Dynamic pricing will be in play as soon as tickets go on sale for next summer’s World Cup, FIFA has confirmed.
The practice has been unpopular with regular event-goers for some time but rocketed to mainstream attention when tickets for Oasis’s UK comeback tour and the 2025 Club World Cup went on sale.
Dynamic pricing automatically changes the cost of tickets for an event in line with demand, surprisingly always upwards and rarely in the other direction.
FIFA World Cup 2026 tickets will be sold via dynamic pricing
Football’s governing body has revealed that the cheapest World Cup tickets will start at £44 and the most expensive final ticket will start at £5,760. No pricing in between has been confirmed.
“FIFA never ran a baseline study to determine how much revenue could be generated from 2026 World Cup ticket sales without dynamic pricing, suggesting the topic was never really up for debate,” according to The Guardian.
The Guardian reports FIFA’s dynamic pricing for the Club World Cup yielded mixed results and did indeed drop, a remarkable indictment of the low level of interest in some of those matches.
World Cup tickets will surely be a different story. They’ll be sold in four different stages between September and next summer and fans can expect the starting prices to be long forgotten by the time they get their hands on them.
“The pricing structure is expected to be put into place immediately for the first phase of ticket sales,” writes Alexander Abnos. “Prices will fluctuate based on demand from that point on, meaning that some matches will have higher minimum price points than others before the World Cup draw has even begun.
“The practice has also attracted complaints from fans priced out of events – including in high-profile cases surrounding Oasis’s tour and last season’s FA Cup final.”
FIFA also confirmed it would “operate a resale marketplace” to cut off scalpers. Individual ticket buyers can buy a maximum of four tickets per match and are limited to ten matches across the World Cup.
The 23rd World Cup will be played, surely with with no little controversy, in the United States, Mexico and Canada in June and July next year.
48 teams will play 104 matches in 16 host cities in the newly expanded tournament, for which the finals draw will be made in December in Washington, D.C.
“The draw had been expected to be held in Las Vegas, which is where it was completed when the US hosted the 1994 tournament,” according to BBC Sport.
“However, the draw, on 5 December, will instead go ahead at the Kennedy Center – the performing arts venue where [Donald] Trump is chairman.”
