A real hit. Heavily criticized for its pricing policy, ticketing for the 2026 World Cup has broken all records. Invited to speak at the opening of the World Sports Summit in Dubai this Monday, FIFA President Gianni Infantino took stock, revealing exorbitant figures for the demand for places to attend the competition organized in the United States, Mexico and Canada.
“Now tell me, in your opinion, how many requests for tickets have we received during these two weeks,” he asked in front of the biggest stars of world football like Ronaldo Nazario and Andrés Iniesta. Maybe 5 million, maybe 10 million, maybe 20 million, what do you think? Well, I can tell you that in 15 days, we received 150 million ticket requests. That’s 10 million ticket requests every day. »
Supporters outraged at the price of tickets
“If we consider that in almost 100 years of history of the World Cup, Fifa has sold 44 million tickets in total, then in two weeks for the next World Cup, we could have filled the equivalent of 300 years of World Cups,” then boasted the Swiss leader, strongly criticized in recent months for his relationship with Donald Trump.
As a reminder, Fifa had first established a minimum price of 153 euros to be able to attend a single match of this World Cup. The FSE, the official European supporters’ association, then affirmed that following your team, from the first match until the final, would cost a fan at least 6,000 euros, or almost five times more than during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
But faced with the anger of supporters, the body finally chose to backtrack in mid-December, by creating a new category of tickets reserved only for supporters of the 48 qualified nations. Entitled “Basic stand for supporters”, the latter will allow tickets to be purchased at “60 US dollars each and available for all 104 matches”.
