Red Card

This article appears in the February 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Read more from the issue.

As the World Cup takes up temporary residence in American cities this summer, FIFA has embraced a familiar opportunity: permission to price-gouge. Ticket prices for soccer’s premier tournament have in some cases topped $80,000. FIFA insists its hands are tied, blaming domestic market conditions.

In the United States, those conditions have a name: Live Nation and its subsidiary Ticketmaster, which controls ticketing for roughly 80 percent of the country’s most popular arenas. In the absence of meaningful competition, Ticketmaster uses dynamic pricing and junk fees to ratchet up event prices. In the secondary market, firms like StubHub and SeatGeek rely on similar tactics. With price-gougers holding a death grip on the market, the vast majority of music artists and sports teams have little choice but to participate in an extractive pricing system.

As the arbiter of its own primary and secondary ticketing marketplace, FIFA could make tickets affordable if it wanted to. It could reserve seats for loyal supporters. In fact, it has done both before. Instead, FIFA has chosen to cash in on the market failures endemic to American ticketing, weaponizing scarcity and monopoly control to squeeze every penny from fans chasing a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

World Cup history makes clear that this was a choice. For the 2026 tournament, FIFA has inflated base ticket prices, introduced its own form of dynamic pricing, and taken a substantial cut of resale transactions. Ticket prices are the highest on record in every category. From 2006 to 2022, the best available tickets to World Cup openers cost between $600 and $725 (adjusted for inflation). Now they are selling for triple that amount: $2,170 in Toronto, $2,355 in Mexico City, and a whopping $2,735 in Los Angeles.

Past World Cups reserved the cheapest tickets for local fans, sometimes for as little as $11. This year, that set-aside was abandoned. The “most affordable” tickets now cost at least three times more than at the last World Cup and were so scant that they sold out before general sales opened. Only after immense public pressure did FIFA agree to offer a small number of tickets—just 1.6 percent of the total—at $60.

Sky-high prices don’t end at the turnstile. Add soaring hotel rates, rising airfare, and FIFA’s own parking fees, which can run as high as $175 per car, per game. FIFA has chosen to make this World Cup the least accessible in modern history.

FIFA justifies its pricing regime by pointing to unprecedented demand, claiming that higher prices channel revenue back into the sport rather than to scalpers. But resale abuse is not inevitable. In co-host country Mexico, where resale regulation is stringent and government pressure forced the issue, FIFA agreed to cap resale prices at face value. In the United States and Canada, it chose not to. As resale prices climb into the tens of thousands, FIFA profits handsomely, extracting a 15 percent fee from both buyer and seller.

FIFA has chosen to cash in on the market failures endemic to American ticketing, to squeeze every penny from fans chasing a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Demand for this year’s matches has shattered records, surpassing 150 million ticket requests in its most recent sales window. The stadiums will be full, but attendance will skew toward wealth rather than devotion, locking many passionate supporters outside the stadium gates. This outcome is especially galling as many U.S. host cities use millions of taxpayer dollars to make this tournament possible—even as the very people footing the bill are priced out of attendance.

Some will argue that truly devoted fans will find a way to pay. But at a moment when more than two-thirds of voters say essentials are becoming less affordable and nearly half are drawing down savings just to get by, attending the World Cup is simply out of reach. In Los Angeles, the cheapest tickets to the opener would cost the average local family the equivalent of nearly seven months of ACA premiums. For a fan traveling to L.A. from neighboring Nevada, the combined price of parking and the cheapest ticket to a quarterfinal would rival the rent of a studio apartment back home.

By segmenting fans by wealth, a tournament historically defined by its unifying power is becoming yet another gated corner of our K-shaped economy. The irony is hard to miss: In chasing maximum revenue, FIFA risks shrinking the very audience that made the World Cup seemingly priceless.

This article appears in Feb 2026 Issue.

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