Less than 24 hours before kickoff, the cost of a seat at the World Cup final crossed the $2 million mark on FIFA's official resale platform.
As Lionel Messi's Argentina prepare to face Spain and their teenage superstar Lamine Yamal at New York New Jersey Stadium, ticket prices on the secondary market have soared to levels that would have seemed impossible even a year ago. By Friday, nearly all tickets appeared sold, with a few listed on FIFA's sales platform at about $32,000 each. By Saturday, no last-minute tickets remained on the official site. FIFA's resale platform, however, still showed tickets ranging from just under $10,000 to as high as $2.3 million.
According to Al Jazeera, the final caps a World Cup where fans were willing to spend more than ever for a seat at the quadrennial tournament. Ticketing expert Scott Friedman, who previously worked for the Cleveland Cavaliers, said FIFA read the demand correctly from the start.
"What FIFA did a very good job of was determining what demand would be because people [were] paying these absurd prices for just about all the 104 matches," Friedman said. "A year ago, we didn't think people would be travelling with Trump's ICE stuff and all this other conspiracy stuff. But it's the most popular tournament in the world by far globally, and FIFA, to their credit, they set the prices high, and people ended up paying them."
Group stage tickets were initially priced at $575 each, more than double the most expensive group ticket available during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. FIFA's dynamic pricing system pushed many final prices far higher than that.
According to the Reuters news agency, an analysis of FIFA attendance data found that more than half the 72 group matches were attended to capacity, with most others only a few hundred fans short of a full house. About 99.7 percent of available seats were filled during the preliminary stage matches, FIFA said.
Those numbers erased early fears that steep prices would drive fans away. Empty seats had been visible around the Guadalajara Stadium for the June 11 match between South Korea and Czechia, prompting concern. But as the tournament expanded to its largest-ever field of 48 teams, so did interest.
As recently as Wednesday, hundreds of tickets for the final were still available at just over $7,000 on FIFA's platform, a figure that prompted speculation over whether FIFA had finally priced too high. The sellout that followed proved those doubts wrong.
