Why World Cup 2026 Tickets Are So Expensive — and Why Some Matches Still Aren’t Sold Out

The 2026 FIFA World Cup is finally here, but as the tournament kicks off, some matches are still struggling to sell out.

The surprising prospect of empty seats, while not an entirely new problem for the World Cup, has fueled debate over FIFA’s ticketing strategy, particularly after fans criticized soaring prices and the tournament’s new dynamic pricing model.

While high ticket costs have drawn the most attention, experts say the story is more complicated. Changes in technology, resale platforms and demand forecasting have transformed how major sporting events sell tickets, creating new opportunities for organizers while raising more concerns about fan access.

Darden professor Pnina Feldman’s research focuses on how digital technologies affects operations strategy with emphasis on services, platforms, pricing, and consumer engagement.

Professor Pnina Feldman of the University of Virginia Darden School of Business is an expert on how digital technology affects operations strategy, pricing and consumer engagement, including ticket markets. The Darden Report caught up with her to learn more about how her research informs the ticketing turmoil around the 2026 World Cup.

Sky-high prices are widely cited as the main reason for the ticketing chaos for this World Cup. Is price the only factor, or are there other trends at play?

Price is clearly a major factor. When many tickets remain available close to the event, and when the public reaction has focused so heavily on prices, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the market is telling FIFA that at least some matches were priced too aggressively.

But I would not say price is the only factor. The World Cup is not one uniform ticket market. It is a collection of match-specific markets. Demand varies by team, city, kickoff time, stadium, travel costs, local fan base, diaspora community and the importance of the match. A Mexico match in Los Angeles, a U.S. knockout match or the final in New Jersey is a very different product from a less prominent group-stage game between two teams with smaller local followings.

There are also broader travel and tourism factors. International fans face not only the ticket price, but also flights, hotels, domestic travel across a very large host region, exchange rates, visa or border concerns, and general uncertainty about traveling to the United States. Those costs matter because the ticket is only one part of the total price of attending the World Cup.

The way I would put it is: high prices are the most visible explanation, but the deeper issue is demand uncertainty. FIFA appears to have priced some matches as if demand would be extremely strong across the board. For some matches, that may be true. For others, the market is now revealing that demand at those prices is weaker than expected.

How did the tickets come to be so expensive this time around? 

The short answer is that FIFA has moved toward the pricing logic used in many other entertainment markets: dynamic pricing, extensive advance sales and an official resale marketplace.

There are two separate but related mechanisms here. The first is dynamic pricing in the primary market. Prices can be adjusted based on demand and availability. That means the organizer can respond to demand signals rather than sticking to a fixed price list. For high-demand matches, that tends to push prices up.

The second is the official resale platform. Historically, without an organized resale market, sellers often disliked reselling because it introduced a lot of competition from resellers. If a fan or broker could buy a ticket early and resell it later, then the seller faced fierce competition against its own previous customers. My research shows that this type of uncontrolled resale market can eliminate the seller’s advantage from advance selling: the outcome looks like spot selling, where tickets simply end up with those willing to pay the market-clearing price, which is bad for the seller.

What has changed is technology. With electronic tickets and an official exchange, the seller can control the resale process and charge fees on resale transactions. That means resale is no longer a problem for the seller. It becomes a revenue opportunity. The organizer can initially sell the ticket and then earn again if the ticket is resold, effectively achieving price discrimination.

So, the high prices now are not the result of dynamic pricing and “scalpers.” It’s a result of FIFA’s control of the resale market that drives prices up due to the collection of fees. That makes the ticketing system much more effective at extracting willingness to pay.

What are the trade-offs between selling tickets for extremely high prices, the potential for ending up with empty seats and the disillusionment from die-hard fans who have been priced out of participating? 

There is a real trade-off between revenue, attendance and legitimacy.

From a revenue perspective, high prices can make sense. If the seller believes enough people are willing to pay very high prices, especially for scarce matches, then charging those prices can raise revenue. In a purely commercial market, that is not surprising.

But the World Cup is not perceived by fans as a purely commercial product. It has cultural, national and public significance. Fans do not experience the World Cup the way they experience a luxury concert or a premium corporate event. They see it as something that belongs, at least partly, to the global soccer community. When die-hard fans are priced out, that creates resentment even if the pricing strategy is economically rational.

The empty-seat problem makes that tension worse. If tickets are expensive and the stadium is full, the organizer can argue that demand justified the price. If tickets are expensive and there are empty seats, fans reasonably ask: why were prices kept so high that ordinary supporters could not attend?

My research finds a similar tension. Authorized resale can improve allocation in the sense that tickets can move from people who value them less to people who value them more. That can be good for overall efficiency. But it also allows the seller to extract more of the value from consumers. In the model, consumer surplus is lower under seller-controlled resale than under spot selling or uncontrolled resale. In plain English, the system can be good at raising revenue while leaving fans worse off.

For FIFA, the risk is not only empty seats. It is fan disillusionment. A ticketing system can be very sophisticated from a revenue-management perspective and still undermine the cultural character of the event. If the fans who create the atmosphere feel excluded, the product itself becomes less valuable in a broader sense.

This is the first year the World Cup has used dynamic pricing. Do you think it will ultimately be considered a successful experiment, or will the organizers go back to the drawing board?

It depends on the metric. If the metric is revenue, FIFA may still view the experiment as a success. In my research, we find that an authorized reselling market is (approximately) the best the seller can do to maximize revenue. So from the seller’s perspective, it is very attractive.

If the metrics are attendance, public trust and fan access, then the experiment looks more mixed. Dynamic pricing and authorized reselling work best when consumers believe the process is transparent and when prices move in a way that feels connected to real demand. It creates backlash when fans feel that prices only go up, that the rules are unclear, or that the institution is using its market power to extract as much as possible from them.

It’s hard to predict the future, but my educated guess is that FIFA will not abandon this approach entirely. The revenue logic is too strong. Once an organizer has the technology to vary prices, monitor demand, operate an official resale channel and collect transaction fees, it is hard to imagine going fully back to a simple fixed-price model, which is likely to invite scalpers back and harm FIFA’s revenue.

But I would expect them to rethink the implementation. They may need more protected, low-priced inventory, clearer communication, less aggressive initial pricing for lower-demand matches or more explicit commitments to fan access. One policy that follows from my research is a cap on the absolute resale commission collected per transaction. That would still allow market prices to reflect demand, but it would prevent the platform’s fee revenue from rising without limit when resale prices are very high, and may be viewed more favorably by fans.

So, I would not call this a failed experiment, but it is revealing. It shows that the technology can extract revenue, but it also shows the reputational cost of doing so too aggressively.

FIFA offered its own resale platform this year. Was it successful in curbing scalping?

I would say largely yes. Speculators are pushed out in an efficient seller-controlled resale market. The reason is simple: a speculator does not consume the ticket, does not expand demand and does not create any allocation possibility that the seller cannot already create through an official resale mechanism. If the seller controls the resale channel, sets the rules and collects a transaction fee, then there is much less room for an outside speculator to add value.

So, in that sense, FIFA’s official resale platform can be understood as an anti-scalping tool. It makes it harder for independent scalpers to profit from arbitrage outside the system, and it gives fans a safer way to buy tickets that have already been sold once. It can also reduce the risk of invalid tickets or fraudulent transactions, which is a real consumer-protection benefit.

But that does not mean the platform makes tickets cheap. This is the important distinction. Curbing scalping is not the same as lowering prices. If demand is high and supply is fixed, resale prices can still be very high even without traditional scalpers. The official platform may reduce the role of outside speculators while still allowing high market-clearing prices.

So the official resale platform probably helps curb traditional scalping, especially independent speculative resale and fraud-prone off-platform transactions. It moves resale into a controlled, official market which can push out scalpers, but also lets FIFA capture some of the economic value that scalpers might otherwise have captured.

For fans who gave up on getting tickets months ago, does the fact that many World Cup games aren’t sold out yet offer hope they could snag a last-minute deal? 

Yes. The reason is that a ticket is a perishable good. Once the match starts, an unsold seat has no value. If resellers are still holding tickets close to kickoff, some will cut prices rather than get nothing. That is especially likely for lower-demand group-stage games, games with weaker local followings or matches where travel costs make it difficult for international fans to attend.

So, for fans who are flexible about which match they attend, there may be real opportunities. The best chance of a deal is likely to be a less glamorous group-stage match, especially in a city where hotel and travel demand is weaker than expected.

But I would not expect this to apply evenly. The World Cup ticket market will be highly segmented. Some games may fall in price. Others may remain expensive or even rise in price. Matches involving teams with large local fan bases, host nations, major soccer countries or knockout-stage stakes will behave very differently from lower-demand group-stage matches.

The advice I would give fans is: keep checking, be flexible and be careful about unauthorized sellers. The existence of unsold inventory is a hopeful sign, but it is not a guarantee of cheap tickets.