Bullet point summary by AI
- Empty seats at the 2026 World Cup reflect a pricing strategy that has priced out many local fans.
- Dynamic pricing and limited affordable ticket tiers have created artificial scarcity and driven up costs for average attendees.
- The issue stems from a model that prioritizes revenue over accessibility, leaving swaths of stadiums unfilled even in soccer-crazy markets.
When you’re watching 2026 World Cup games and see empty seats, just remember who the real enemy is. It’s not the American, Canadian or Mexican fans who didn’t fill those seats. Because those empty seats aren’t about interest in the world’s most prestigious soccer tournament. There’s plenty of interest. No, the enemy is FIFA, whose dynamic pricing and greed guaranteed those swaths of open chairs.
There will be some who take the low-hanging fruit and blame attendance issues on the United States’ supposed apathy towards soccer. That would be more believable if the second game of the tournament in Guadalajara didn’t have thousands of empty seats. Soccer is the No. 1 sport in Mexico. Even that soccer-crazed country didn’t sell out every game.
Supply and demand don’t explain expensive World Cup tickets
Supply and demand is usually the culprit of uber-expensive tickets at sporting events. The get-in price for the Super Bowl is thousands of dollars because there are only so many Super Bowl tickets to go around and far more people interested in attending. The same goes for recent events like Game 3 and 4 of the Knicks’ NBA Finals matchup with the Spurs.
That’s not what’s going on with World Cup games. Sure, the spectacular USA opener against Paraguay was always going to be a pricey ticket. Top-tier teams with large communities in the United States like Argentina, Brazil, Spain, France, Germany and England were destined to test the wallet. It’s matchups like Qatar vs. Switzerland, Haiti vs. Scotland and Australia vs. Turkiye were bound to rely on local soccer fans to fill the seats.
The problem is local fans have been priced out by dynamic pricing, the ticketing model adopted by FIFA for this World Cup
How dynamic pricing works
Dynamic pricing means FIFA doesn’t set static ticket prices. Prices are free to fluctuate up or down. Theoretically that fluctuation is based on demand. Except FIFA held back inventory, creating artificial scarcity that kept already aggressive initial pricing high. They also designated the majority of seats in every stadium as Category 1, the most pricey tier, and then added newer and pricier tiers in the spring. The lower-value Category 2 and 3 tickets generally cover the other half of the stadium together. Category 4 tickets, the most affordable, account for less than two percent.
Unless you won the initial lottery for the first wave of ticket sales and lucked into the laughably tiny number of Category 4 tickets ($60), by the time you got a crack at buying tickets in the general sale, the prices were already being inflated by hundreds.
With casual fans being priced out, speculators will have gobbled up a larger swath of the available inventory than natural. That means you have artificially inflated prices extending to resale sites, where the incentive to turn a profit rules.
The ticket reality for local World Cup fans
I accepted long ago that I wouldn’t be able to afford a ticket to any of the United States’ games at SoFi Stadium just 10 miles from my home in Los Angeles (the get-in price for Friday’s opener against Paraguay was a cool $1,000). I also suspected from the jump that nabbing a ticket to any nearby games involving Spain, the country of my heritage, would be a long shot (tickets for Spain’s opener against Cape Verde start at $800 on resale sites).
But you know what I hoped to do? Catch a game between two random nations I had no ties to just so I could have the World Cup experience while it’s here. World Cup group stage tickets in Qatar were as low as $11 for locals. I was prepared to pay 15 times that to be able to attend a game this summer. It turns out, I should have prepared to pay 30 times that, at least.
SoFi’s match between Iran and New Zealand is by far the cheapest ticket for the World Cup in Los Angeles. You won’t get in for much less than $300 per seat. I just secured tickets for my husband and me in the second-to-last row of SoFi at face value of $215 each, and that’s before the fees applied by FIFA on their resale site, which brought the total to $500. It feels like we got a deal relative to our other options to get to a match this summer. That’s as cheap as it was going to get.
And that’s just talking about the “cheap” seats. Many of the empty seats are in sections where FIFA expected fans to pay well more than $500 a pop (if not thousands for hospitality packages) for bottom-tier matchups.
It turns out the Venn diagram of people interested in watching Czechia vs. South Korea at the World Cup and those with the disposable cash to afford to spend twice what it would cost to get season tickets to Chivas de Guadalajara is rather narrow.
Empty seats are a direct reflection of FIFA’s greed. Instead of making the World Cup as accessible as possible to the average American, Canadian or Mexican, they made it a financial sacrifice to attend games in your own neighborhood. Unfortunately, they’re too busy counting their billions to care.
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