalent ticket cost $1,607. In comparison, tickets for the Euro 2024 final in Berlin started at €95, with the most expensive seats costing €2,000.
Following criticism, FIFA offered 130,000 tickets priced at $60 to national federations for their regular supporters.
Are comparisons to US market rates accurate?
When asked about the higher prices, FIFA President Gianni Infantino said FIFA had consulted the “best lawyers” and “best experts” before launching ticket sales, and that the organisation was comfortable defending its pricing strategy.
Infantino said that market rates had influenced the cost of the tickets. He also argued that demand for this year’s tournament has driven prices up, arguing that ticket prices reflected the market, given that the US “is the market in which entertainment is the most developed in the world” in May.
On 10 June, he told reporters that the average ticket price of less than $500 was comparable to other US sports during their playoffs, adding that he was not concerned about tickets listed on the resale market at $2 million.
This comparison may be true for some resale markets, but it is less accurate when looking at official list prices, according to analysis by the AP.
Tickets to the World Series — the annual championship series of Major League Baseball — have averaged been $350 to $400 in recent years, while National Football League (NFL) prices last season averaged $230 for the wild-card round, $320 for divisional games, and $450 for conference championships. Meanwhile, tickets to the Super Bowl averaged around $3,300.
The get-in price (or the total cost of the cheapest ticket on the market) on FIFA’s resale site for the World Cup final is $9,805. The NBA Finals have had wildly varied get-in prices, ranging from a minimum of about $500 for the first two games in San Antonio to about $10,000 for Game 3 in New York. Game 4 in New York was much less, dropping to about $4,000 on 10 June.
Experts have cast doubt on Infantino’s comparison between American sports playoffs and the World Cup.
“It is rather disingenuous to compare the two, as a 48-team tournament played over five weeks is rather different in conception, design and delivery from end-of-season franchise play-offs,” Simon Chadwick, professor of Afro-Eurasian Sport at Emlyon Business School, told Euronews’ fact-checking team, The Cube.
“Perhaps the most obvious difference is that one is contested by countries, whereas the other takes place between teams within cities,” he said. “Hence, the products on offer are fundamentally different and have very different target audiences.”
Chadwick also argued that the World Cup’s fan base is much broader than that of most American professional sports.
“The US is a highly mature sports market in which people are willing to pay significant amounts of money for sporting experiences,” he said. “Whereas the World Cup has a very different, often economically disadvantaged, constituency, as well as a very different global socio-demographic basis.”
He also questioned FIFA’s claim that the average ticket price will be less than $500, due to dynamic pricing, which means that prices for the events have fluctuated and will continue to do so.
“Maybe sometime in July, Infantino will be able to say this was the average price. But until then, we can’t really say that,” Chadwick said.
Do the high prices prevent high-cost resales?
Infantino also argued that high prices were necessary and that if FIFA had lowered the prices, then scalpers would have taken advantage of the situation by charging far higher rates — feeding the profit into the black market rather than into the game itself.
“In the US, it is permitted to resell tickets as well,” Infantino said in May, according to The Guardian. “So if you were to sell tickets at a price which is too low, these tickets will be resold at a much higher price.”
However, consumer rights groups say that high prices do not prevent resale.
“We’re seeing tickets being sold at something over €2 million; many more intermediaries are making money from that resale,” said Olivia Brown, policy officer at Euroconsumers, the European umbrella consumer rights group. “The argument that dynamic pricing helps keep the money in sport is something we’re sceptical about.”
“FIFA introduced a 15% fee for the buyer and the seller of the tickets. So from every ticket that’s resold, FIFA takes another 30% back,” she added. “I know that they say the revenue is going back into sport, but we also know that a lot of the revenue remains with FIFA.”
Brown suggested that FIFA could have introduced a cap to ensure that tickets were only resold at face value, but this ultimately did not happen.
FIFA’s argument has garnered some support from commentators, though.
Football journalist Henry Bushnell said in a piece published in The Athletic — the sports department of the New York Times — that even if FIFA had sold tickets at similar prices to previous World Cups, many would have likely ended up on secondary markets at much higher prices because of the US’s largely unrestricted resale market.
According to Bushnell, FIFA’s biggest mistake was not charging high prices, but failing to reserve more affordable tickets for loyal supporters.
FIFA did not respond to our request for comment.
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