The United States makes its 2026 World Cup debut on Friday, at the stadium formerly known as “SoFi” (the name has been redacted, per FIFA demands). Tickets remain available to watch the U.S. and Paraguay play in person at 9:00 p.m. ET, 6:00 p.m. PT.
Via Joe Lago of Sports Business Journal, FIFA has roughly 350 tickets left in its primary inventory. Another 2,500 or so are available on the secondary market.
As of Friday morning, the cheapest price for a ticket was $1,129.
The matches at SoFi will be played on lush, high-quality grass that Rams owner Stan Kroenke installed at the behest of FIFA. By February, when SoFi Stadium hosts Super Bowl LXI, the grass will be long gone and the fake stuff will have returned in all of its artificial glory.
Kroenke also had to, as mentioned above, remove the sponsored name of the venue for the duration of the World Cup, reconfigure the lower areas of the stadium, and forgo other events that would have generated significant revenue for the duration of FIFA’s SoFi takeover.
As Devin McCourty said earlier this week on PFT Live, and as the NFLPA Twitter account amplified on Thursday, it’s “disrespectful” to NFL players for NFL owners to install high-quality grass for soccer and insist on using artificial turf for football.
Said the NFLPA in another post, “If these extensive field changes are worth the cost for a month-long tournament, why aren’t they worth the cost for the NFL players who primarily compete in these stadiums?”
The bottom line is that grass fields, in the view of owners who choose turf, have too much of an impact on the bottom line. Now that it’s a collective bargaining issue, it will change only if the NFLPA makes a concession that matches the overall cost of converting all stadiums to grass.
Still, there’s value in pushing it. The NFL does a good job of locking arms during CBA talks. What better way to drive a wedge among the oligarchs than to insist on a term that, for the teams already playing on grass, will be viewed as no big deal?
