The World Cup Is Here. Can Regular Fans Still Afford to Go?

FIFA likes to call the World Cup the people's tournament. This summer, a lot of those people are doing math at the kitchen table and deciding they'll have to watch from the couch.

The sticker shock starts with the tickets. For the first time, FIFA is using "dynamic pricing"—the same system airlines and concert promoters use, where the price climbs as demand rises and dips when it cools. On paper, seats started as low as $60. In practice, the cheap ones vanish fast. By the start of June, ESPN found the cheapest tickets to opening-round games on FIFA's own marketplace running from $242 to $960, with final tickets climbing into the thousands and resale listings reaching absurd territory.

Add it all up and the trip looks very different from four years ago. ESPN's analysis put the cost of following a team through eight matches at roughly £5,225—about $7,000—at the lowest tier, compared with around £1,466 for a similar run at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. That's not inflation. That's a different kind of event.

Fans have noticed, and they're not being quiet about it. Football Supporters Europe, together with the consumer group Euroconsumers, filed a complaint with the European Commission arguing that FIFA holds a monopoly over World Cup tickets and is using it to impose prices that "would never be acceptable in a competitive market." Peter Moore, the former Liverpool chief executive, went further, calling the pricing "dystopian" in an interview with Al Jazeera. Even some members of Congress have weighed in, with Rep. Morgan McGarvey writing to FIFA to warn against treating sky-high demand as a license for price gouging.

FIFA's defense is simple: these are just market rates, set by what fans are willing to pay. A growing number of economists say that misses the point—the market itself was built to produce this result. FIFA controls the supply of tickets, decides when they're released, and runs the official resale site, where it collects a 15% fee from both the buyer and the seller—roughly $30 on every $100 changing hands, Fortune reported. One economist put the appeal bluntly: a $700 face-value ticket draws outrage, but a $500 ticket with a $200 fee tacked on quietly at the back end doesn't. Fortune also noted that big, contiguous blocks of seats vanished from the official portal and reappeared on resale—not the pattern of ordinary fans offloading a spare ticket. When one company owns every level of the market, critics argue, "supply and demand" stops being a force of nature and starts being a dial someone can turn.

The ticket is only the first line on the bill. Because matches are spread across three countries and a long list of cities, a fan chasing one team can land in three separate hotel markets on a single trip—Dallas one week, Toronto the next, Seattle after that. Travel outlet Skift reports that host cities are also layering on new or higher taxes on hotels, short-term rentals and even rideshares to help cover the cost of hosting, which means the final tab keeps growing after the tickets are bought.

It isn't only overseas fans doing the math. Plenty of Americans are squeezed before they ever look at a ticket. Households are still wrestling with elevated prices on groceries, housing and utilities, and travel has gotten notably pricier—average U.S. travel costs are running about 11% higher than a year ago, NerdWallet's tracker shows, with airfare alone up more than 25%. Fans are reacting the way you'd expect: nearly half say they're actively stretching their travel budgets, and lower-income households are the most likely to scrap trips altogether, according to U.S. Travel Association data. For a family already trimming dinners out, a $250 group-stage ticket times four is an easy thing to skip.

A big piece of that airfare jump traces back to the war between the U.S.-Israel coalition and Iran. The conflict choked off oil moving through the Strait of Hormuz and sent jet fuel prices soaring—North American jet fuel has roughly doubled since the fighting began, NPR reported, pushing airlines to add fuel surcharges and raise fares 5 to 10%. Analysts warn those increases may stick around even after the shooting stops. It's a reminder that not every barrier to attending the tournament was set by FIFA—some of it is the wider world pressing in at exactly the wrong moment.

There's a feedback loop forming, too. As prices rise, demand softens. Reuters reporting found flight bookings from Europe into host cities down about 3.8% year over year on average heading into June and July, with bookings into New York off nearly 16%. Empty-ish flights and quieter hotels are the opposite of what local businesses were promised when their cities signed up. 

It helps to know what's riding on all this. FIFA projects around $13 billion in revenue across the cycle ending with this tournament—what's expected to be the most lucrative World Cup in history, with matchday income alone potentially tripling from the last one. Against that backdrop, FIFA's main concession to angry fans looks modest: a limited batch of $60 tickets released across all 104 matches after the early backlash, amounting to just 1–2% of the seats.

For most fans, those are lottery tickets, not a plan. The beautiful game is famous for belonging to everyone—the kid in the cheap seats as much as the executive in the box. The lingering question this summer is whether the people running it still see it that way.