Welcome back to Niche Football Journalism. This week, we have a different kind of article. If you listened to the podcast from Thursday, you may understand why we have released this today. We’ve had guests on the podcast recently, and we tend to tell stories from all around the world that do not often get the light of day in the modern mainstream media. However, today, we are looking at something that has come out in recent days and that has caused a huge stir in the world of football. The 2026 World Cup ticket prices.

This isn’t a rant about FIFA charging too much for their tickets. Unfortunately, FIFA is the governing body and is free to charge what it wants. The issue is that the average football fan is now being priced out because of this.

In years gone by, it has been projected that FIFA has become a greedy organisation and will go to extreme lengths to squeeze every penny out of the people who make the game what it is, the fans.

Categories

World Cup tickets are sold on a category basis, usually ranging from category 1 to category 4. The USA, Mexico and Canada are no different. The opening games for the World Cup are already highly priced. During the proposal of hosting the event, the team behind the bid proposed that tickets would range between 21 dollars and 323 dollars. The final price ranges from 128 dollars to 4210 dollars for premium seats. Personally, I believe to is extremely overpriced.

Alas, this is not the case. Those figures, it seemed, were to help bolster the bid and acquire the rights to host the tournament. It has come to attention that the very cheapest tickets for the World Cup final will be just over two thousand dollars, with more expensive tickets going up to almost seven grand. Ludicrous money. Money people may be spending to watch a game that their nation may not even be a part of.

The category 4 tickets were said to be as little as 60 dollars, and FIFA has stood by that in saying they will be, but it seems as if, in some stadiums, these correlate to about 10 seats, if that, in each ground. Not only that, but the 60 dollars would be for the tickets themselves, which see you sat in the clouds, and one can guess with a restricted view, but it does not guarantee you an actual ticket.

Right To Buy Scheme

A big talking point about the tickets is FIFA’s new Right To Buy (RTB) scheme. Or in other words. FIFA’s way of extorting more money from football fans for no other reason than the fact that they can do it. The RTB scheme is, I think, absolutely ludicrous. The RTB scheme is almost just an expensive queue jump. You purchase digital tokens, not so different to NFTs when they were popular, from the FIFA Collect platform. These tokens themselves can cost in excess of a thousand dollars.

After going to the FIFA Collect website itself, I am gobsmacked at what I came across. FIFA are selling this RTB as some kind of sticker album to convince the world that it’s all a fun game. You buy packs that contain, basically, digital stickers and collect them. Once you finish a collection, you ‘may’ be rewarded with the right to buy. So, you may be rewarded with the one thing you’re doing this for. Again, though, you will more likely not be. The cheapest of these packs, which contains just three items, is $9.99.

The most expensive, from what I have seen so far, is the Mega Glory Bundle, which costs 23 thousand dollars. Ridiculous. Yes, this guarantees you 25 tickets; however, these were for the club World Cup this year, which, if you watched, wasn’t exactly a very sold-out tournament, so you would have been better off just turning up on the day. It also guarantees you 25 RTB’s which then gives you another opportunity to spend, probably another couple thousand dollars for an actual ticket.

The most worrying thing so far is how many of these ‘packs’ have sold out. All packs have limited allocation, as some, which cost thousands of dollars, are for specific stadiums; therefore, FIFA cannot sell more than the capacity it holds.

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Ticket Touting

Not to worry, though, surely that means that all the tickets have been snapped up so far by die-hard football fans. Not the case, not the case in the wildest dreams of anyone. A new problem has arisen. In the U.S.A., it is not illegal in all states to ticket tout. Yes, you heard that right. In some states, it is legal to buy and resell tickets at whatever price you want. Not the case in Mexico, where it is illegal, but the final is in America, the final, which has already seen tickets being sold in excess of 40,000 dollars because of this.

So, the RTB tickets for each nation have been released at various prices, with the majority of the bigger nations having sold out their allocation. The individual nation RTB packages cost up to 1000 dollars and are there to give each paying person the chance to buy a ticket to the final, if, and only if, their nation reaches the final. And remember, these are non-refundable. As of recording 2, fans of Uzbekistan have paid 300 dollars for a Right To Final (RTF) pack, one of the cheaper RTF packs, as they are highly unlikely to make it to the final, seeing as this is their first ever World Cup. And without being disrespectful to Uzbekistan, these people have simply given FIFA 300 dollars for nothing.

Even if your team reaches the final, you may not receive a ticket, and not only that, but you will also have to arrange travel on a few days’ notice. Flights will cost well over a grand for return flights from Europe, and maybe more depending on where you are from.

A Real Shame

And there goes the final whistle on this story. Yes, this is very different to what is usually posted on this website, but this is something that needed to be spoken about. I, as do millions of people, love the World Cup. Watching 3 or 4 games a day at home, taking time off work to just watch from home or at the pub is fantastic. For the fans who want to go, which I am definitely not after this news, it is a real shame and does go to show Infantino’s intentions. It’s a dark time for the World Cup, and unfortunately, with ticket touting being legal in several states, I can only see the situation getting worse.

A real shame.

Written and Researched by BSc Cavan Campbell

FIFA Disrespecting Football Fans And Their Ludicrous World Cup Tickets

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