As summer draws closer, many are dreaming about more sun, swimming and in Kansas City, soccer. The 2026 FIFA World Cup is being jointly hosted by the U.S., Canada and Mexico, with four group-stage games, one round of 32 and a quarterfinal happening right here in KC. Typically, World Cup host cities feature larger populations, like New York, Dallas and Los Angeles. Kansas City was uniquely chosen this year, making the opportunity to see such a world-class event even more accessible for local midwesterners.
In addition to releasing these games, FIFA launched a new campaign to make tickets more financially accessible to fans, promising prices as low as $60. For many KC soccer fanatics, this was a dream scenario: getting to see a game at a majorly reduced price without purchasing a plane ticket. However, not all dreams become a reality.
FIFA adopted a dynamic pricing strategy for this year’s World Cup. This means ticket prices are subject to change, depending on demand and inventory from game to game. Initially pitched as a way to lower prices for certain matches, this system has transformed into what feels like a bait-and-switch for ticket-seeking fans.
Steven Goff, a soccer writer and contributor to Yahoo Sports, has covered 14 World Cups in his career. He commented on the misleading nature of this year’s World Cup ticketing.
“And World Cup tickets are always high because it is the World Cup. But some studies have shown that they’re four or five times more than they were four years ago in Qatar. This is just a severe case of greed,” Goff said on NPR on Dec. 12, 2026.
Goff is not alone in this observation. According to Sports Illustrated, ticket prices for the World Cup Final have increased by over 70% within a six-month time frame, from when they were first made available in October 2025. Fans can now find themselves paying over $10,000 for a single seat at the match as opposed to the $6,370 they would have paid in October.
This exorbitant price increase is made even more dramatic when compared to prices from the final matches from past years. The 2022 Qatar Final featured Category 1 prices (the most expensive), which peaked at $1,604, roughly 14% of the 2026 price for the same game.
Another option, seen as a way to bypass this inflated system, was to purchase “Right to Buy” tokens through FIFA Collect. Each token costs hundreds of dollars and gives the owner the right to purchase a ticket at a to-be-determined future cost and time. However, FIFA Collect demanded that fans pay for the tickets by Nov. 13, leaving them in the dark as to the cost. Later, it was revealed that 70% of the tickets made available through the RTB system were Category 1 (the most expensive) and NONE were Category 4 (the only category with offerings under $100). This meant that if fans were unwilling to shell out thousands for a seat, they were at a loss and their token and the money spent on it became useless.
Football Supporters Europe (FSE), led by Ronan Evain, lodged a formal complaint against FIFA’s policies, stating that “FIFA holds a monopoly over ticket sales for the 2026 World Cup and has used that power to impose conditions on fans that would never be acceptable in a competitive market”.
They went on to allege six more specific abuses of power, bait advertising among them.
Arguably, FIFA’s ticket-selling approach goes beyond corporate greed and exposes the truly cynical side of modern sports. Corporations are turning away from the interests of the fan base to focus on their own monetary gains. It has gone beyond celebrating the love of the game.
