World Cup Ticketing: A Modern Strategy Taken to the Extreme

The United States Men’s National Team will play its World Cup opener on June 12, and there are thousands of tickets for the game still available for sale direct from FIFA. It’s one of many games with myriad unsold seats, despite FIFA claiming it received more than 500 million ticket requests for the five-week event.

That lingering inventory, which has drawn criticism from fans who believe the list prices are unreasonable, is a principal feature of the governing body’s ticket pricing strategy. For FIFA president Gianni Infantino and his organization, the unsold tickets are a feature—not a bug—of their goal to extract every cent they can from fans looking to attend the World Cup.

“This is all about selling the maximum amount of tickets for the maximum amount of money,” Keith Pagello, founder of TicketData, said in an interview.

FIFA’s strategy may be cynical or greedy, but it’s not unique. Major U.S. sports and big concert tours are increasingly shifting toward a similar model, according to ticketing experts, with sky-high early prices, a gradual release of inventory and a side market for even more expensive hospitality. Tennis fans confronted a version of this reality earlier this week when the earliest tranches of U.S. Open tickets gave would-be buyers sticker shock when they first went on sale.

FIFA, which doesn’t sell tickets to annual events in America, is just taking it to extremes, to the point that authorities are getting fed up: On Wednesday, the attorneys general of New York and New Jersey subpoenaed FIFA to seek information about their World Cup ticketing practices.

“The fan is an afterthought in sports in America,” Dave Wakeman, a ticketing consultant and author of the Talking Tickets! newsletter, said. “You’re only a fan inasmuch as you are willing to pay and take the shit that they feed you.”

Wakeman pointed to the adoption of legal sports gambling in the U.S. and resulting pervasive advertising for it as further evidence that the sports industry has “contempt” for its audience.

“You don’t care if they’re abused. You don’t care if they’re just destroyed. You just care about extracting as much value as you can before they’re a broken husk and they’re thrown over to the side,” he said. “That’s what FIFA is doing.”

Slow ticketing

The idea of “slow ticketing”—releasing inventory in a more targeted and gradual rollout, as opposed to one massive 10 a.m. dump—has gradually taken root over the past decade or so, becoming popular first for major concerts acts like Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen, then bleeding over into high-profile sporting events.

What’s changing now, as Wakeman explained, is the pricing. Rightsholders are more willing to push the envelope on pricing at the outset, with listings often deliberately opening higher than they know the market will support. It helps ensure that the artist, organizer or team captures the value that used to be harvested by brokers buying tickets at face value, then flipping them for profit on the secondary market.

“On a global level, we are witnessing a transition of pricing power, from the broker community to the rights holders,” Ken Hanscom, chief operating officer of TicketManager, said in an interview.

In this new process, early buyers frequently accept prices that will eventually come down as the event organizer gradually manages supply and demand. It’s become common, therefore, to see primary tickets sit on the market for weeks or months after they go on sale, even for events like the World Cup, where millions pre-registered for an opportunity to buy.

Ticket insiders call this “blue dot fever,” a reference to the number of blue dots—which indicate primary tickets still available—when you look at the event on Ticketmaster’s website. Last Thursday morning, for example, about 10 hours before Game 2 of the NBA’s Eastern Conference finals between the Knicks and Cavaliers at Madison Square Garden, there were hundreds of face-value tickets still available, ranging in price from $693 to $3,220. (A late buyer of one of those blue-dot tickets? New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.) Tickets for the U.S. Men’s National Team’s first World Cup game, on June 12 vs. Paraguay in Los Angeles, has roughly 2,400 face-value tickets still available online as of Wednesday afternoon, according to TicketData, with face values ranging from $1,940 to $2,735.

Unsold FIFA tickets for USA vs. Paraguay on June 12.

Hospitality

Higher initial prices have run up against another major trend in modern sports economics—a push to sell a greater proportion of tickets as part of much pricier hospitality packages. The NFL and On Location, which the league co-founded in 2015, have made this strategy a principal part of Super Bowls for the past decade. Fancy suites are part of some packages, of course, but so are much more generic tickets elsewhere in the stadium, sold alongside private dinners, concerts, hotel rooms and other types of access. It’s unclear how many Super Bowl tickets earlier this year were sold through On Location, but the company has become a critical piece of the event’s gate strategy.

The set-up has multiple benefits for rights holders. For one, there’s economics. On Location’s deal with FIFA for this World Cup doesn’t include guaranteed cash or minimums, but FIFA is likely sharing in the group’s sales, which On Location says have surpassed 500,000 packages sold for this World Cup. Those arrangements create much pricier options for ultrawealthy fans, take the burden of selling some seats off the rights holder and create more opacity in the market, blurring the line between what inventory is unsold by a group like FIFA and what’s unsold via a hospitality partner.

On Location, which is also an IOC partner, wrote off about $85.7 million in unsold tickets for the Paris Games, according to an SEC filing. After TKO CFO Andrew Schleimer said on an earnings call in November that the 2024 Olympics were not profitable for On Location, Sports Business Journal reported that the hospitality company lost $252 million on the event. (An On Location representative didn’t immediately respond to a request for comments).

All of this comes as investors rush into sports and other forms of entertainment, seeking to capture a growing desire for shared experiences. In an interview earlier this month with Fox Business Network, tech billionaire Ryan Smith, who owns the Utah Mammoth and Utah Jazz, described sports as a financial safe haven against the disruption coming from AI.

“What we’re seeing in live experiences is right up there with some of the greatest tech booms that we have had,” Smith said.

‘We have to apply market rates‘

FIFA president Infantino hasn’t spoken much about the ticket strategy, but he did discuss the thinking recently at the Milken Institute Global Conference. When asked about the controversial pricing, he mentioned that the strategy had to be different than prior World Cups because of the prevalence of the secondary market in the U.S. and the size of the American economy.

“We have to look at the market,” Infantino said. “We are in the market in which entertainment is the most developed in the world, so we have to apply market rates.”

A FIFA rep didn’t respond to an email seeking clarity on the organization’s ticket strategy.

FIFA made about $929 million in ticket sales and hospitality from the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. Given the expanded tournament—there are 104 games now, instead of 64—and pricing that is significantly higher than 2022, it seems reasonable to assume that the numbers from the 2026 will end up dwarfing that total, even if some ticket inventory goes unsold. It’s also possible that the 2030 tournament, to be held across six nations on three continents, could come eventually come in lower.

Knock-on effects

For fans, there are obvious downsides to this new form of pricey, slow ticketing. For one, it puts buyers in the tough position of either buying early at a price that likely means overpaying, or waiting to try and time the market. Ticket lotteries that gatekeep access serve to add an addition layer of urgency for fans. All of this is perhaps most cynical for the World Cup, where many fans need to 1) travel thousands of miles, and 2) buy the most expensive event ticket of their lifetimes. It also means the most avid fans are often the ones gouged the most because they pay a literal price for buying quickly.

The change in ticketing strategy could impact more than just fans. When tickets are more closely priced to their fair market value—or in the World Cup’s case, even higher—it dampens the resale market. That may make things tougher for resellers, whether they’re professional broker operations or individual humans.

“Those margins have absolutely come down over the last five to 10 years,” Pagello said. “What used to be shooting fish in a barrel—let’s buy World Cup tickets for $100 and flip them for $500—has become much rarer nowadays as primary rightsholders get more comfortable pricing tickets to what they think the market will pay.”

Marketplaces like StubHub and Vivid Seats have also historically benefitted from the old model, taking a fee from each of those resale transactions. Vivid’s stock price is in a steady, multiyear slide, down from $273 in October 2021 to about $8.17 as of Wednesday’s close. StubHub priced its September 2025 IPO at $23.50 and is now trading around $9.69.

Their struggles, however, aren’t a direct result of this shifting approach to ticket pricing, according to Cameron Mansson-Perrone, lead analyst, music & live entertainment research at Morgan Stanley, who covers both stocks. Investors are worried because Vivid Seats is losing market share, but also concerned about what StubHub is spending to acquire new customers.

“There are much more significant pressures, and concerns, for the industry” than slow ticketing, he said in an interview. “This dynamic probably does diminish value for the resellers, gradually, over the long term. But of what we’ve seen to date, it’s been fairly marginal.”

It hasn’t been marginal for fans or rightsholders, and in at least one way, FIFA sits in a world of its own. Thirty-two years have transpired between the last men’s World Cup in the U.S. and the upcoming one. Therefore, FIFA can afford to be more extractive than a baseball team seeking month-over-month and year-over-year repeat purchases, or even touring acts that come to town every few years.

“FIFA sits in a fairly unique position where it comes into a market every four years and then doesn’t return to that market for a while,” Mansson-Perrone said. “That allows them to be a little bit more ambitious—or aggressive—with their initial pricing.”

It’ll be five years until FIFA returns: The 2031 Women’s World Cup is scheduled to take place across the U.S. and North America.

(In the fifth-to-last paragraph, Cameron Mansson-Perrone’s title at Morgan Stanley has been updated. Also, this story has been updated to clarify the structure of On Location’s relationship with FIFA.)