World Cup tickets are absurdly expensive and everyone is mad about it. Non-American fans seem to have been priced out of the tournament, judging by the lack of hotel reservations being made in host cities, and even FIFA Peace Prize recipient Donald Trump thinks things have gotten out of hand. "I wouldn’t pay it either, to be honest with you," Trump told the New York Post when alerted to the fact that tickets to the USMNT's opening game are selling for upwards of $1,000.
FIFA is to blame for this, as the organization can set face-value ticket prices however it pleases. The top ticket price for this year's final is more than $10,000, whereas a similar ticket for the 2022 World Cup final in Qatar cost $1,600.
According to FIFA president Gianni Infantino, these extortionist prices aren't actually the result of FIFA's own choices, but of the nefarious American custom of ticket reselling. Infantino spoke at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, and had this to say for himself:
In the US it is permitted to resell tickets as well. So if you were to sell tickets at the price which is too low, these tickets will be resold at a much higher price.
And as a matter of fact, even though some people are saying that the ticket prices we have are high, they still end up on the resale market at an even higher price, more than double of our price.
It's darkly amusing that Infantino can't be bothered to even pretend to make an argument on behalf of soccer fans. All he's saying here is FIFA's ability to protect its cut is more important than anyone having a chance at securing a reasonably priced ticket in the first place. Sure, it sucks to be in a ticket lottery trying to outmaneuver scalpers hoovering up every cheap ticket for the sake of reselling them, but FIFA cutting out the middle man by marking up the original ticket prices to this degree doesn't make life any easier for the average fan. And as Infantino himself points out, resellers are still going to buy those tickets anyway, only now their markup has to be even more severe. This is how you end up with a few tickets to the 2026 final being priced at $2 million on FIFA's official resale market. FIFA gets a 30 percent cut on any ticket sold on this market, of course.
Ticket reselling isn't the real problem here. Infantino even admitted as much during the same conference:
We have to look at the market – we are in the market in which entertainment is the most developed in the world. So we have to apply market rates.
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You cannot go to watch in the US a college game, not even speaking about a top professional game of a certain level, for less than $300. And this is the World Cup
Consider this a timely reminder that FIFA, despite billing itself as a virtuous organization that exists solely to glorify the game of soccer and spread its gospel around the globe, is first and foremost an engine for wealth extraction. It does not choose host cities for its marquee tournament so much as it identifies markets, and its purpose is to ruthlessly exploit those markets to the best of its ability. Infantino and his cronies are making a bet that there are enough rich people in each of the American host cities to fill a stadium. The rest of us just have to eat shit.
