With less than four weeks to go until the start of the men’s World Cup, The Athletic has been speaking to secondary ticket sellers in the U.S. who are working on the tournament market.
“It’s legal. A service. I help people get tickets. I’ve never held a gun to anyone’s head,” says one who, like the others quoted in this article, spoke on condition of anonymity to be able to talk freely about the inner workings of an industry that is likely to play a key role in fans’ ability to attend World Cup matches in the U.S., Canada and Mexico this summer.
“Nobody ever feels bad for me when I lose money.”
Our conversations take place on Zoom with three brokers — as they all like to be called, rather than ‘touts’ or ‘scalpers’. “We normally think of guys who work the streets as touts or scalpers,” the first one adds.
“I look at us no different than a travel agent, when you go on holiday,” says another. “If I know these tickets are going to come down, I’ll let you know.”
They go through spreadsheets revealing millions of dollars of sales, orders and discounted tickets made available to the secondary market. They also discuss the number of tickets they believe are still available for the tournament and provide advice for fans negotiating controversial prices.
Broker one: ‘I had sold a lot of tickets before actually owning any’
“Shall I share my screen?,” says the first broker. It is at this point that the scale of his operation — albeit a one-man show — becomes clear.
It is a spreadsheet listing the number of tickets sold to individuals for World Cup games via the 10 platforms he operates on.
The most telling columns are those detailing how much he paid for the tickets, and how much he sold them for.
He puts his cursor over game four (they all refer to them by a number out of 104 — the total number of matches at this World Cup). It is the United States’ group-stage opener against Paraguay on July 12 at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. Bought at an average of $1,300 (£974 at time of writing) and sold at $2,200, he has made a $900 mark-up per ticket, meaning a $45,000 profit for him on just one game.
“There are thousands of brokers in the U.S.,” he says. “How many do over £1million a year? Probably 500.”
He has already done very well out of the 2026 World Cup. He skips over from the spreadsheet to his sales hub, which reveals he has already seen his best year of sales.
“For a typical Super Bowl, I’ll usually sell about $1million worth of tickets in a year,” he says. “I usually do about $3m a year. But this (the World Cup) is 104 matches, so it’s bigger.”
Brokers sell via secondary platforms and, according to the terms and conditions on that particular site, are obliged to fulfil orders to members of the public or face penalties, sometimes up to 100 per cent of the ticket price. “That’s the reason why most orders get fulfilled,” he says. “Once you have a pattern or history of not fulfilling orders, you would be out of business.” Brokers are charged a premium by the sites, which also take a cut from the buyer.
Back on the spreadsheet — with colour-coded columns — there is meticulous detail. He seeks out the best margin he has made on a single game. “Here we go — South Africa,” he says. “I bought four at $225 and sold them for $3,000 for the Mexico game (the first match of the tournament on June 11), so I make around $11,000.”
He had invested in those tickets via one of the early FIFA sales rounds prior to the group-stage draw last December, when you could commit to buying tickets to follow your team without knowing who their three opponents would be in the tournament’s initial phase or where those matches would be staged. It’s the risk-reward game brokers play. “You could end up with Curacao versus Ivory Coast or Colombia-Portugal — in which case it’s a home run.”
During the first three lotteries, which all ran before the group-phase draw nailed down teams and locations, he invested in a large tranche of tickets, varying in price from $140 to $1,000. “It was like shooting fish in a barrel those first couple of rounds, because there was plenty of availability.”
Exactly how he managed to buy that many is where one of the tricks of the trade comes in.
When the initial official sales phase started last September, many brokers became frustrated by being blocked by the purchasing system. Soon, messages appeared in brokers’ WhatsApp groups — some have as many as 400 members — about ways to circumvent it, for a fee, to make multiple 40-ticket (the maximum permitted) purchases. With the process still ongoing, the broker does not want to reveal exactly how this is done, for now.
FIFA opened one of its official ticketing windows in September 2025 (Carl De Souza/ AFP via Getty Images)
Although FIFA applied limits to the number of tickets people could buy, he thinks these worked in the brokers’ favour. You could only buy tickets (four maximum) for one game per day but get the same amount for 10 matches, wherever they happened to be, across subsequent days.
“It didn’t matter the itinerary or how impossible or onerous it would be, it was just, ‘Get them out’. ‘Take as much as you want’, in a way.”
It was well before the official sales window opened in September that he and other brokers started to speculatively sell tickets for the tournament on various platforms.
“From June to the end of August, I had sold a lot of tickets, before actually owning any,” he says.
“You can go long — owning the tickets, hoping they go up in price — or go short, where you don’t own them, expect the price to go down and get them cheaper.”
He says only five per cent of tickets sell for above face value. “I’ll always be able to get tickets, but whether I make money or not, that’s where the risk is.”
You also need to be able to fund such an operation.
While larger platforms are known to get financial help from investment vehicles and hedge funds, this broker needs large-scale but more familiar borrowing methods. During the Zoom, he gets a call from a well-known online e-commerce platform to discuss a six-digit lending facility.
He says: “I have around 18 different credit cards from different lenders, with $150,000 to $350,000 limits. So you are capped by that.”
Having fulfilled approximately 3,000 ticket orders, he has plenty of work to do before the tournament starts.
Before our call ends, he switches the screen to one World Cup stadium’s ticket map. He studies these carefully throughout a day to look for trends, and therefore opportunities.
“When you see the big white blocks on the maps of stadiums without any seats available, they haven’t sold them. I think FIFA is holding them back,” he says. FIFA disputes that and says these areas do not represent unsold seats, but rather those that have been sold or are for hospitality, VIP, VVIP or media seating areas.
The broker’s advice to fans is to wait it out for as long as possible and “there’s not much difference in quality between category two and three tickets. You’re going to be upper level of every stadium — closer to God than to the players”.
Broker two: ‘It feels like everyone is trying to gouge the fans’
Two main things stand out from our conversation with the second broker.
The first is the number of tickets he’s heard that FIFA is yet to sell.
“I’ve been told they have between 500,000 and 1.2 million left,” he says. That upper figure represents almost 20 per cent of FIFA’s total tournament inventory of six to seven million.
FIFA strongly rejects that claim and says it has sold 100 per cent of the inventory it has so far put on the market, which, it says, is approximately 90 per cent of the global total. Its president Gianni Infantino has also consistently highlighted in speeches that the organisation has received 500 million ticket requests for the World Cup.
The second standout element of the discussion centres around a document.
“This spreadsheet is everywhere,” he says.
It shows discounted prices for category one, two and three tickets for all 104 matches at the tournament. The broker is unable to reveal where he got it from, but he understands it as an offer from a particular party to sell a large quantity of cut-priced tickets to brokers on the secondary market.
The biggest discounts the spreadsheet shows are for the World Cup final, which takes place on July 19 at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, just west of New York City. Prices for these, on average, are $2,000 via official listings, allowing an opportunity to make a profit.
MetLife Stadium will host the 2026 World Cup final on July 19 (Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images)
There are reductions for 40 per cent of World Cup matches.
Tickets for England versus Panama (also at MetLife, on June 27, in the third and last round of group matches) are only $35 cheaper according to the spreadsheet, but category one tickets for the tournament’s opening game in Mexico City between co-hosts Mexico and South Africa on June 11 are $630 below the cheapest official listing. According to this broker, resellers are being offered over $16,000 worth of savings across all categories.
The broker is aware of others who have followed up on receiving the spreadsheet by making orders — one, he says, has offered to purchase “millions of dollars worth of tickets” — but they have not yet been fulfilled.
When talking about FIFA’s approach to ticketing across this World Cup, his impression is that the inner circles around Infantino are saying, “Everything is fine, it’s the World Cup, we know what we’re doing” regarding ticket sales, but he says those closer to the ticket-selling coal face are telling a different story: “It’s a mix of awareness that there’s a problem and delusion that it’s not as bad as they think it is.”
FIFA says it is “focused on ensuring fair access to our game for existing but also prospective fans” and that “unlike the entities behind profit-driven third-party ticket marketplaces, FIFA is a not-for-profit organisation”.
In addition to the total number of World Cup tickets that may still be available, the broker says corporate hospitality tickets are also an issue and that thousands of them remain on the market.
When contacted by The Athletic, On Location — FIFA’s official hospitality partner — said it was content with its sales levels at this stage. It highlighted an awareness that customers in the North American market often leave purchases later and a sense many currently unsold tickets will be allocated as teams progress through the tournament. It acknowledged it is currently in a key sales period, but projects selling more hospitality packages than at any other World Cup.
The broker highlighted On Location’s $252million loss on the Paris-hosted Olympic Games two years ago, $86m of which was reportedly due to unsold tickets. On Location did not comment on specific figures, but feels the established hospitality offering in football is different to the Olympics.
Last week, Mark Shapiro, the president and chief operating officer of On Location’s parent company TKO, said during an earnings call that hospitality sales “ended the quarter (Q1) at over two times any previous World Cup” and were “firmly on track to meet or even exceed expectations”.
While the inventory that On Location is responsible for is effectively seen as already sold by FIFA, the broker feels that gives an inaccurate picture of the popularity of the tournament. “If they (On Location) have taken 10 per cent, and other sponsors have also taken 10 or 15 per cent of tickets, FIFA can be saying that games are 25 per cent sold before they put tickets on sale.”
FIFA retaining high prices in the latest round of ticket releases is “eliminating potential customers”, says the broker, because “there are lots of roadblocks” like “political struggles, the travel expense, the transportation costs”.
Reducing prices is the way forward, he adds. Put simply: “If you can get people into those seats, $25 is better than zero.”
His fear is a repeat of some of the Club World Cup crowds in the U.S. last summer, referring to eventual winners Chelsea playing MLS side Los Angeles FC in front of 22,000 people at the 70,000-capacity Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta in their opening group match.
At that tournament, FIFA — as it has for the World Cup — adopted a dynamic pricing approach and dropped semi-final tickets from in the region of $400 to $15 as kick-off approached. “It teaches people to wait later and later, but that’s dangerous when now there are those barriers,” the broker says. “It feels like everyone is trying to gouge the fans.”
When asked about high ticket prices, FIFA told The Athletic it is “focused on ensuring fair access to our game for existing but also for prospective fans, and offered group-stage tickets starting at $60, a very competitive price point for a major global sporting event in the U.S.”. And when speaking about the secondary market in general, FIFA pointed out it had established “ticket sales and secondary market model (which) reflect standard ticket market practices” and its own resale and exchange platform “provides a safe, transparent and secure environment for fans to sell or transfer tickets to other fans”.
Broker three: ‘Final tickets are $33,000. I can pull one up for $8,000’
The third broker says he has generated far less revenue from World Cup tickets. “We’ve done probably close to $50,000 to $60,000 worth — it’s under $100,000.”
But that is because he is taking a different approach from the others.
“We’ve wanted to steer clear of it until the bloodshed happens,” he says. “I’m not in the game to actually put money on the line and say, ‘This could be a monster’, because the downsides could really blow up in your face.”
His approach is underpinned by his belief that FIFA is struggling to shift tickets. “I’m still in that camp of thinking there’s north of two million seats left,” he says.
FIFA strongly rejects the idea there are that many tickets still unsold.
While on the call with us, the broker highlights the role the secondary market is already playing. “I’m looking at face-value (official) tickets for the final that are $33,000. But I can pull one up right now for $8,000 on a secondary site.”
Some tickets, like for Portugal versus Colombia in Miami on June 27 (both sides’ potentially vital last game of the group stage), will hold their value. “Anyone who’s been watching that market knows darn well it’s a $2,000 ticket straight up,” he says.
Lots of others “are going to come back to earth”, he predicts. Jordan against Austria, the first group game for both teams on June 16 at 70,000-seat Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, is one example. “I’m pretty confident there’s going to be at least 30,000 seats empty for that match,” he adds. It is after the group stage that ticket prices will “shoot up”, in his view.
His strategy of not speculatively selling tickets across the tournament’s entire 104-match schedule is to guard against overpromising and being at risk of underdelivering. “It’s very stressful, because you have to offer something that’s similar to what you promised.”
Two cautionary tales come to mind.
When Colombia and Argentina played in the 2024 Copa America final in Miami, others in his industry “lost their a**”, as he puts it, because after speculatively selling tickets, demand was high and “they had to fill orders one way or another”. The other? The 2015 Super Bowl, when “short sellers lost millions on that game and people went bankrupt”.
While the World Cup will be a huge event, he believes other sporting fixtures this summer — more familiar to a U.S. audience due to regular exposure to them — will still be more appealing.
“You’ll have the NBA finals, Stanley Cup play-offs and the baseball season still going heavy,” he says. “That’s a lot of noise in the American market still happening when the World Cup is going on. How much money is there really to go around for these big-time events?”
