FIFA Uses Their Monopoly to Box Out Ticket Competition at World Cup

The United States is co-hosting the 2026 World Cup, which will be a huge event across the US, Canada & Mexico. The majority of the matches will be at existing US football stadiums. These venues are larger in capacity than most venues used for the World Cup which should mean more opportunities for fans in the US to attend matches. The challenge the fans will face is finding tickets they may want to buy, and not being forced to buy tickets for matches they do not want. That is because FIFA will work overtime to eliminate any competition on World Cup ticket sales. If FIFA is successful fans will only have one source to try to buy tickets and have to live with whatever options are presented there, which may event mean being forced to purchase additional games they do not want just to secure tickets for the best matches.

None of this is new, as this has been the standard practice for the World Cup for the past 30+ years. FIFA works with the host country to try to eliminate any competition for ticket sales, thus greatly reducing the ability for fans to purchase the tickets they want. The impacts of this are forcing fans to pay more money for tickets than they would if they could freely buy tickets on secondary ticket market, making it difficult for fans to find the tickets they want to purchase and even creating more opportunities for fraudsters to offer tickets due to the lack of ticket sales on credible ticket sites. The problem with fraudulent sites scamming fans has happened at the past few World Cups and FIFA is eager to promote that same danger for the US World Cup. The difference is that purchasing tickets from existing US ticket marketplaces offers protections for fans that these fraudulent sites obviously do not. If FIFA is effective in eliminating competition in ticketing on the ’26 World Cup, then fans will once again pay higher prices (in many cases) for less available options and more fans will unfortunately wind up buying from fraudulent sites that pop up for this event.

If US regulators are thinking of the fans then they will decide that a robust free market on tickets is much preferable for fans instead of restricting ticket sales to the monopoly controlled by FIFA. Competition creates healthy markets and plenty of opportunities for fans to buy tickets at the prices they are willing to pay, versus the ticket prices they are forced to pay. FIFA has plenty of dollars at stake in trying to control the ticket market on the US World Cup, but hopefully common sense will prevail thus not allowing them to monopolize ticket sales for the event.