When the first tickets for the 2026 World Cup went on sale last week, millions of fans joined online queues only to discover what Gianni Infantino’s assurance that “the world will be welcome” really means. The cheapest face-value seat for next summer’s final, somewhere in the gods of New Jersey’s 82,500-seat MetLife Stadium where the players are specks and the football’s a rumor, comes at a cost of $2,030 (oxygen tank not included). Most upper-deck seats range from $2,790 to $4,210, according to customers who finally glimpsed the prices that had been closely guarded. The much-touted $60 tickets for group-stage games, propped up by Fifa as evidence of affordability, exist only as comically tiny green smudges on the edge of digital seating maps, little more than mirages of inclusivity.
Fifa had kept the costs under wraps until the very moment of sale, replacing the usual published table of price points with a digital lottery that decided who even got the chance to buy. Millions spent hours staring at a queue screen as algorithms determined their place in line. When access finally came for most, the lower-priced sections had already vanished, many presumably swallowed by bots and bulk-buyers (and that’s before Fifa quietly raised the prices of at least nine matches after only one day of sales). The whole process resembled less a ticket release than a psyop to calibrate how much frustration and scarcity the public will tolerate.
This, Fifa insists, is merely an adaptation to “market norms” in the United States, where most matches will be staged, as though gouging fans were a cultural practice to be respected like banning beer at the Qatar World Cup. In a sense, they’re bang-on. Profiteering and exploitation have long served as America’s articles of faith in the absence of a national religion. In reality, what’s taking shape is less a global festival of soccer than a fintech laboratory for everything that has made contemporary entertainment so exhausting. The governing body has fused together every irritant of modern consumer life – dynamic pricing, algorithmic lotteries, endless logins, even the remnants of a failed crypto boom – into a single soul-deadening experience designed to turn access itself into a commodity. This is the World Cup re-engineered for the Ticketmaster-Live Nation monopoly era, where the thrill of fandom meets the calculus of hedge-fund speculation.
The story began during the NFT craze of 2022, when Fifa launched Fifa+ Collect, promising fans “affordable ownership” of digital soccer moments – Pelé lifting the 1970 trophy, Maradona’s 1986 solo run, Kylian Mbappé’s goal in the 2018 final – each sold as a blockchain collectible. When the market collapsed (quelle surprise), Fifa reheated its own nachos by quietly rebadging the tokens as ticketing opportunities. The new scheme, marketed under the chillingly corporate Right to Buy (RTB) name, offers supporters the chance to purchase NFTs that would one day give them permission to purchase an actual match ticket. A Right to Final token costs up to $999 and can be redeemed only if the buyer’s chosen team reaches the final. If not, it becomes a useless JPEG. Fifa discovered how to monetize anticipation itself, a system that traffics not in tickets but in Fomo.
That illusion was finally shattered this week, when Fifa Collect administrators disclosed that the vast majority of Right to Buy holders would only be eligible for Category 1 and 2 seats, the priciest brackets in Fifa’s opening phase at costs far beyond the reach of the average punter. The news triggered open revolt among the NFT community: Discord threads filled with complaints of being “ripped off” and a sudden rush to resell tokens as their market value collapsed.
When the real tickets finally appeared, the scale of the escalation became clear. Category 1 seats for the semi-finals approach $3,000; quarter-finals nearly $1,700. Fifa’s new dynamic pricing model means those numbers can, and surely will, rise signficantly higher. The technique, borrowed from airlines and Silicon Valley ticket platforms, now governs the world’s biggest sporting event, creating a byzantine and hierarchical marketplace carved into endless tiers of privilege.
At past World Cups, resale prices were capped at face value. For 2026, Fifa lifted that restriction and moved into the secondary market itself. Tickets on its official resale platform have already appeared for tens of thousands of dollars, including a $2,030 ticket for the final was relisted the next day for $25,000. Fifa double-dips by taking a 15% commission from the seller and another 15% from the buyer, pocketing $300 for every $1,000 traded. Officials claim this will discourage scalpers from using outside sites such as StubHub. In practice it legitimizes them, as though the easiest way to beat the touts was simply to host them.
By the time a ticket is finally scanned at the turnstile on matchday, it may have been bought, flipped and resold three or four times, every trade skimming another cut into Fifa’s coffers. It’s less a ticketing system than a financial instrument, and suddently that $3.017bn target for ticket and hospitality revenue doesn’t seem so quixotic.
Supporters’ groups have responded with predictable disbelief and outrage. Thomas Concannon of England’s Fans’ Embassy called the prices “astonishing”, pointing out that following a team through the tournament on the cheapest tickets would cost more than double the equivalent journey in Qatar. Add in transatlantic travel, accommodation and visa restrictions, and the so-called “most inclusive World Cup ever” begins to look an awful lot like a gated community. Ronan Evain of Fans Europe called it “the privatization of what was once a tournament open to all”, arguing that Fifa is building “a World Cup for middle-class Westerners and the happy few who can enter the US”.
In Mexico, where resale laws have something resembling teeth, Fifa relented to government pressure and capped prices at face value on a localized ticket exchange platform. Everywhere else, the late-stage free-market grift carries on unchecked. The logic is simple: scarcity drives profit, and even disappointment can be monetized. Fifa’s defense leans heavily on American precedent. Concert promoters and major leagues have used dynamic pricing for years and resale sites routinely charge similar fees. But invoking “market norms” misses the point. Soccer’s global ritual isn’t meant to mimic the Super Bowl or the Eras Tour by normalizing the abusive consumer practices Americans resigned themselves to years ago. It was meant to belong to everyone: the traveling supporters, the families, the people who transform neutral stadiums into carnivals of color and noise.
The 2026 rollout exposes a new frontier of sports capitalism: the monetization of emotion. Fifa has built an ecosystem in which every feeling – excitement, anxiety, devotion – becomes a revenue stream. Fear of missing out? There’s a token for that. Late-stage panic? Dynamic pricing will account for it. Regret? The resale platform will take another 30%. Buying a ticket is no longer an act of fandom but of speculation, a wager placed on both your team’s fortunes and one’s own disposable income.
The parallels with the spiraling economics of the live music industry are striking. With concerts, the explosion of VIP “packages” and velvet-rope pricing has turned performance into a gated spectacle and audience into clientele. With soccer, the same transformation is under way. Stadiums once defined by chaos and community are being remade as climate-controlled malls of efficiency: perfect sightlines, perfect sound and prices that erase the very imperfection that made the experience human. When ordinary fans are priced out, what’s left is a sport stripped of its edge and flattened into entertainment.
Fifa says that every dollar generated by ticket sales goes back into the game, as it stressed in a recent letter to the Guardian, like that shopworn talking point were a moral shield. Yet what’s being returned to the game is a recalibrated worldview: that soccer, like every other corner of modern life, can be measured, segmented and commodified. In the process, the world’s most democratic sport becomes an exercise in exclusion, where the right to belong is determined by AI and a balance sheet.
Infantino keeps repeating that 2026 will be “the biggest, best and most inclusive World Cup ever”. On the first count he’ll surely be right and on the second he may be, but a World Cup priced as a luxury brand is destined to fall spectacularly short of the third. The dream football once offered of common ground and of shared joy has been bought, repackaged and sold back at a markup. When access itself becomes an asset class, the world’s game no longer belongs to the world.
