The ticketing conversation entering the World Cup was not good. Prices were high, inventory availability was opaque and there was a real concern about just how full host venues would be throughout North America.
Ultimately, the 104-game behemoth of a soccer tournament featured 70 sellouts. FIFA expects to eclipse $15 billion in revenue for its 2023-26 cycle, a number far exceeding the governing body’s expectations.
For TicketData.com founder Keith Pagello, whose site tracks the get-in cost and pricing fluctuations for sporting events and live entertainment, the biggest ticketing takeaway settled around the pricing: The pricing cratering that many expected in the lead-up to the matches never happened.
“The overall sentiment was that they will have to lower the prices to get tickets sold because there’s no way that they’ll sell them all at these prices,” Pagello said. “And so many people based [their opinions] on that reasoning, which was sound reasoning at the time.”
Fans are programmed now to wait for last-second deals. But unlike most sporting events, for which ticket prices become most affordable a day or two before game time, Pagello said the only World Cup deals available were for some of the third group-stage matches featuring teams already eliminated from the knockout phase or group-stage winners resting their starting 11.
“By and large, the first two group-stage games for every team were probably almost unanimously significantly higher,” Pagello said. “Probably, on average, double the price a week or two into the tournament versus where they were a week before the tournament started.”
Knockout games, meanwhile, often saw a pricing surge initially but came back down toward their pre-tournament pricing, according to Pagello. Take the World Cup final as an example: It had a get-in price of $7,322 in October 2025, a peak pricing of $12,300 on June 23 and a final get-in price of $7,477 roughly six hours before Spain and Argentina kicked off the July 19 match.
FIFA’s lack of information around total inventory ahead of the games played to its advantage, Pagello said. What felt like artificial scarcity due to the lack of clarity around total inventory proved to be real scarcity for one of the most sought-after sports tickets in the world. Case in point: On top of the 70 sellouts, 24 more games reached more than 99% capacity.
“Everybody thought prices would go down,” Pagello said. “That’s what everybody was saying. ‘There’s so many unsold tickets.’ And everyone was wrong.”
