How can we measure the success of the U.S. men’s team in the upcoming World Cup?
USA TODAY Sports’ John Arnold and Seth Bartelny join former USWNT player Laurie Lindsay to discuss the measures of success for the U.S. men’s team at the World Cup.
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The average full-time worker in America earns about $1,235 a week.
On that salary, if you wanted the best seats in the country, you would have to work 27 weeks to buy a ticket to the men’s World Cup final at face value.
Soccer fans are paying staggering amounts of money for tickets to the 2026 World Cup, which will see some matches played in the United States for the first time since 1994. FIFA, soccer’s governing body, surprised people earlier this month by selling premium cup final tickets for $32,970 each.
The event became emblematic of the perceived overreach of dynamic pricing, a sales strategy that adjusts prices over time based on what customers are willing to pay.
Dynamic pricing has helped drive dramatic increases in ticket prices for big games in both the primary and secondary markets. Fans paid $6,652 for the cheapest seats to Super Bowl 60 and $1,588 for nosebleed tickets to Game 7 of the 2025 World Series.
“It’s about maximizing margins down to the last dollar,” said Jesse Lawrence, founder and CEO of TicketIQ, which offers fee-free event tickets.
The controversial history of dynamic pricing
Scalpers have been using flexible pricing since time immemorial, collecting as much markup as they can on tickets originally purchased at a fixed price.
Sometime into the 2000s, Lawrence and others say, many sports and entertainment venues began using dynamic pricing, raising and lowering ticket prices based on supply and demand, star power economics, team competition, and even the weather.
Fan anger over dynamic pricing peaked around 2022, the year of the “Bruce Springsteen ticket debacle,” in which fans shelled out $4,000 for Springsteen tickets whose value was set by surging demand.
Several years have passed since then, and tempers have calmed down. Many customers now expect dynamic pricing, and this practice is spreading across consumers. If you charge more for Uber during rush hour, you’re embracing dynamic pricing.
The way people think about the experiential value of once-in-a-lifetime rock concerts and sporting events also seems to be changing.
Between Super Bowl 46 and Super Bowl 56, ticket prices rose from $1,674 to $11,557. This amount is adjusted for inflation.
This World Cup could test the limits of dynamic pricing.
The 2026 World Cup provides an interesting test case for how much fans will pay for a glimpse into sports history.
As the summer tournament approached, FIFA set prices high and continued to increase them. According to The Athletic, good tickets to the Cup Final were on sale for $6,370 in October. FIFA raised the price to $7,875 in November, $8,680 in December, and $10,990 in April. In May, the organization put on sale $32,970 “Front Category I” tickets.
By contrast, the most expensive ticket to the 2022 Cup Final was around $1,600.
“The way they started was outrageous, and that’s how people saw it,” said Dave Wakeman, a sports strategy consultant. “There’s this myth that FIFA is telling itself, this is America, Americans love big events, Americans will pay any amount of money to be in these big events.”
FIFA President Gianni Infantino defended his organization’s prices in recent remarks at a conference in California, pointing to the prevalence of dynamic pricing in the United States.
“We have to look at the market. We are in the most developed entertainment market in the world,” he said. “Therefore, the market rate must be applied.”
Ticket prices for the World Cup have soared. And then they fell.
By mid-April, the cheapest tickets for the first group games of the World Cup were selling for about $730, the equivalent of about three days’ wages for the average American worker.
And then prices started to fall. According to TicketData, through May 19, the average price for a “get in” ticket to a group stage game was “just” $560.
For FIFA’s critics, the drop in ticket prices proves that FIFA is charging too much.
“Prices are going down because they’re not rooted in reality,” Wakeman said. “FIFA misread this. They thought, ‘This is the World Cup, they can do whatever they want.’
Much like the Super Bowl, today’s World Cup is a much more expensive luxury than in years past, even when adjusting for inflation.
Cheap seats for group stage matches at the 1994 World Cup cost $55, adjusted for inflation, according to an online analysis of FIFA’s official prices. This year, the price for the same seat was $201.
TicketIQ’s Lawrence said: “Ultimately, I think this outrage is for customers who have been buying World Cup tickets for years… wondering what happened to that world.”
Ticket prices for the 2026 World Cup vary widely depending on who is playing in which round. The cheapest ticket to see a Saudi Arabia game was $165 as of May 19, according to TicketData. Tickets to Brazil start at $905. Brazil has won the World Cup five times. Saudi Arabia, never.
The high ticket prices aren’t entirely FIFA’s fault. According to data shared by Lawrence, FIFA tickets are cheaper for some matches, such as Colombia vs. Portugal, than on the secondary market. For other matches, such as the United States vs. Paraguay, FIFA charges even more.
Did FIFA mistime the price hike?
Spring 2026 may not be the ideal time for FIFA to experiment with dynamic pricing for the World Cup. Gasoline prices are rising. Inflation has just reached its highest level in three years. There is talk of an affordability crisis.
President Donald Trump himself seemed hesitant about the price of World Cup tickets. When asked by the New York Post about the $1,000 ticket price for the U.S. national team’s opening game on June 12, Trump replied, “Honestly, I don’t want to pay either.”
A Reddit thread about World Cup tickets has had mixed reactions. Some fans are angry about the high price. Others take them for granted.
“The price needs to come down more for it to be considered,” one Redditor wrote in a discussion about ticket prices in the r/Seattle community. “Unfortunately, it was prohibitively expensive at first.”
In a discussion on r/WorldCup2026Tickets, another Redditor took a more long-term view, saying, “I couldn’t imagine missing out on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for over $100 that I didn’t want to spend.”
