Image Credit: Shutterstock
Soccerscene reported in September that FIFA’s new pricing system for World Cup 2026 tickets had fans and supporter groups accusing football’s governing body of being out of touch, with group-stage prices said to “start from” around 90 Australian dollars and no ceiling disclosed before the pre-sale lottery closed. Nine months on, the real numbers are in, and the fallout has moved well past fan anger into regulatory territory.
FIFA ultimately used dynamic pricing for World Cup tickets for the first time in the tournament’s history, the same demand-based model used by airlines and ride-share apps, where prices climb as inventory tightens. The cheapest tickets did open at 60 US dollars, as promised. But the top category for the July 19 final in New Jersey opened at 6,730 dollars and had climbed to nearly 11,000 dollars by the tournament’s later sales windows, according to NPR, roughly seven times the cost of the most expensive ticket at the 2022 Qatar tournament.
From backlash to investigation
What has changed since September is that the backlash now carries legal weight. The attorneys general of New York, New Jersey and Texas have opened formal investigations into FIFA’s ticketing practices, alleging the organisation held back cheaper inventory and released more expensive categories later in a way regulators say could mislead buyers. Infantino has defended the strategy publicly, comparing FIFA’s approach to standard practice across the US ticketing industry, arguing that if FIFA is at fault, then, in his words, “everyone selling tickets in North America is doing something wrong”.
Then, when the tournament began, a second controversy emerged that the September pricing story could not have anticipated. Television broadcasts from several early matches showed clearly empty sections in supposedly near-capacity stadiums. FIFA reported 44,985 fans at a Guadalajara fixture in a venue with roughly 45,664 seats, an official figure barely below capacity, even as visible pockets of empty seating spread across social media within hours. FIFA’s explanation, that attendance is based on scanned tickets and people within the stadium footprint rather than a seat-by-seat visual count, has not fully settled the dispute. Independent analysis by The Athletic found fewer than 1,600 seats unfilled across the tournament’s first six matches, a number difficult to reconcile with what viewers were seeing on screen.
None of this has dented the tournament’s underlying performance. Group-stage attendance sat at roughly 99.4 to 99.7 percent of capacity, and the World Cup has already broken the overall attendance record previously held by the 1994 US-hosted tournament. Fox averaged five million viewers across its 72 group-stage matches, a network record, while fan festivals across the three host nations drew an estimated 5.5 million people separate from ticketed attendance altogether. FIFA has projected the tournament will generate more than 11 billion US dollars in total revenue, largely from broadcast rights. The record numbers support that projection. The investigation, and the empty seats FIFA has struggled to explain, complicate it.
The correction is already underway
The clearest sign that FIFA’s pricing model responds to real demand, not just its own targets, has arrived in the past fortnight. According to ticket data reported by Newsweek, resale prices for the tournament’s remaining matches fell 39 percent in a single week as the knockout rounds opened, with the average cost of the cheapest available seat dropping from a peak of roughly 12,500 dollars in late June to just over 10,300 dollars days later. Seats for the United States’ own knockout fixture against Bosnia and Herzegovina dropped from 2,705 to 1,650 dollars over the same window.
A pricing model built to extract maximum value from peak demand will, by the same logic, correct sharply once brokers who overpaid need to move inventory. The mechanism that produced September’s backlash and July’s headlines is the same one now producing rapid discounts as the tournament enters its final weeks. Whether regulators, and the federations bidding to host the next World Cup, read that as evidence the model works, or as confirmation it needs fixing, is the question this story left unresolved in September and still has not answered.
