The fact that the global body of football would capitalise on a World Cup being held on North American soil was never in doubt. But it is the varying layers of costs, added across different mediums, that have turned the 2026 World Cup across the USA, Mexico and Canada into an event where the best matches have simply become unaffordable to a significant group of fans. At the heart of this is dynamic pricing. For long, events have priced their tickets at a set value. People have purchased those tickets at that value and, based on demand, sold them at higher prices on secondary platforms and made a profit. Dynamic pricing essentially attempts to remove that secondary retail market by basing ticket prices on demand and supply. Dynamic pricing is a part of everyday life. The Rapido bike you book works on the same principle. The cost of a ride goes up during the rainy season or peak traffic, but drops during lunch hour. Sometimes the customer benefits, sometimes the service provider benefits — but the middleman marketplace benefits all the time. What FIFA did, though, was to create a marketplace for reselling tickets, and then decided to charge 15% from both the seller and the buyer, ensuring that regardless of demand or supply, they profit from it. “An authorized resale market enables the seller to control the exchange and charge commissions and is the seller’s best revenue-maximizing mechanism. That is the core economic logic behind FIFA’s resale platform,” Pnina Feldman, an associate professor from the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, told ESPN. Also Read | FIFA attempts to ease fan anxiety with in-stadia sensory rooms According to Ticketdata.com, the cheapest ticket available was for a Cape Verde vs Saudi Arabia Group H fixture at the Reliant Stadium in Texas, with prices hovering around the $160-170 mark. But the real issue with dynamic pricing emerges with the bigger games. The World Cup final, initially priced at $6,730 for the top category, has now risen to over $10,990 in the latest sales window. “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,” FIFA president Gianni Infantino said. “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.”Story continues below this ad The justification is that where there is demand, FIFA must strive to earn the topmost dollar. It has also led to wide variance in prices. Most group stage tickets cost anywhere between $60 and $620. FIFA has not released data on how many tickets are available at the cheaper end. According to the Associated Press, the number of $60 tickets for each game is likely to be in the hundreds, not thousands — accounting for roughly 1.6% of total available seats per match. There is a marked disagreement between FIFA and fans over who should be present at a big-ticket World Cup match. Dynamic pricing favours fans willing to pay astronomical amounts for better games while relegating those who cannot afford them to watching less in-demand fixtures. It has led to skyrocketing prices for top level games and a serious lack of demand for certain group stage matches. FIFA has been accused of trying to offload tickets for these low-turnout games by selling large quantities to unofficial resale websites. According to the Telegraph, large blocks of seats appeared on resale website SeatGeek for $200, well below the $700 valuation on FIFA’s own resale marketplace. In some cases, as many as 18 blocks of seats were available on the site, which is inconsistent with normal reseller behaviour and points to a mass dumping of cheap inventory into the market. “Why doesn’t FIFA just lower prices on its own site? Probably because official price cuts could trigger refund demands, chargebacks, or consumer-protection headaches from fans who already bought at much higher prices. Instead FIFA keeps official prices high, avoids openly admitting the market-clearing price is lower, and moves unsold inventory through third-party resale platforms instead,” said Florian Ederer, an economics professor from Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.
How FIFA turned the World Cup into a rich man’s game
