Six days after FIFA president Gianni Infantino claimed that “every” 2026 World Cup match is “already sold out,” FIFA, out of nowhere, launched an effort to sell World Cup tickets.
It emailed fans advertising an “exclusive additional chance to purchase,” and warned that “availability is extremely limited.” Then, from Wednesday onward, it offered tickets to at least 64 of the World Cup’s 104 games, according to fans who sent information and screenshots to The Athletic.
The unexpected sale was, some experts suspect, the clearest evidence yet that FIFA has perhaps overstated demand for some World Cup games — or, rather, that it has priced out segments of that demand.
“When they say there’s incredibly high demand for this [World Cup], of course that’s true,” Jim McCarthy, a ticketing industry veteran, told The Athletic. “But that doesn’t mean there aren’t a whole bunch of games that are going to need some [marketing] support, and probably are still overpriced.”
It is not entirely clear why FIFA created this surprise sales window. One source suggested that the inventory could include tickets that had been offered to (and declined by) broadcasters and sponsors. Others assume it was tickets that FIFA wasn’t able to sell in its main lottery phase, the “Random Selection Draw,” which wrapped up last month.
Either way, the 64-plus matches were ones that FIFA hadn’t fully sold, despite Infantino’s claim, and despite a purported 508 million ticket requests.
And they speak to the likely truth behind that big nine-digit number, which “doesn’t tell the whole story,” McCarthy said.
The whole story is that there has, almost certainly, been unprecedented demand for certain World Cup games — the ones that weren’t available in last week’s sales window. When fans logged on Wednesday and Thursday, they saw neither the final nor either semifinal. No games involving Argentina, England or Mexico were listed. For Brazil, Colombia, Canada, the U.S., Scotland, Morocco and France, at least two of three group games were unavailable. This, surely, was not coincidental — these, plus the quarterfinals and round of 16, are the games that account for huge chunks of lottery entries and interest, even at FIFA’s prices.
Then there are the rest: games involving teams like New Zealand or Austria or Saudi Arabia.
There was clear rhyme and reason to the availability. This was not just a random selection of tickets made available by credit card failures in the Random Selection Draw. Perhaps there were some of those, but this looked a lot more like leftovers. It was, primarily, Category 1 and 2 tickets — the most expensive categories — to matches involving non-top seeds. Some sold quickly, others didn’t.
It was, therefore, probably a window into the contours of World Cup ticket demand — a window into which games were fully oversubscribed in the lottery and which weren’t, and which could still be available during a “last-minute” sales phase in April.
And the single biggest takeaway was that the U.S. vs. Paraguay, the American opener at SoFi Stadium near Los Angeles, was beyond available.
The USMNT will open the World Cup against Paraguay in a rematch of a November 2025 friendly (Vincent Carchietta / Getty Images)
It was available when the Los Angeles window opened at 3 p.m. ET on Wednesday, and still available hours later, and still available throughout Thursday, into Friday morning. On the main page of FIFA’s portal, it didn’t even get a “limited availability” tag — as other matches did, either immediately or as fans scooped up the inventory.
Why? Well, likely because FIFA priced Category 1 tickets to that game at $2,735 and Category 2 tickets at $1,940. At the start of sales back in October, it was the third-most expensive game of the entire tournament, sandwiched between the two semifinals.
As a result, many U.S. men’s national team supporters — or at least those who’ve spoken to The Athletic — focused their efforts and their funds on getting to Seattle for the second group match, or to Los Angeles for the group finale, each of which costs less than a third of the opener’s prices.
And over the five months since, the opener was one of relatively few games for which FIFA didn’t raise prices — likely an implicit acknowledgement that tickets to that game haven’t sold as well as expected.
Category 3 tickets to that game, priced at $1,120, have seemingly sold, but fans have evidently balked at the higher numbers.
Similar trends seem to exist for less-glamorous games at lower price points. In every sales phase, at every game, Category 3 (and virtually non-existent Category 4) seats have disappeared quickly. But hours after last week’s access began, Uruguay vs. Cape Verde, Jordan vs. Algeria, Croatia vs. Ghana and even Tunisia vs. Netherlands still had plenty of Category 1 and 2 tickets available.
In some cases, availability did indeed seem “extremely limited.” France’s match in Philadelphia, and Scotland-Haiti in Boston, for example, sold before some fans could get through digital queues. Several knockout games were initially offered but, in most cases, quickly gone. Ditto for the third-place match in Miami.
But for others, inventory was either plentiful or unappealing. (A full list of matches made available, most of which The Athletic has independently confirmed, was compiled by fans on Reddit.)
And to people who’ve followed the World Cup ticketing process, the overarching conclusion was reasonably clear.
“They have a lot of inventory they need to move,” Barry Kahn, a former ticketing executive who helped pioneer dynamic pricing in sports, told The Athletic.
“There’s absolutely demand,” Scott Friedman, host of the “Ticket Talk” show, told The Athletic. “People obviously want to go. But [some games are] drastically mispriced.”
Hardly anyone doubts that a majority of 2026 World Cup games will ultimately sell out. That they seemingly haven’t yet, with the tournament still three-plus months away, is not (necessarily) cause for alarm.
The question is how FIFA will get them over the line — will it lower prices? — and how far it still has to go. It’s difficult to know how many tickets were made available last week and how many fans were given access. It’s unclear what will be available in April. FIFA spokespeople, as has been the case throughout a remarkably opaque process, won’t say.
Or, perhaps there will be another sale between now and April. Who knows?
FIFA, in early February, told ticket applicants in emails that “the next opportunity to secure tickets … will be during the Last-Minute Sales Phase,” which its website said would begin “in early April.” Then, without warning, some of those same fans got emails last week about the previously unadvertised sale.
FIFA, when asked why, said it offered the opportunity to lottery applicants who hadn’t been chosen “in order to maximise fairness and acknowledge fans who have already demonstrated strong interest in the tournament.”
McCarthy offered a different line of analysis: “Creating a new window is a sign that they would like to get some completed orders into the system.”
Kahn was more blunt: “When you have an organization that’s announced a plan, like FIFA did, and when you deviate from the plan, clearly something is wrong.”
