A single match cost me thousands of dollars at 2026’s World Cup of the 1% | Leander Schaerlaeckens

With ticket sales phases under way and prices reaching eye-watering levels, my experience raised a crucial question: who is this World Cup for?

For months, people in my life had been asking me when and where to get World Cup tickets. In the absence of any actionable information from Fifa before the first round of the pre-sale opened up, they hoped, I guess, that I had inside knowledge.

In truth, I only knew that Fifa would be using the universally despised dynamic pricing model, and that the bid book for the 2026 World Cup had promised an average group stage ticket price of $305. Mind you, that was seven and a half years ago and an awful lot of inflation has happened since then. In the bid, Category 4 tickets for the group stage - the cheapest seats available - were priced at $21. (As we would soon learn, the actual price would start at $60, and category 4 tickets are almost non-existent.)