SBJ Unpacks: The state of FIFA World Cup ticketing

Tonight in Unpacks: With the June 11 kickoff for the FIFA Men’s World Cup looming, SBJ’s Ethan Joyce demystifies what appears to be a murky market around the event’s ticketing in this week’s magazine.

Also tonight:

• U.S. Soccer opens $250 million National Training Center
• NCAA Tournament expansion brings media, sponsor changes
• MLB licensees ebullient now, but face lockout ‘uncertainty’
• Op-ed: The missing metric in injury recovery

Listen to SBJ’s most popular podcast, Morning Buzzcast, where Joe Lemire discusses the sports and media legacy of Ted Turner, the PWHL’s expansion to Detroit, FanDuel’s leadership change and more.

We’re roughly a month out from the FIFA Men’s World Cup, and collectively, the sports industry is still wondering just how well-attended the 104 matches may be.

While clarity on that won’t come until the June 11 kickoff in Mexico City, what we’re seeing is FIFA holding firm on its ticketing price points, a secondary market that experienced more get-in prices rising than falling and a U.S. sports industry that still feels confident in the potential success of this tournament.

There’s a lot to get through here, so let’s run through this like a young Lionel Messi cutting into the box from the right.

Pricing and the current market

Prices have been the 800-pound gorilla around this whole event, illustrated by the topic’s steady coverage from international outlets (like The Athletic, Guardian and others) since the first ticket-purchasing window opened last fall.

Combine that with a lack of visibility on primary sales data for individual games — FIFA has only provided big-picture updates, like when President Gianni Infantino shared last month that more than 5 million tickets have been sold — and a legitimate concern about attendance has emerged.

For a pricing example, the worst-selling games on the secondary market, according to TicketData.com as of April 30, have a significantly lower cost than the current FIFA prices:

• Cabo Verde vs. Saudi Arabia: $158 get-in price | $380 FIFA lowest price listed
• Austria vs. Jordan: $175 | $380
• Algeria vs. Austria: $180 | $380

Meanwhile, tickets to catch the U.S. men’s national team’s June 12 opener against Paraguay still had tickets that ranged in prices from $1,120 to $4,105 via FIFA’s sales site.

Comparisons between the Club World Cup last summer and this World Cup end at the organizing body that oversaw them. The former was a new venture put together in a short window and positioned as a premium event (one that candidly struggled with attendance and prices, like the significant drop around late knockout-stage games). The latter has a much farther reach, nearly 100 years of history and fervent international interest.

That said, the 2025 tournament could have been an education in test-ballooning price points, according to longtime ticketer and consultant Jim McCarthy, who runs Impresario Strategic Growth Service to enhance business and sales strategies around soccer clubs. Demand, he says, is only fostered at accessible prices.

McCarthy suggested that the initial pricing windows for these games should have been more probing, the way the LA28 Olympics was with its initial deployment of local presale. “You have to sound out the market, and if prices are going to be high, you kind of need to work your way up to high prices rather than down,” he told Sports Business Journal late last month. FIFA had four phases of ticket windows, starting with the Visa Presale Draw for a chance to buy tickets, which ultimately went live in October — when pricing discourse around the tournament truly started — and featured a limited number of lower-cost seats.

But even without a clear picture of remaining inventory, the tickets out in the ecosystem that reach the secondary market are selling — and doing so at a higher price.

More than half of the games have seen a get-in price increase during the last 30 days (as of April 30). That includes 16 games that have seen an uptick of at least 20% in that window of time. Keith Pagello, the founder of TicketData.com, sees this as the pricing rising to meet the market, even in this last-chance window that FIFA recently opened. “You’re not finding anything that’s being released in these last-minute sales that’s below 50%,” Pagello said.

Thoughts around the industry

I sent out a World Cup straw poll to a handful of industry sources, gauging whether they saw any residual effects from FIFA’s ticketing process and whether there was anything that hadn’t been talked about enough.

The overwhelming sentiment? The World Cup is an event that pushes into that once-in-a-lifetime stratosphere, and in typical fashion, fans may be waiting until the last minute to buy for better value. Simply put by one source: “This tourney will be fine after all is said and done.”

A former operator on the premium side told me a likely break point on these prices will come, just because some of these games are not marquee (like the bulleted matchups I introduced earlier). But the process experienced here may inform the pursuit of premium offerings now and going forward.

“I’m curious the impact this has on standard tickets versus hospitality packages,” they said. “What value will be placed on hospitality and access, and will that avenue be more protected at the end of the day because people will pay for it?”

There was also some intrigue with FIFA’s decision to use Secutix as its ticketer for the World Cup, considering that Ticketmaster is the ticketer for nearly all the U.S. venues (10 of 11, to be exact). But the choice of Secutix and its white-label SaaS let the FIFA brand stand alone in both its sales site and marketplace.

This feedback ultimately set up the greatest game of chicken around a sports event: Fans have been conditioned to look for great deals closer to event dates, and FIFA’s sole purpose is to make money from its biggest event.

“Fans see the early listings [which are the most aspirational prices in the market, set by sellers who are testing the ceiling], and that becomes the story,” one ticketer told me. “What doesn’t become the story is that those tickets mostly don’t sell at those prices.

“The market corrects. It always does.”

Ethan Joyce can be reached at ejoyce@sportsbusinessjournal.com.

U.S. Soccer will officially open the Arthur M. Blank U.S. Soccer National Training Center (NTC) on Thursday, giving the federation a permanent training center and headquarters for the first time in its history. The $250M complex in Fayetteville, Ga., currently occupies 123 acres and features 400,000 square feet of indoor space.

The ribbon-cutting ceremony comes just weeks before the USMNT arrives for a training camp to prepare for the FIFA World Cup in North America. In addition to the senior men’s and women’s teams, the facility will cater to all 27 of the federation’s national teams, including youth, beach soccer, futsal and adaptive teams.

The opening of the NTC represents a major milestone for the federation, which has historically relied on rented training facilities. The establishment of a central hub brings the national governing body in line with top global soccer powers and is intended to centralize player development, coaching education, referee training and national team operations.

The NTC includes 17 outdoor playing surfaces, including 13 regulation-size natural grass fields, two artificial turf fields and two sand pitches for beach soccer. It also features a 115,000-square-foot indoor turf training facility and an indoor court for both futsal and powerchair soccer.

The NTC will serve as the organization’s corporate headquarters as well, with more than 350 staff members slated to move in on May 18.

U.S. Soccer expects to hold many of its tentpole events -- including the Annual General Meeting, Commercial Summit and SheBelieves Summit -- at the facility, though they may still go on the road. The federation projects the facility will host 215,000 visitors annually for gatherings ranging from youth tournaments to coaching clinics.

“This has been a long time coming,” said NTC GM Tom Norton, who joined the federation from IMG Academy last year. “U.S. Soccer has never owned a blade of grass prior to this facility. So, we’re excited to now really live and breathe soccer every day and be surrounded by it.”

The project was designed by architecture firm Gensler and constructed by Brasfield & Gorrie, with groundbreaking taking place in April 2024.

The NTC has been an attractive asset for brands, with seven signing on as founding partners: AT&T, Bank of America, Chobani, Coca-Cola, Emory Healthcare, Nike and Oura. Another 10 brands have been designated supporting partners, along with three supplier partners.

While the facility itself was named after Falcons and Atlanta United owner Arthur Blank, who donated $50M to the project, there are eight spaces so far within the complex that carry corporate entitlements:

• Nike High Performance
• Chobani Nutrition Zones
• Georgia Power Court
• AT&T Fields
• Bank of America Fields
• Chobani Field
• La Colombe Field
• Powerade Hydration Zone (Coca-Cola)

Norton said there are still more naming-rights opportunities within the facility and that the NTC will unlock additional revenue through rentals for a range of soccer events.

In addition to Blank, other key philanthropic contributors included Chick-fil-A Chair Dan Cathy, who donated the land, and Washington Spirit owner Michele Kang.

The site includes 77 additional acres of undeveloped land, allowing for further development in the future. Norton pointed to on-site athlete housing as one potential use case.

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The NCAA will be receiving an additional $50M each season in media as part of men’s and women’s tournament expansion from 68 to 76 teams. That expansion means TNT Sports and CBS Sports, which sell sponsorships for both events, will also see the opening of additional categories to grow their own revenue from the event. The move will seek to protect sponsors that are still part of the Corporate Champions and Partners (CCP) program, while also giving those media entities additional sources of potential revenue.

The move to expand also means the elimination of the First Four, which has been held since 2011, in favor of an “Opening Round,” with six games played Tuesday and six games played Wednesday leading into Thursday, the traditional first day of the first round. Each of the No. 16 seeds, plus half of No. 15s, would make up half of those 24 teams. The other dozen would be made up of a mix of No. 11s, No. 12s and No. 13s.

No subsequent schedule changes are expected for the tournament beyond that. The deal means an additional $131M in new revenue distributions to member schools participating in the event over the remaining six years of the NCAA’s media deals.

This would mark the third time since 2000 that the NCAA Basketball Tournament has grown the number of teams in the field. The D-I cabinet is set to meet on May 22 to pass the slated changes to the field, followed by an NCAA Board of Governors vote.

AMELIA ISLAND, Fla. — Coming after baseball’s most memorable World Series since the Cubs’ 2016 triumph, the eighty-something apparel and hard-goods licensees gathered here last week under the Florida sun were universally ebullient concerning the current state of their businesses. Looking eight months into their future, however, nearly all believed a lockout will short-circuit business, with many predicting that the 2027 MLB Spring training, if not the regular season, will miss games.

G-III Sports Chairman Carl Banks said his company has been having weekly meetings about lockout scenarios since March. “It’s definitely top of mind,” he added. “We’re talking to everyone about that possibility and everyone’s talking to us.”

The timing as far as starting to affect orders for next year is now, Banks said. “So, we’re looking at what we can build and hold that’s somewhat evergreen or fill blanks where we can here,” he said.

The 2027 MLB All-Star Game is set for Wrigley Field. With his Sports World Chicago store across the street from the “friendly confines,” Managing Partner Bradley Rosen has multiple concerns.

“I’m trying to figure out how much All-Star Game merch we should buy, or even if there will be one,” he said. “It looks like we’re going to miss a lot of our selling season, starting with spring training, so I’m planning on buying 75% percent of what I usually do and chasing the rest.”

“We haven’t gotten any calls [from licensees] about royalties,” said Evan Kaplan, president of MLB Players Inc. and a 27-year veteran of the MLBPA. “We remain optimistic, because there’s lots of incentives to continue playing. When you look at [licensing] sales, everything from spring training to the WBC into this season this year was very positive.”

At press time, Polymarket odds indicated a 55% to 57% probability that a new collective-bargaining agreement will not be signed by Dec. 1, when the current one expires. Accordingly, some licensees and teams are starting to operate like it’s not business as usual.

“Our top executives are telling me we’re going to miss games,” said a senior team merchandizing exec. “And there are already deals being done by licensees, as far as paying for goods later or paying partially.”

Added Rosen: “Most of my suppliers are large enough that they can swallow 30-, 60- or 90-day delays on orders. We’ll be OK, long term, but planning is problematic, at best.”

Fourteen-year MLB licensing vet Jamie Leece had headed MLB consumer products since January as SVP business/global consumer products and retail. He was preaching caution.

“If you’re not planning for business as usual, you’ll be unprepared,” he said. “That’s the feedback we’re giving licensees. ... I’d be naive to think [a potential lockout] wasn’t a concern, but a lot of the concerns I’m hearing from licensees here are just the normal blocking and tackling of the day.”

Still, a potential work stoppage was easily the topic du jour.

“Our baseball business has been great, and novelties are hot across sports, but there’s definitely uncertainty,” said Dave Bringe, VP sales at Fanatics’ Wincraft hard-goods unit. “It’s a bit like COVID, where we just didn’t know the future. We’re telling customers to plan like it’s a regular season (impending), and we‘ll certainly work with them when we know more and they know their inventory positions.”

Antigua Apparel was showcasing a line of iridescent shirts with MLB team logos which had to be booked by June to guarantee delivery for next season. “We’re cautiously positive,” said Antigua SVP Sales and Marketing Brendan McQuillan, “but like everyone here, we’re planning for every eventuality.”

Antigua and others with stateside manufacturing, decoration or assembly capabilities were optimistic those will be the ultimate determinant of success in case of a lockout.

“We have domestic production and shipping and that will ultimately mean a lot if the worst happens,” said Jack Queally, CEO of hard-goods licensee YouTheFan. “We’re all just waiting to see the outcome.”

This is a big earnings week in the sports industry, with many companies sharing their Q1 2026 results.

Interestingly enough, on the tech side, three companies are each dealing with what I’ll call “external pressures” that are most definitely impacting their businesses now and potentially in the future. Let’s run through the most interesting takeaways from Live Nation (which filed late Tuesday) and Sportradar (last week), while putting a spotlight on Genius Sports as it is set to release its latest filings Thursday morning.

Live Nation

The external pressure: The continued legal proceedings associated with its federal and state antitrust case and recent verdict.

Live Nation and its subsidiary, Ticketmaster, have operated as an illegal monopoly, according to the federal grand jury that ruled in favor of the 30-plus states. That decision, which came April 15, has now spawned a remedies phase that will start later this month.

While the ruling hasn’t caught up to Live Nation’s revenue — its $3.8 billion in Q1 is a 12% year-over-year increase — the trial’s consequences show in the company’s operating losses. The company racked up $450 million in expenses from government investigations and litigations, which led to an operational loss of $370.5 million. That number will surely be added to in Q2, with the remedies process of the antitrust lawsuit ongoing.

That gave investors little pause: Live Nation shares were up to $10.56 in the 24 hours since its filing, closing Wednesday at $167.82 a share. The company’s adjusted operating income (a figure that eliminates non-recurring sums of money like legal costs) was $371 million this quarter, up 9% YoY. Revenue in concerts, ticketing (via Ticketmaster) and sponsorship and advertising were all up as well.

On the earnings call Tuesday evening, Live Nation President/CFO Joe Berchtold explained that the company is still waiting on decisions to have a clearer picture of the outcome. The remedies phase could result in more potential damages paid or a breakup of Live Nation and Ticketmaster.

“There’s three key elements here,” Berchtold said. “One is we have a few motions that we made as it related to some of the evidence and how that proceeds, so we need a ruling on that. Two is the judge determining the process for the review of the settlement with the Department of Justice. And then third is the remedies portion of the trial that just concluded.

“So, we have views on how we think it should proceed, but the judge will decide that, and then that will define the timing and the exact pieces. So until then, we just have to wait a minute and see how he lays it out.”

Sportradar

The external pressure: Reports of connections to 270-plus unlicensed betting companies late last month.

Sportradar, which operates at a global level with deals across the NBA, NHL, MLB, MLS and too many others to highlight, already addressed the report, saying it only works “with licensed operators, follows strict global compliance and due diligence standards.” But that report resulted in a 28% drop in stock price. Share prices stabilized there, and as of market close Wednesday, they sat at $13.36.

The company reported an 11% YoY increase in revenue, coming in at just over $407 million. It had an operating loss of $7 million, which it attributed to a foreign currency loss of $9 million related to the value of the dollar.

Highlights from Sportradar’s quarter include hiring Sameer Deen as its CCO from Miami-based Entain, expanding its deal with Hard Rock Bet and adding the PGA Tour and UFC to its data and in-play betting offerings.

Genius Sports

The external pressure: The reaction to the company’s acquisition of the media network Legend for $1.2 billion.

This move, which officially closed last week, was not one that investors liked at all. Post-acquisition life for Genius Sports has seen its stock fall below $5 (it started the year over $11). The Q1 report will be the first reflecting this move and prompting commentary from leadership.

There’s a lot of intrigue in what Thursday may reveal, especially when its earnings call takes place. Stay tuned.

In professional sports, return-to-play decisions are often framed as physical milestones when strength is restored and key metrics are met. However, many rehabilitation programs still overlook a crucial variable: psychological readiness.

An athlete may be medically cleared, but not mentally prepared. That gap carries consequences.

Across sports, research consistently shows that psychological factors, such as fear of reinjury, confidence, identity disruption, and perceived readiness, play a decisive role in both athletic performance and reinjury risk. Conversely, mental health conditions themselves can increase injury risk, reinforcing the need to address psychological factors throughout rehabilitation. Athletes who return to competition without full psychological readiness are more likely to hesitate in high-pressure moments, potentially risking recurrent injury, as well as underperform relative to their baseline.

Multiple studies in sports medicine demonstrate that athletes with lower psychological readiness scores following injury, especially after ACL reconstruction, deal with significantly higher rates of reinjury and reduced likelihood of returning to prior levels of performance. A validated scale that reliably predicts return-to-sport outcomes is the ACL-Return to Sport after Injury (ACL-RSI), a 12-item questionnaire that evaluates confidence and psychological readiness. There are now a few validated scales that measure key components like confidence and fear of reinjury. However, how many are being administered or utilized in professional sports? It is clear that mental and physical health are closely linked, and inadequate management of either can create negative cycles that impact both recovery and performance.

We now know that an athlete’s mental health directly influences rehabilitation adherence, recovery timelines, and overall outcomes. Yet in many organizations, return-to-play protocols remain heavily weighted toward physical benchmarks, with mental health factors overlooked. This reflects an incomplete model of recovery.

Injury is not simply a physical disruption. It is also a psychological event. Whether it’s a traumatic mechanism of injury or feelings of isolation when pulled from routine team practices and games for recovery, athletes often experience loss of identity, performance anxiety, pressure to return quickly, and fear of reinjury. When the injury itself heals, the previously mentioned factors do not disappear. Instead, they oftentimes influence how an athlete moves, reacts, and performs under pressure.

NBA player Spencer Jones describes this experience: “I’d say coming back from injury is 70%-80% mental. The whole part of being an athlete is having a relationship with your body, and when you inevitably get injured, especially significantly, you lose trust in that relationship because it failed you. So a lot of the rehab process is mentally trusting it again and believing it can do the same things it ‘promised’ it could do.”

The loss and then subsequent rebuilding of trust is essential for recovery, yet it’s rarely measured or even talked about like physical strength and mobility are measured. From a performance standpoint, this matters. Hesitation can impact biomechanics, and fear can affect decision-making speed. Confidence plays a large role in how an athlete commits in a critical moment or pulls back from a play.

From a business standpoint, psychological readiness should be of utmost importance to leagues and team executives. Elite athletes represent a large organizational investment. A premature return-to-play decision increases reinjury risk, therefore extending recovery timelines and thus impacting overall team performance and roster stability. Integrating psychological readiness into rehabilitation is a performance and risk management strategy.

However, implementation requires more than just adding an assessment tool.

As Soul Cole, NFL legend and wellness consultant, explains, “True progress requires addressing the culture of the locker room, where stigma, trust, and psychological safety are shaped daily by ownership and coaching leadership. Without genuine buy-in and proper investment [for mental health resources], including fair compensation for clinicians, the impact will remain limited.”

Former NFL player Jelani Jenkins reinforces this reality from a player perspective as well: “You can’t drop somebody [mental health clinician] into the building and expect transformation if the culture around them hasn’t shifted.”

Their insights highlight an important truth: Psychological readiness cannot be effectively evaluated or improved without trust, integration, and organizational alignment. If athletes do not feel psychologically safe engaging in the process, even the best assessment tools will fail to provide meaningful feedback. While the solution is clear, implementation requires intentional and coordinated effort.

Leagues and teams must reflect on how physical performance and stats on the court or field will likely improve if psychological readiness is a key component of every physical injury rehabilitation program. Psychological readiness should be treated as a standard component of return-to-play decisions, alongside physical and functional testing. This includes validated measures of confidence, fear avoidance, and perceived readiness, as well as direct involvement from licensed mental health professionals, including sports psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, and more. These psychological milestones needed to successfully return to play must be given equal weight as physical measures of improvement.

Readiness is not defined by physical clearance alone, but by a comprehensive understanding of both physical and psychological preparedness. Being ready is not simply being healed. It is the intersection of physical capability, psychological confidence, and competitive resilience.

The next evolution in professional sports is clear: Integrating psychological readiness into return-to-play protocols with the same rigor applied to physical recovery. The cost of overlooking the mental component is not just missed performance, but a preventable risk. In today’s high-stakes sports environment, that is a gap that no organization can afford to ignore.

Dr. Brook Choulet is a concierge sports and performance psychiatrist, founder of Choulet Performance Psychiatry, and president of the American Board of Sports & Performance Psychiatry.

• SBJ’s Alex Silverman writes that following an introduction from the rapper Drake, Tim Leiweke and his daughter, Francesca Bodie, invested $117 million in the Italian soccer club Venezia FC.
• The NBA adjusted the business model of its proposed standalone league in Europe, sources confirmed to SBJ’s Tom Friend, by informing bidders last week that it will invest over $3 billion to offset potential early-stage losses.
• MLB is averaging 2.28 million viewers for its national games this season to date, marking the league’s best figure since 2017 and up 44% compared to this point last season, reports SBJ’s Austin Karp in this week’s Audience Analysis.
• Karp also writes that TNT Sports’ second year with Roland Garros will bring back many of the key voices that made the event such a success in 2025, plus a few new additions to the commentator lineup, such as former players Genie Bouchard and John Isner.
• Victory+ will stream the Dream’s local games for free this season, writes Friend, a follow-up to its recent WNBA deal with the Lynx that provides more momentum as it solicits crucial financing from investors.
• Just Women’s Sports is deepening its bet on women’s basketball, striking a content partnership with the WNBA ahead of the 2026 season includes sharing official highlights on media channels, notes SBJ’s Irving Mejia-Hilario.
• UFC has created a new bundle of various fighting sport properties, such as Zuffa Boxing and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and will appoint Joe Hand Promotions to sell it to bars and restaurants across the country, writes SBJ’s Adam Stern.
• TKO Group Holdings will not be getting cut off from Saudi Arabian funding like LIV Golf will, said President Mark Shapiro, allaying concerns that the combat sports operator could face a similar fate, notes Stern.