The Cost of Admission — Football Case Study

973/FCS

Research Department

Football Case Study supports Football for the Goals as a proud member of the United Nations initiative.

CONTACT

If you’d like to commission a research report, strategic advice or get in touch to know more, please contact: marvin.heilbronn@footballcasestudy.com

The Cost of Admission:
Dynamic Pricing at the World Cup

June 23 2026

WORDS Jasper Broad & Marvin Heilbronn
PHOTOGRAPHY Marvin Heilbronn

Introduction to Dynamic Pricing

In the months leading up to the 2026 World Cup, ticket prices for the event have become a recurring headline for media outlets and pundits alike. Prices range from thousands of dollars for group-stage matches to tickets for the final reportedly reselling for as much as two million dollars. Immediate controversy has followed these sky-high prices, and players such as the U.S. Men’s National Team winger Tim Weah, in conversation with French outlet Le Dauphiné, expressed that they are simply “too expensive.”1 Likewise, even U.S. President Donald Trump, who is known to spare no expenses for his political or personal desires, stated that he would refuse to pay a $1,000 ticket for a World Cup match.2 In response to widespread criticism, FIFA President Gianni Infantino has continued to defend the legality of this operation.

The emergence of thousand-dollar tickets has clearly alarmed the global football audience, but it is ultimately the product of FIFA's embrace of America's relentlessly profit-driven economic structure and its unyielding drive toward profit maximization. During the primary phase of ticket sales in September of 2025, FIFA announced it would utilize dynamic pricing, a system battle-tested during the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup.3 This system marked a departure from previous World Cups, which relied on a fixed-tier pricing model that differentiated access through ticket categories. For the 2022 tournament in Qatar, the original face-value ticket prices (typically categorized into 4 tiers, with Category 1 being the most premium) varied based on the importance of the match. Group Stage matches ranged from $70 to $220, Round of 16 tickets ranged from $96 to $275, Quarterfinals from $206 to $426, Semifinals from $357 to $955, and the final match from $604 to $1,604.

Dynamic pricing offers a notable shift from FIFA’s long-standing fixed-pricing model, and one that is unique to North America. Under this model, ticket prices are adjusted in real time based on the demand for certain games. As consumer demand grows for specific matches, the price of entry follows suit.4 Prices for certain games therefore vary depending on a multitude of factors influencing demand, such as the size of its fanbase in the region or the star power of its players. For example, the minimum price for a match between Jordan (Ranked #68 by FIFA) and Algeria (Ranked #32 by FIFA) currently stands at around $300, while tickets for Colombia (Ranked #11 by FIFA) versus Portugal (Ranked #7 by FIFA) fall around $2,300.

Dynamic pricing in the world of sports is not a recent innovation. Major sporting events in the United States have long applied this pricing model, with its first use emerging in the MLB in the late 2000s. Infantino, in response to concerns surrounding the tournament’s rising price of entry, further pointed to the frequent use of dynamic pricing in the U.S., asserting that “...if we do something wrong, then probably everyone selling tickets in North America is doing something wrong.”5

The FIFA president has also pushed concerns over the secondary black market for ticket sales as a defense for dynamic pricing. In a pre-tournament press conference, he noted that even with record-high face value, tickets still end up on the secondary market at a greater figure than FIFA’s initial selling point.6 He further alluded to the argument that fluctuating dynamic pricing ensures that FIFA captures the true market value of the tickets, while simultaneously preventing the black market from pocketing profits.7 While dynamic pricing has generated criticism among American sports fans in the past, the World Cup's global audience has brought renewed and heightened attention to the issue.

Gianni Infantino, Swiss football administrator and the president of FIFA, in the stands for the USMNT debut at the FIFA World Cup 2026 at Los Angeles Stadium (SoFi Stadium). June 12, 2026

Although mainstream media discussions have extensively covered the cost of World Cup attendance, this paper explores what FIFA's adoption of dynamic pricing reveals about football's broader transition into a privatized, consumer-based commodity. As football grows into a multi-billion-dollar industry and commercial partnerships expand into the United States, governing bodies are steering the sport away from the accessibility that has long made it a sport for all social classes. It is perhaps fitting that this transition is unfolding most visibly within the United States' hyper-capitalist economic structure. As this paper later argues, the fiscal barriers to entry for the 2026 World Cup reflect both America's belated embrace of football and the broader marketization that pervades United States social and economic life.

The World Cup’s History of Accessibility

Shock surrounding the price point of the 2026 tournament stems largely from the widespread and established notion that football is the "people's game." Football, especially at the international level, has long been celebrated for its accessibility to fans and players from all socioeconomic backgrounds. The game’s origins are a key driver in this established rhetoric. Although the historical “start” or creation of football has been debated, the game was first professionalized in England, and its popularity soared among the working class. Whether in the stands or on the field, football offered a divine sanctuary away from industrial work, and “as one of the pillars of working-class culture, associational football was not just a form of escape, but also a representation of the ordinary”.8 As we look past Britain and the emergence of not only the “people’s game,” but the “ world’s game”, football has consistently promoted accessibility.

Football’s diverse base at the grassroots level has fueled both the sport's cross-continental success and its mantra as the “world’s game.”9 Requiring only a ball and an open space, football has appealed to people across geographic, social, and economic boundaries. Its accessibility has enabled the sport to transcend divisions that often restrict participation in other activities, helping establish it as a truly global game.10 FIFA and its predecessor governing bodies have worked to reinforce this notion of football as a platform for diversity and accessibility, reinvesting revenue from past tournaments into grassroots and youth-level development programs.11 In member organizations where access may be limited, FIFA’s funding sources have been essential in ensuring that the youth of the nation are granted the opportunity to play football regardless of economic circumstances.

Following the 2010 World Cup, FIFA partnered with the non-profit organization Grassroot Soccer (GRS) to develop FIFA Football for Hope Centers across South Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. These centers prioritized the development of safe spaces for a community’s youth, combining football with education, health services, and youth development. As one GRS Hope Center graduate explained, “I am because the FIFA Football For Hope Center in Khayelitsha was. In the midst of poverty and crime in my community, I have gained my independence and freedom through support and coaching from GRS.”12 While examples such as the Sub-Saharan Hope Centers illustrate how FIFA has continued to promote global accessibility, one can not ignore the potential corruption associated with these initiatives.

The main form in which projects and initiatives such as these face claims of corruption is through FIFA’s lack of external accountability. Due to the organization's governance, which resembles a monolithic "one member, one vote" system, a majority of FIFA’s decisions are concentrated in executive authority.13 A lack of internal and external checks and balances has resulted in an environment susceptible to unchecked patronage, bribery, and illicit financial networks. In 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) unsealed a 47-count indictment against FIFA, its then-president Sepp Blatter, and a multitude of executives at FIFA. The indictment documented how executives at the organization had engaged in a 24-year racketeering, wire fraud, and money laundering scheme to enrich themselves at the expense of FIFA’s global partners.14 Importantly, a press release from the DoJ stated that these crimes had “profoundly harmed a multitude of victims, from the youth leagues and developing countries that should benefit from the revenue generated by the commercial rights these organizations hold.”15 While the indictment does not directly implicate the FIFA Football for Hope Centers, the period covered by the corruption investigation (1991 to 2015) overlaps with the development and expansion of these accessibility initiatives.

It is perhaps FIFA's own legacy of accessibility and its long-standing commitment to growing the game worldwide that makes the exclusionary turn of the 2026 World Cup so jarring. The tournament's economics make this transition difficult to ignore. Compared to the 2014 final in Brazil, the minimum ticket price for the 2026 final in New Jersey has risen by a staggering 1,377 percent. At the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, the cheapest group-stage ticket was priced at just $11 for residents. In 2026, by contrast, the lowest available price has settled around $60, and even that figure is reserved for a handful of nosebleed seats. Past World Cups, even those hosted in countries marked by deep economic disparity such as Brazil, Russia, and Qatar, proved that football's hallmark accessibility could survive on the sport's biggest stage. Dynamic pricing in 2026 has brought that legacy to an abrupt halt.

America’s Consumption and Transition of the “World’s Game”

While numerous factors contributed to FIFA's abrupt shift toward higher ticket prices, the tournament's location in the United States best explains both this shift and the consumer demand driving it. Criticism from mainstream media and football pundits has remained robust since the tournament began, yet nearly all stadiums continue filling to capacity. Even as demand pushes ticket prices upward, fans and newcomers to the "people's game" alike keep buying. Buyers from the host nations constitute the highest share of demand16, a strong indicator that interest in the World Cup, and football more generally, is rising across North America. It’s also worth noting that this trend reveals how rising prices are turning many fans outside North America away from the tournament altogether.

The shift is, in part, a product of football's growing market power in the United States, an inevitable result of the American public's growing affinity for the sport. Before the growth of the sport's popularity, football had existed in a commercial blind spot, overshadowed by baseball, American football, and basketball. In a 2023 Gallup poll, only 5% of Americans recorded that football was their favorite sport to watch, compared to the 41% that favored American football.17 However, since the 2022 World Cup and the U.S.’s gradual preparation for hosting the global event, data reveals that American interest in football has nearly doubled since the last tournament.18

Football fanatics and lifelong viewers in the United States may welcome this newfound American interest in the sport, yet a harsh reality underlies this gradual rise in popularity. The distance between international football and America had, in effect, protected the "world's game" from America's exploitative consumer market. With FIFA's shift to dynamic pricing and Americans' increasing frequency of ticket purchases, the market's potential and demand have been recognized, and America's market structure is doing what it does best: monetizing everything in sight.

On the one hand, the game's rising consumption, paired with a pre-existing market already built on dynamic pricing, has given FIFA the cover it needs to justify its World Cup 2026 ticket pricing strategy. As previously mentioned and quoted by the FIFA president in defense of skyrocketing ticket prices, dynamic pricing has been applied to most major U.S. sporting events. Throughout the states, these events have been characterized by high ticket prices driven by the aforementioned pricing model, a practice that has become widely accepted as the status quo of the American sports entertainment industry. In playoff contests or rivalry games that acquire increased consumer demand, prices have risen to comparable figures to those highlighted and criticized for the 2026 World Cup. Within the American sports industry, data reveals that dynamic pricing has been successful in raising revenue. According to Barry Kahn, the CEO of Qcue, a company offering dynamic pricing solutions to live entertainment companies, Qcue clients have increased revenue by 30 percent with high-demand events and from 5-10 percent with low-demand events.19

Given the similarities between FIFA's 2026 pricing strategy and those successfully employed by major North American sports leagues, Infantino's comparison holds considerable weight. In the North American sports environment, which FIFA will enter in 2026, a fixed-tier pricing model is simply insufficient for maximizing potential revenue. For FIFA, capitalizing on Americans' newfound demand, alongside adopting America's profit-maximizing ideology, has resulted in a transition to dynamic pricing, ultimately coming at the expense of the game's accessibility for all.

The U.S.’s market-oriented economic structure also helps explain why a World Cup hosted there has privatized the viewing experience of a sport coined as the “people’s game.” As the political and economic capital of major U.S. corporations strengthens, the marketization of commodities once regarded as publicly accessible has expanded. For example, public higher education in the U.S. has become more reliant on revenue from tuition, resulting in access becoming more dependent on an individual's ability to pay. Healthcare follows the same pattern, with the rise of private insurance markets binding the most essential of human needs, medical care, to a market-oriented logic. This marketization has crept into nearly every corner of American life, down to something as mundane as parking. Privately operated parking systems, now common across U.S. states, have been shown to drive up costs for those reliant on personal transportation while siphoning revenue away from municipal governments, starving the public infrastructure and social services that revenue would otherwise fund.20 These examples capture only a fraction of how marketization and privatization have reshaped Americans' financial lives, yet they reflect a broader pattern, one that extends, inevitably, to international football.

Although these examples may appear as disconnected from football and the 2026 tournament, they illustrate how the American capitalist-driven market dictates access to experiences, goods, or commodities viewed as broadly accessible. FIFA’s embrace of dynamic pricing reflects the same logic. Revenue and profit maximization based on consumer demand is prioritized over maintaining football’s mantra as the “people’s game” – a title held since the sports boom in industrial England. At its roots, and as past World Cups have exhibited, access to football does not discriminate based on one’s socioeconomic status. It is slowly appearing as if the tides have changed.

These broader trends help explain why 2026 World Cup prices hold greater weight than a simple increase in consumer costs. FIFA’s transition to dynamic pricing and its subsequent result represent a drastic departure from football’s core values as a “representation of the ordinary” and “the world’s game.” Access to the beautiful game becomes a privatized viewing experience for those who can afford to watch. While free, government-subsidized ticket lotteries, such as those organized by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the New York City government, may help expand access, they remain limited in scale. Only time will tell how dynamic pricing at the 2026 tournament will alter football's global accessibility. As the tournament leaves the United States for Morocco, Spain, and Portugal in 2030, it remains to be seen whether football's departure from America also marks a departure from America's business practices. For anyone who values the game's accessibility and its reputation as the people's game, the hope is that it will.

Endnotes

1. Condamine, Xavier. 2026. “Entretien exclusif. Timothy Weah : «J'ai envie de rentrer dans l'histoire de l'Olympique de Marseille».” Le Dauphiné Libéré. https://www.ledauphine.com/sport/2026/01/07/timothy-weah-j-ai-envie-de-rentrer-dans-l-histoire-de-l-olympique-de-marseille.

2. Perry, Austin. 2026. “President Trump on $1,000 World Cup ticket prices: ‘I wouldn’t pay it either, to be honest.’” FOX News. https://www.foxnews.com/outkick-sports/president-trump-1000-world-cup-ticket-prices-wouldnt-pay-either-honest.

3. ESPN News Services. 2025. “2026 World Cup tickets: FIFA confirms use of dynamic pricing.” ESPN. https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/_/id/46147005/2026-world-cup-tickets-fifa-dynamic-pricing-prices.

4. Heather, Sean. 2026. “World Cup Tickets Show Dynamic Pricing Works.” U.S. Chamber of Commerce. https://www.uschamber.com/antitrust/what-world-cup-ticket-prices-teach-us-about-dynamic-pricing.

5. Rodriguez, Carlos. 2026. “FIFA's Infantino defends World Cup ticket prices, says fans 'should chill' about ref denied US entry.” PBS. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/fifas-infantino-defends-world-cup-ticket-prices-says-fans-should-chill-about-ref-denied-us-entry.

6. Mendoza, Jordan. 2026. “FIFA's Gianni Infantino defends high World Cup ticket prices.” USA Today. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/soccer/worldcup/2026/06/10/fifa-defends-world-cup-ticket-prices/90495809007/.

7. Ibid.

8. Diaconescu, Ioana. n.d. “The Place of Football in the Political Culture of the Twentieth-Century British Working Class by Ioana Diaconescu.” The Market for Ideas. Accessed June 18, 2026. https://www.themarketforideas.com/the-place-of-football-in-the-political-culture-of-the-twentieth-century-british-working-class-a677/.

9. Pifer, N. D., Yan Wang, Glaucio Scremin, Brenda G. Pitts, and James J. Zhang. 2018. The Global Football Industry. 1st ed. N.p.: Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781351117982-1/contemporary-global-football-industry-david-pifer-yan-wang-glaucio-scremin-brenda-pitts-james-zhang.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. Haley. n.d. “Grassroot Soccer Celebrates a Decade of Partnering with FIFA.” Grassroot Soccer. https://grassrootsoccer.org/articles/grassroot-soccer-celebrates-a-decade-of-partnering-with-fifa/.

13. Rollin, Jack, and Michael Levy. n.d. “2015 FIFA corruption scandal | Explained, Qatar, & 2022 World Cup.” Britannica. Accessed June 18, 2026. https://www.britannica.com/event/2015-FIFA-corruption-scandal.

14. U.S. Department of Justice. 2015. “Nine FIFA Officials and Five Corporate Executives Indicted for Racketeering Conspiracy and Corruption.” Department of Justice. https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/nine-fifa-officials-and-five-corporate-executives-indicted-racketeering-conspiracy-and.

15. Ibid.

16. Reynolds, Tim. 2025. “FIFA announces 1M World Cup tickets sold, US leads demand.” AP News. https://apnews.com/article/fifa-world-cup-tickets-aa5ec608f51b398174b1c234d85f8def.

17. Gallup News. n.d. “Sports | Gallup Historical Trends.” Gallup News. Accessed June 18, 2026. https://news.gallup.com/poll/4735/sports.aspx.

18. YouGov. 2026. “Soccer is gaining ground in the U.S. ahead of the FIFA World Cup.” YouGov. https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/54777-soccer-is-gaining-ground-in-the-us-ahead-of-the-fifa-world-cup.

19. Rishe, Patrick. 2012. “Dynamic Pricing: The Future of Ticket Pricing in Sports.” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/prishe/2012/01/06/dynamic-pricing-the-future-of-ticket-pricing-in-sports/.

20. Metropolitan Planning Council. n.d. “Innovative Infrastructure Delivery: Chicago Parking Meter Analysis.” Metropolitan Planning Council. Accessed June 18, 2026. https://metroplanning.org/projects/innovative-infrastructure-delivery-chicago-parking-meter-analysis/.

INDEX NEXT