It’s World Cup Eve And Everyone’s Mad At Fifa

Fans of the beautiful game maybe haven’t been this universally angry since Diego Maradona scored that goal with his hand. Now, on the eve of the 2026 tournament, the soccer world’s outrage is aimed squarely at FIFA and its new pricing model, which has made tickets so expensive that thousands are still available.

According to the Financial Times:

• Nearly 180,000 World Cup tickets were still on FIFA’s official resale portal as of Monday.
• Around 4,400 of those were for the US team’s opening match against Paraguay this Friday in Los Angeles.

Put simply: “Had the tickets been priced more reasonably all along, they would all be sold out,” soccer reporter Henry Bushnell wrote for The Athletic. Instead, FIFA used dynamic pricing for the first time ever, making these the most expensive matches in World Cup history:

• From October 2025 (when tickets went on sale) to April, FIFA hiked ticket prices for the vast majority of games by an average of 35%, according to The Athletic.
• At the extreme end, the best tickets to the World Cup final tripled to ~$33,000 in May.
• But even the cheapest seats for the final and the group stage matches are more than three times as expensive as the cheapest Qatar 2022 tickets, according to The Economist.

FIFA president Gianni Infantino has defended the sky-high prices as reflective of North American demand, but that argument appears to have some holes: Median prices on the FIFA resale portal’s plethora of tickets have fallen 20% since last month, and most resellers are set to lose money, the Financial Times reported.

Did FIFA’s plan backfire?

Maybe reputationally, but probably not financially: FIFA is projected to generate $11 billion in overall revenue from the 2026 World Cup, $3 billion of which would come from ticket sales. For context, ticket sales accounted for just ~$930 million of the 2022 World Cup’s $7.5 billion revenue.

But…FIFA could be in legal trouble. Several states have launched investigations into the governing body amid widespread allegations of artificial ticket scarcity and price deception.—ML

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