2:43
This chart shows the average cost of category 1 tickets for all the World Cup final matches since 1998. To see the average price for 2026, you have to zoom out and zoom out even more. People are pretty frustrated primarily with FIFA about just how expensive the 2026 World Cup is shaping up to be. Cheapest $7,000. FIFA needs to do something about the prices of these tickets. They caught on the trend of let's let me make money out of this. But this chart is just the tip of the iceberg. Flights, hotels, and travel to the stadiums are also expensive. So,
there's a lot that a fan has to pay to see even one game. I crunched the numbers myself and compiled five charts to show just how expensive this year's World Cup is and who's to blame. Before we move to the next chart, let's talk about ticket categories for a sec because they point to a broader trend that we're seeing with this year's tournament costs. Category 1 tickets are the most expensive. They're usually located along the sidelines or closer to midfield. Category 2 seats are mid-tier, often in corners or in less central sideline sections. And category 3 seats are cheaper. They're usually high up in the stadium or behind the goals.
There's also a fourth category which is the cheapest, but those tickets are mostly reserved. What's interesting is when you compare how prices have changed for different categories. This chart shows the change over time for category 3 tickets compared with category 1 for group stage matches. The first round of games before the later knockout stage, which tends to be even more expensive. The increase in costs for this year's category 3 seats wasn't nearly as much as it was for the most expensive ones. This represents something that we might call the premiumization of the sports fan experience. That's Ben Shields, a senior lecturer at
the MIT Sloan School of Management who researches the business of sports media and entertainment. It is a reflection of this broader trend in premium fan experiences here in the US and FIFA is capitalizing on that or at least trying to. But on FIFA's resale market, you can find some pretty pricey tickets even in category 3. Let's pull up this game between Colombia and Portugal on June the 27th. In this category 3 section, you'll find tickets ranging from few thousand to nearly 12,000. And category 3 can reach up to $23,000 for this game. More on the resale market in a bit because that is a whole other issue. So ticket prices are the highest they've ever been even after adjusting for inflation. But why?
Part of that is supply and demand, right? Next time that it's played here on US soil, we don't know when that's going to be. Ben's right. When you look at the supply versus demand, the imbalance is enormous compared with previous years. To receive 500 million ticket requests, half a billion people. But FIFA President Janney Infantino said only 7 million tickets were available. By comparison, FIFA received fewer than 100 million ticket requests for the 2022 tournament. In a statement to Business Insider, FIFA said about 104,000 tickets priced at $60 were made available to fans across the 2026 tournament. Still,
demand hasn't been strong everywhere. In some host cities, resale ticket prices have fallen below $100 as FIFA and sellers struggle to fill less popular matches. That contrast highlights how uneven the demand really is. And even with strong demand for certain matches, it still doesn't fully explain why some tickets have skyrocketed to the thousands and tens of thousands of dollars. There's something else going on here. This is the first time that FIFA has used dynamic pricing for ticket sales. People have been frustrated about dynamic pricing for years, whether it's for ride hailing apps, concert tickets, Disney parks, or online shopping. In
FIFA's case, it essentially means that it could raise prices when it saw that demand was high. For example, category 1 tickets for the final reportedly started at around $6,400, then jumped to about $8,700, and then to around 11,000 in the final stage of sales. And for some fans, those rising prices completely changed which teams they could afford to see. Wiihanzing Hai, a 40-year-old football fan from a village in northeast India, hoped to buy tickets to see England or Portugal, but they were out of his price range. The cheapest ticket were like $450 to $650. My budget was like $350. Beyond that, I could not go. Eventually, he gave up on seeing the teams that he originally wanted to and focused on what
he could afford. Two tickets for him and his father-in-law to see the Czech Republic against South Africa for $140 each. Wiihon was able to snag his tickets through FIFA's lastminute sales phase in April. But fans who didn't get tickets during any of the previous sales stages were pushed into the resale market with prices far higher and largely unregulated in the United States and parts of Canada. For example, if I lived in the US and I bought a ticket in an early sale for $1,000, there's nothing stopping me from turning around and reselling it for double. But if I lived in Mexico, I couldn't do that. I could only exchange my ticket because of resale regulations, and any tickets for
games in Ontario could only be relisted for the face value price or lower. Seatpic, a ticket aggregator, found in April that the average resale ticket in any category cost $1,600 and the average resale tickets for the big final game cost 10 times that. FIFA told BI that its resale and primary marketplaces are aligned with typical standards and trends in North American sports and entertainment. Let's look at the game that I pulled up earlier. Say I buy this nearly $3,000 category 3 resale ticket. FIFA shows that the original price was $155. And FIFA takes 15% from the seller and 15% from the buyer in this transaction.
FIFA and America and everyone is just they're giving them that chance to take advantage of it and they're definitely taking it to the fullest. But the ticket itself is only part of the cost. I've calculated that a fan can still shell out a ton of money beyond what they're paying FIFA. That brings us to our third chart. Flight prices alone can easily dwarf the cost of a ticket. And if you bought your flight after the start of the Iran war, it's likely higher than expected due to rising fuel prices. Then there's the cost of your accommodation and transportation to the stadiums. I calculated that if an Argentina fan was to fly from Buenos Aries to Dallas with a layover in Atlanta to attend a group stage game against Jordan, they'd spend about
$3,361, which includes the tickets, the flight, and an average three-star downtown hotel. I'm a Scotland fan, so I also looked up how much it would be to fly from Edinburgh to Boston to see the team's first game against Haiti. The breakdown is similar. The average group stage game ticket cost a couple of hundred dollars less, but hotels in Boston cost more, driving up the total. And while we're talking about Boston, take a look at this extra bit at the end. That represents transportation costs. While FIFA is expected to generate billions of dollars from the tournament, local governments and transit operators, not FIFA, are largely responsible for covering the additional
costs of handling the massive influx of fans trying to get to and from the stadiums. Next chart. In Boston, a roundtrip train ticket from downtown to Gillette Stadium about 20 m away usually costs about $20, but during the World Cup, the city is charging $80. Similarly, New Jersey Transit usually charges $12.90 for a roundtrip fair between Penn Station and the Metife Stadium. On the day of a match, fans will have to cough up $98 for the same trip. In Florida, the Bright Line train is also charging a high markup. Because prices have jumped so much, fans like Muhammad Faraj are finding creative ways to make the World Cup more affordable.
Muhammad, an Iraq supporter living in Boston, bought tickets to all three of Iraq's group stage games for about $850 total. He and his friends plan to drive the entire route while making Instagram and Tik Tok content. After some of their past football videos have drawn hundreds of thousands of views, I've been busy just uh just messaging, emailing different businesses that want to be part of this World Cup journey to sponsor the trip for us. Muhammad says he's also been setting aside $200 a month since last November to afford it all. I opened a separate bank account where every single month I would get paid. I money just goes in there just so it wouldn't be a big chunk. That's the only way that I could have handled it. Now,
to bring together all the numbers I've crunched and the people that we've talked to, I broke down what it would cost for a fan of last time's winners, Argentina, to go to the first three matches on a budget. If they flew out of Buenos Aries to Houston and then to Kansas City for the first match, and then flew to Dallas for matches two and three, flights and hotels alone would cost about $7,000. When I looked in May, the cheapest tickets I found on the resale market for each of those three games would cost about $747, $835, and $862. And using public transit in these cities would be a combined $33. Not too bad.
All in all, the Argentina fan would shell out around $9,800. Just for fun, I also calculated what an Argentina fan would spend if they went to every game from beginning to end. Assuming the team makes it to the final like last time, a fan would be looking at about $31,250. FIFA expects to bring in roughly $13 billion during this World Cup cycle, making 2026 the most lucrative tournament in its history. There is a tension between sport as an institution that offers a public good to fans versus sport as a business that sells a product and experience to fans. In the case of the World Cup, I'm sensing a little bit of tension between these two factors. Meanwhile,
fans from many countries can't even afford a single ticket, let alone the travel costs. For Wiihon, whose in-laws are covering the cost of flights, attending even one match meant putting off a major purchase. Regarding money, my plan was like to buy a laptop this year during this time, but then uh I have to wait a little bit longer. Wiihon says he earns about 500 rupees a day. That's5 or $6 and has been cutting back spending ahead of his trip. We are very careful with our spending here. No more holiday, no more buying new things. Which brings us to my final chart. I
calculated what the cheapest available ticket was for a person to watch their country's team as a proportion of the country's GDP per capita or essentially how much of their country's average income would be spent to see the national team. In Haiti, for example, the cheapest ticket cost 89.2% of the average income. Even Brazil and Turkey at 7.2% is quite steep. This all brings up an important question. Who is this year's World Cup really for
