Good Luck Getting World Cup Tickets
I fell in love with soccer as a young boy. Growing up in Calgary, I played, watched and read about it as much as I could. Back then, it wasn’t fashionable to be a crazy soccer fan. Hockey was king. I had to scrounge around news kiosks to find a Vancouver Sun or Province that reported on my favourite team, the Vancouver Whitecaps.
I watched my first World Cup in 1978, barely into my teens. It was hosted by Argentina, and only 16 teams qualified. I skipped school and joined other soccer fans at a local hockey arena to view the live broadcast. The place was packed, almost exclusively with chain-smoking men. We all strained to make out the soccer ball on the screen—the quality was so bad it looked like it was snowing in Buenos Aires. But just being around other fans was thrilling for me.
Here I am, decades later, still crazy about soccer. I’m incredibly excited that Canada is co-hosting the FIFA World Cup, with 13 matches in Toronto and Vancouver. After years of mediocrity, our men’s national team is competitive and could pull off some real upsets. And for Canadian supporters, the chance to cheer on their team at home is nothing short of extraordinary.
There’s just one problem for us soccer-mad fans. Tickets for the World Cup are very, very difficult to get. According to FIFA, as of late 2025, the demand for tickets was 30 times more than the available supply. For Canada’s three group-stage games, once tickets have been set aside for corporate partners, media and other groups, only about eight per cent of purchasable seats end up in the hands of Canada Soccer to distribute to fans. Almost none of my friends who hoped to see a match at home were selected in FIFA’s lotteries. All 13 games in Canada are virtually sold out.
And with such high demand for tickets comes steep ticket prices. FIFA uses dynamic pricing, which means it raises ticket prices as demand grows. According to an analysis by The Athletic, FIFA increased World Cup ticket prices by 34 per cent between October of 2025 and April of 2026. The best ticket to the opening match between Mexico and South Africa has increased from US$1,160 to US$2,985. For the final match, the best seats have jumped from US$4,620 to US$10,990. As of early April, FIFA’s ticket sales platform lists around 700 tickets available for Canada’s first match against Bosnia at US$3,125 each. The matches I attended at World Cups in Brazil in 2014 and Qatar in 2022 cost about a third of this year’s prices. So why the big difference?
On paper, FIFA is a non-profit. In reality, it functions more like a corporation whose 211 member federations are its stakeholders. FIFA argues that high prices simply reflect the incredible demand for tickets, and it has a fiduciary duty to its members to profit as much as possible, because 90 per cent of that money goes back into the sport. The organization subsidizes national associations, funds grassroots and women’s programs, supports referee and coaching education, and backs talent academies around the world. FIFA is simply trying to capture as much of the market value of the tickets as possible, which would otherwise sell for much more on the unregulated, secondary ticket market. This is true of any major entertainment event in North America. Just look at how much people paid for Taylor Swift tickets on the secondary market. FIFA has even built its own resale platform, where original buyers can list tickets at markups of up to 30 per cent.
Seen this way, World Cup ticket pricing is simply a rational business decision to maximize the market value of the event, then redistribute that money back to its shareholders for the good of soccer. Critics scoff at this claim, but FIFA funds many tournaments beyond the men’s World Cup that don’t make money, while also sending millions to cash-strapped national federations like Canada Soccer. It’s different from purely profit-based secondary resellers like Stubhub, which monetizes scarcity and keeps that profit in a private marketplace. FIFA turns scarcity into a subsidy for the sport.
And yet FIFA’s prices seem like a bald cash grab, especially when compared to how cheap the tickets are for other tournaments like the Euros or the UEFA Champions League final. At Euro 2024, the cheapest seats for group matches were €30 to €60, with more expensive seats in the €150-to-€200 range. But part of the reason why UEFA, Europe’s governing body for soccer, can set low prices is that it’s redistributing revenue across just 55 member associations in one of the richest regions in world football. FIFA, by contrast, uses the World Cup to help subsidize 211 federations, many of which rely on outside funding.
Soccer supporters in Europe—the people who pay, week after week, to see their teams play—also seem to have more influence there than with FIFA. Fan groups are well-organized, with a history of pushing back on corporate cash grabs. For example, public outrage helped take down the proposed European Super League in 2021. Last year, in Germany, organized fans forced the Bundesliga to drop a private-equity media deal. And in England, years of campaigning helped secure a cap on Premier League away-ticket prices. In countries like Germany and Sweden, members even hold majority control of their professional clubs.
With mounting worldwide criticism of its World Cup prices, FIFA somewhat relented in December by creating a Supporter Entry Tier with a small number of tickets priced at US$60 for each match. Canada Soccer asked the Voyageurs—the country’s main supporters’ group—to distribute them through its own lottery. I’m a Voyageurs member and, despite never having bought a lottery ticket in my life, I got lucky enough to nab a cheap ticket to Canada’s crucial last group match against Switzerland, which might determine whether we move on to the knockout rounds.
So what’s a soccer-mad fan to do if they want to see a World Cup match in Canada? With all of FIFA’s lotteries now over, they can either wait and hope that resale prices fall from out-of-this-world to just extremely expensive, or find a cheaper ticket to one of the less-popular matches—say, Jordan vs. Algeria—if they’re willing to travel to the United States or Mexico.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Government regulation of the secondary ticket market is legally tricky, but it can be done. Legislators in the U.K. and Europe are already looking to prohibit secondary ticket sales above the face value of the original ticket, and Canada’s provinces should follow this lead.
All of which reminds me of my favourite stick-it-to-the-corporation story. I was in Paris for the 1998 World Cup final between France and Brazil. I didn’t have tickets but was able to revel in the post-match celebrations on the Champs-Élysées after France won 3-0. The next day, on a train back to Stuttgart, I got talking to a German man in my compartment and asked where he’d watched the match. “At a pub just outside the Stade de France—until 10 minutes before the final whistle, when stadium security opened the gates.” He just wandered into the stadium and joined the French supporters for the final minutes of the game and post-match celebrations.
Given current security protocols, that couldn’t happen now. Nor will it ever in a world where unbridled capitalism—not the love of Taylor Swift, hockey, soccer or even Pelé—is king.
Murray Mollard is the author of Winning Pitch: The Canadian Men’s Soccer Team at the World Cup and Beyond