As a Massachusetts resident, I was overjoyed when I heard the 2026 World Cup would come to my own backyard at Foxborough’s Gillette Stadium. A passionate soccer fan, I rushed to the International Federation of Association Football’s (FIFA) website to purchase tickets this past spring. I was shocked to find sky-high ticket prices in the thousands, nowhere close to the 2022 Qatar price levels. Hearing my dad reminisce about tickets in the low hundreds during the 1994 U.S. World Cup, I realized I had been naive.
What could explain these expensive ticket prices? Was it simply inflation, increased expenses for this World Cup, or, as FIFA President Gianni Infantino repeatedly claims, all a matter of supply and demand?
Ultimately, fans should only blame FIFA itself. By exaggerating match attendance and dumping tickets onto third-party resale sites, FIFA has created the illusion of high demand and low supply. Because of these market manipulation tactics, along with FIFA’s failure to guarantee fans the correct seats they paid for, relevant authorities should hold FIFA legally accountable for consumer deception at the 2026 World Cup.
For the 2026 World Cup, FIFA implemented a new ticketing model. According to their website, ticket prices may fluctuate based on “demand and availability” in each match, effectively making its ticketing a dynamic pricing model. However, FIFA rejects this characterization, insisting that the organization employs “variable pricing,” an argument that suggests a mere battle over semantics than anything else.
FIFA’s supply and demand-based pricing is not problematic on its own. After all, the organization has every right to determine ticket prices based on market conditions. Rather, the issue arises when FIFA covers up the true market value of its tickets. The organization has artificially inflated ticket prices through misleading statements about ticketing sale quantities and creating the illusion of short supply by outsourcing sales to third-party websites.
Earlier this year, FIFA leadership lied about the actual attendance numbers at matches. In an interview with CNBC in February, FIFA President Gianni Infantino claimed that “every match is sold out.” However, game-day numbers tell a different story. An independent analysis by TicketData, which tracks attendance at major U.S. sporting events, found that almost 74,000 tickets remained unsold only five days out to the opening match on June 11.
FIFA’s close relationship with third-party vendors has also aided FIFA in its pricing scheme. As The New York Times reports, FIFA has sold a substantial portion of its tickets to official, approved third-party partner vendors at lower prices than their official website tickets. FIFA makes a 30% profit on each third-party vendor sale.
The consequences are twofold. First, dumping unsold tickets from its own platform creates the illusion of low supply. Ticket buyers will not know how scarce these tickets actually are, because these third-party vendors are scattered and without a central ticketing platform. By creating the illusion of ticket scarcity, FIFA then has an economically valid justification for driving up ticket prices. In the midst of this mess, FIFA also obscures the true market value of the tickets, which are available for cheaper on these secondary markets. These actions contradict FIFA’s purported mission to protect the fair market value of its tickets.
While Boston University economics professor Florian Ederer understands FIFA’s need to get rid of unsold tickets, he believes this particular tactic is unjustifiable. In an interview with Yahoo Sports, Ederer argued, “FIFA shouldn’t leave money on the table and hand it en gros to resellers, but what they’ve been doing here in terms of ‘supply management’ is deceptive and exploitative.”
Second, this strategy decreases the likelihood of legal liability for FIFA, which could simply lower prices on its own website. However, Processor Ederer notes that doing so would likely open the floodgates for consumer protection complaints, as fans would accuse the federation of having artificially inflated ticket prices in the first place.
Yet, supply-and-demand manipulation is not the only problem in FIFA’s ticketing fiasco this summer. New reports have emerged from a New York attorney general investigation that FIFA has not been transparent about ticket categories of purchased tickets. For this World Cup, FIFA has split tickets into four tiered categories, with Category 1 offering the best seats.
Specifically, some fans have complained to the attorney general’s office that they received tickets for Category 2, instead of Category 1 seats. In addition, FIFA created subcategories of “Front Categories” within each of the four sections with the most desirable seats in early 2026, past when tickets first released in September 2025. Fans who had already purchased tickets were left in limbo, unable to access these newly available seats. This chaos only added to the confusion and lack of transparency surrounding the ticket process.
Collectively, these actions suggest that FIFA has broken its pledge to protect the fair market value of its tickets. Currently, the organization shows no sign of changing. Maintaining that 90% of game revenue is reinvested into soccer development around the world, FIFA officials have adamantly defended their predatory ticketing practices.
This defense falls flat because claiming to serve a noble end does not justify the means of reaching it. Even if one were to take FIFA’s words at face value, the organization already has a poor track record through market manipulation and opaque information on seats. Accountability must come before the organization continues its exploitative mechanisms to maximize profits in future World Cups. Yet, this task is easier said than done and begs the question: how can prosecutors hold FIFA criminally liable for its acts of consumer deception?
The first immediate challenge arises from jurisdictional issues. In other words, prosecuting FIFA as a collective organization will be difficult. Referencing previous investigations into FIFA corruption, an article in the New Criminal Law Review explains that courts do not have the authority to evaluate claims outside of a country. Given that FIFA is a multinational organization, this legal principle would pose challenges to charging the organization as a whole.
Therefore, the best path forward is for prosecutors to examine individual actors and specific conduct within a specific jurisdiction. These investigations could look like analyzing FIFA President Infantino’s public statements, analyzing ticket price fluctuations in a specific venue, or looking back at data on third-party resale sites for specific games. For example, the New York attorney general’s ongoing investigation could result in hearings in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, which typically hears consumer protection violation claims. The outlook remains hopeful for such an outcome, especially given the previous precedent of successful cases in corruption claims against FIFA. Whatever the legal landscape shapes out to be, the implications are clear: prosecutors must act, and they must act expeditiously before FIFA gets the green light to repeat its ticketing recipe disaster at the next World Cup.
