World Cup ticket prices moved like airline fares all year. FIFA's dynamic experiment left fans waiting at the gate
Marcin Golba / NurPhoto via Getty Images
Florian Ederer's friends in San Francisco asked if he could help them get tickets to Austria's first World Cup match in 28 years. Availability for the game against 63rd-ranked Jordan, one of the least anticipated matchups at the 2026 World Cup, wasn't the issue. The problem, as they saw it, was the cost.
With prices changing week to week — and sometimes hour to hour — they turned to academic economist Ederer to get the timing right.
It never used to be this way. At previous World Cups, there was one price to pay, and that was it. FIFA sorted tickets into predetermined tiers and sold them without much hassle. Every group game cost the same — no matter where they were or which teams contested them.
This year, FIFA began using dynamic pricing, following in the footsteps of hotels and airlines in charging different rates at different times for the World Cup. But instead of using the strategy to manage capacity, FIFA priced tickets high from the start, knowing millions of fans would compete for the inevitably constrained supply. Five hundred million requests flew in for the roughly six to seven million tickets available.
But with one day to go before the tournament kicks off in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, tens of thousands of tickets remain up for sale on FIFA's official website. Another 175,000 or so are available on its official resale marketplace.
Fans are paying attention. Many are waiting until the last minute to buy. Not everyone will succeed.
Ederer didn't mind paying as much as $1,000 to go to Austria's marquee match against defending World Cup champion Argentina. The math made sense to him. As an Austrian expat who teaches at Boston University's Questrom School of Business, he knew he couldn't gamble on prices going down. He wanted to guarantee his attendance at a game he'll remember forever. FIFA banked on such passion to drive early sales.
Ederer's friends — who are on sabbatical in the San Francisco area, where Austria's opener just happens to be located — aren't "as obsessed." And they're in luck. Median prices for the June 17 match have fallen from $518 to $380 over the last 14 days, according to SeatSidekick, a website that tracks World Cup price trends. With more than 5,000 tickets still up for sale, the price may have room to drop.
"There's a real tension here," Ederer told Quartz. "What is FIFA really going to do in order to both maximize revenue and ensure that those stadiums are actually going to be full?"
The professor had a theory: What if FIFA had worked with SeatGeek, one of the main resale platforms in the U.S., to dump loads of the tickets it couldn't sell at the prices it had set to manage this growing supply problem? FIFA could then protect its own pricing strategy and avoid upsetting the fans who bought much higher much earlier in the process.
SeatGeek later told BBC Sport it doesn't have a "partnership or distribution agreement" with FIFA.
"They have to deal with the problem of there being still quite a few tickets available, and selling them to people at the highest possible prices," Ederer said, "and that means that they just cannot list all of the inventory in ways that then makes it seem as if there's lots of inventory."
The only ones who can take advantage of these fluctuations are locals. International fans who needed price certainty to book travel were priced out long ago.
"When we get close to game day, the dynamic ticket price might fall to $60, but by that time, it's too late for the traveling population," Simon Chadwick, professor of Eurasian sports at emlyon business school, told Quartz. "There are no air tickets, and it would be difficult to arrange anyway."
The sheer scale of this World Cup — which is spread across 16 host cities in three countries that don't particularly see eye to eye right now — makes dynamic pricing especially punishing for the international fans who would've helped the World Cup deliver the $30.5 billion boost to U.S. GDP that FIFA President Gianni Infantino had projected. Locals are more likely to go to and from the games without leaving as much of an economic footprint.
"Will restaurants and cafes and cities see an uptick in economic activity? Yeah, I think probably, but it will be very marginal," Chadwick said. "A lot of studies measure the benefits only. What they don't measure is the costs, and the costs include fan violence and increased security and police force bills."
Hotels are already feeling the pain. The American Hotel & Lodging Association, which represents most franchised hotels in the U.S., said that nearly 80% of its members had fewer bookings than estimated. Dynamic pricing could cost host cities the tourism that they needed to offset the sum of staging matches.
Dynamic pricing was also FIFA's attempt to capture the profit that it risked losing to resellers. Chadwick said FIFA, as a nonprofit with 211 member associations that depend on it for funding, had an almost fiduciary duty to ensure the North American resale market wouldn't extract value from its product. So it priced aggressively and launched its own resale marketplace — where it collects 30% on all sales — to corner the revenue opportunity.
"This is a neoliberalization of soccer," Chadwick said. "In essence, this was a European sociocultural institution that emerged at the end of the 19th century and grew organically and was always part of community and identity and history. What we now have is a neoliberal World Cup, which is free markets, commercial return, and individual decision-making. Markets make the decisions, not people, not governing bodies, and those markets consist of people who have a willingness and ability to pay."
The attorneys general of New York and New Jersey don't see it as such an innocent play. On May 27, they subpoenaed FIFA as part of an investigation into the "gauntlet of confusion, fake scarcity, and impossibly high prices" that its ticketing practices created.
As with every tournament, FIFA released tickets at various stages to manage supply, but according to TicketData, which tracks get-in prices for U.S. sports events, FIFA has removed swaths of them for no specific reason.
"They want to induce in fans and consumers this perception that there are hardly any tickets left, and that this is the last opportunity to buy tickets, and if you do not buy tickets now, then you won't be able to go to any games," Ederer added. "That, of course, then creates the sense of urgency and artificial scarcity."
Ederer believes fans will have a shot at cheaper tickets for Saudi Arabia's game against Cape Verde, Congo's against Uzbekistan, and other low-demand fixtures prone to price adjustments.
But many may be left out. Over the past 30 days, the average get-in price across all 72 World Cup group stage matches is up 14%, according to TicketData. Tickets for host nation Mexico are trading at an average of four times their initial purchase price, according to Financial Times, and the get-in price for Sweden's match against Tunisia — one of those so-called low-demand fixtures — is up 132% over the last 30 days.
"You can either pay $300 and get your tickets for sure, or you gamble on getting your tickets with a 33% probability and pay $100 before the game," Ederer said. "That kind of gamble is only really feasible for somebody who's going to be onsite anyway. It's my friends who are on sabbatical in Berkeley at the moment, who want to see a game, and they're going to go to the Austria-Jordan game and buy tickets at the last minute."
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