Soccer fans, your chance to score tickets to the 2026 FIFA World Cup begins on Wednesday. But if you want to be a part of the action at one of 16 venues across North America, it won’t come cheap.
When is the first opportunity to buy tickets?
If you’re a VISA credit card, debit or prepaid card holder, you have 10 days to enter a presale lottery of sorts starting Wednesday for the first chance to buy tickets. If you register and are selected in what amounts to a lottery, you can buy up to four tickets apiece for as many as 10 matches, meaning 40 tickets in total on Oct. 1.
FIFA said around a million tickets would likely be available in the first presale for any of the 104 matches in the tournament, including the final. That’s one-sixth of the total available for the entire tournament. Those tickets will initially be priced at $60 for some group stage matches, all the way up to $6,700 for the final.
Those prices, however, could increase the moment they go on sale Oct. 1 because FIFA has implemented a version of dynamic pricing that will fluctuate the cost based on demand. Organizers are calling it “variable pricing.” Fans who buy presale tickets won’t know which teams they will be seeing next summer, nor will they be able to choose their specific seats.
“What FIFA is doing is adapting to the domestic market,” a FIFA official told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s a reality in the U.S. and Canada that events are being priced as per the demand that is coming in for that event.”
Will there be other ticket sale opportunities?
A similar lottery phase will be held for non-Visa cardholders in late October. Prices will likely see a dramatic shift on Dec. 5, when President Donald Trump, along with FIFA President Gianni Infantino, unveil the group stage tournament draw at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
“It will be broadcasted live all over the world,” Infantino said. “We’ll have a billion people watching how the 48 countries who qualify for the World Cup will be drawn into 12 different groups, in 16 different venues across the United States, Canada and Mexico.”
After the draw is announced, there will be another random selection lottery in mid-December to give fans another shot at some premium seats. Prices will increase once fans know who, when and where their favorite team is playing. Closer to the tournament, there will be last-minute sales that fans can also join.
Is there a way around buying via the lottery system?
It seems the only way around the lottery system requires cash, and lots of it. FIFA will set up an official secondary market early next year where fans will be able to buy and sell tickets that have already been paid for.
FIFA’s official site will work a lot like popular resellers Stubhub or VenueKings and also compete with those websites. The difference between FIFA’s resale site and those others is that FIFA can 100% guarantee you’ll actually get your tickets, where other sites can’t.
During the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, FIFA said it received over 23 million requests for about 3.4 million available tickets. Four years later, there are almost double the number of tickets available, but also, nearly twice the demand.
The tournament has expanded from 32 teams to 48. Currently, 18 slots in the field are filled, with 30 more up for grabs in qualifying tournaments around the world. Some of those tournaments, in Africa and Central America, for example, will not wrap up until mid to late November.
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