FIFA slow – With thousands of U.S. World Cup tickets still available for sale directly from FIFA months ahead of the June 12 opener, the governing body’s pricing strategy—built around slow releases and high early prices—has drawn fresh legal scrutiny. New York and New Jer
When the U.S. Men’s National Team plays its World Cup opener on June 12. the match won’t be hard to find on FIFA’s own sales channels—thousands of tickets are still available for purchase direct from FIFA. Fans who expected ticketing to feel like a simple “buy and go” moment are instead watching a supply plan that keeps seats on the table. even as FIFA has said it received more than 500 million ticket requests for the five-week event.
That mismatch between demand claims and lingering inventory is now colliding with regulatory pressure. On Wednesday, the attorneys general of New York and New Jersey subpoenaed FIFA to seek information about their World Cup ticketing practices.
For Gianni Infantino, FIFA’s president, and the organization he leads, the unsold seats aren’t a flaw to fix. They’re built into the approach—part of a broader strategy that, ticketing experts say, is designed to maximize revenue by timing releases of inventory and pushing prices early.
“This is all about selling the maximum amount of tickets for the maximum amount of money,” Keith Pagello, founder of TicketData, said in an interview.
Critics say the effect is predictable: fans pay more up front or gamble on whether waiting will help. Supporters argue this is the price of living in a market where entertainment companies can shape supply and demand over time instead of unloading everything at once.
Ticketing consultants describe the mechanics as a modern version of “slow ticketing”—a gradual release of inventory. rather than a single massive 10 a.m. drop. The idea has spread from major concert acts like Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen over the past decade or so and has increasingly moved into high-profile sporting events.
What has changed, Wakeman said, is the pricing. As Dave Wakeman, a ticketing consultant and author of the Talking Tickets!. newsletter. put it. early listings often open higher than the market can bear. helping rights holders capture value that used to be harvested by brokers who bought tickets at face value and then flipped them on the secondary market.
“On a global level, we are witnessing a transition of pricing power, from the broker community to the rights holders,” Ken Hanscom, chief operating officer of TicketManager, said in an interview.
In this model, early buyers frequently accept prices that will eventually come down as the organizer manages inventory and demand. That can mean primary tickets remain on sale for weeks or months after release—even for events like the World Cup, where millions pre-registered for a chance to buy.
Ticket insiders sometimes refer to the pattern as “blue dot fever. ” named for the blue dots on Ticketmaster’s event pages that indicate primary tickets still available. Last Thursday morning—about 10 hours before Game 2 of the NBA’s Eastern Conference finals between the Knicks and Cavaliers at Madison Square Garden—there were hundreds of face-value tickets still available. with prices ranging from $693 to $3. 220. (A late buyer of one of those blue-dot tickets was New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.).
For the World Cup opener—U.S. Men’s National Team vs. Paraguay on June 12 in Los Angeles—TicketData said there were roughly 2,400 face-value tickets still available online as of Wednesday afternoon, with face values ranging from $1,940 to $2,735.
Wakeman’s frustration cuts beyond ticket availability and into the moral logic of the system. The fan, he argued, is treated like an afterthought.
“The fan is an afterthought in sports in America,” Wakeman said. “You’re only a fan inasmuch as you are willing to pay and take the shit that they feed you.”
He pointed to the expansion of legal sports gambling in the U.S. and the advertising that follows as evidence of how he believes the industry views its audience—using aggressive monetization regardless of what fans experience.
“You don’t care if they’re abused. You don’t care if they’re just destroyed. You just care about extracting as much value as you can before they’re a broken husk and they’re thrown over to the side,” Wakeman said. “That’s what FIFA is doing.”
The ticketing approach also intersects with a broader shift in modern sports economics: organizers have leaned harder on hospitality packages that sell access alongside the game itself. In the NFL. On Location—which the league co-founded in 2015—has built a major part of Super Bowl gate strategy around pricier hospitality. Suites can be part of some packages. but so can more general stadium tickets paired with private dinners. concerts. hotel rooms and other access.
On Location pays to serve as the hospitality partner across major events. including this World Cup. as part of a deal it announced in 2024. Ticketing experts say those arrangements can both shift some selling burden away from rights holders and blur where “unsold” seats really sit—whether they were never sold by FIFA or are still held through a hospitality partner.
Financial disclosures show how risky hospitality inventory can be. On Location. which is also an IOC partner. wrote off about $85.7 million in unsold tickets for the Paris Games. according to an SEC filing. After TKO CFO Andrew Schleimer said on an earnings call in November that the 2024 Olympics were not profitable for On Location. Sports Business Journal reported that the hospitality company lost $252 million on the event. An On Location representative didn’t immediately respond to a request for comments.
That push toward shared, high-priced experiences is also pulling in investors. Earlier this month. tech billionaire Ryan Smith—who described sports as a financial safe haven against disruption from AI—told Fox Business Network in an interview that live experiences are “right up there with some of the greatest tech booms that we have had.” Smith is the owner of the Utah Mammoth and Utah Jazz.
FIFA’s public messaging on ticket strategy has been limited. but Infantino discussed the thinking recently at the Milken Institute Global Conference. When asked about the controversial pricing. he said the strategy had to be different than prior World Cups because of the prevalence of the secondary market in the U.S. and the size of the American economy.
“We have to look at the market,” Infantino said. “We are in the market in which entertainment is the most developed in the world, so we have to apply market rates.”
A FIFA representative didn’t respond to an email seeking clarity on the organization’s ticket strategy.
The numbers FIFA has already earned from recent World Cup sales make the push for revenue hard to ignore. FIFA made about $929 million in ticket sales and hospitality from the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. With the expanded tournament—104 games now. instead of 64—and pricing that is significantly higher than 2022. it seems reasonable to assume the 2026 total will end up dwarfing that amount. even if some inventory goes unsold. There’s also the possibility the 2030 tournament, scheduled across six nations on three continents, could come eventually at lower prices.
For fans, the downsides are immediate. The pricing logic forces a choice between buying early—often at prices that may prove to be overpaying later—or waiting and trying to time the market. Ticket lotteries can add another layer of urgency by gating access.
The World Cup makes the stakes sharper than most events. Many fans need to travel thousands of miles and buy the most expensive event ticket of their lives. Wakeman’s critique is that those who are most willing to commit quickly are often the most exposed to price gouging.
It isn’t just the fan side that changes. When tickets are priced closer to perceived fair market value—or even higher, in FIFA’s case—it can dampen the resale market, making it harder for resellers, whether they are professional broker operations or individual sellers.
Pagello described the pressure on resale margins bluntly.
“Those margins have absolutely come down over the last five to 10 years,” he said. “What used to be shooting fish in a barrel—let’s buy World Cup tickets for $100 and flip them for $500—has become much rarer nowadays as primary rightsholders get more comfortable pricing tickets to what they think the market will pay.”.
Marketplaces like StubHub and Vivid Seats have historically benefitted from the old model, taking a fee from resale transactions. Vivid’s stock price has been in a multiyear slide. down from $273 in October 2021 to about $8.17 as of Wednesday’s close. StubHub priced its September 2025 IPO at $23.50 and is now trading around $9.69.
Morgan Stanley analyst Cameron Mansson-Perrone. lead analyst. music & live entertainment research at Morgan Stanley. said investors are worried because Vivid Seats is losing market share. and also concerned about what StubHub is spending to acquire new customers. She also said the broader industry pressures go beyond slow ticketing.
“There are much more significant pressures, and concerns, for the industry” than slow ticketing, Mansson-Perrone said in an interview. “This dynamic probably does diminish value for the resellers, gradually, over the long term. But of what we’ve seen to date, it’s been fairly marginal.”
That may sound small for resellers, but it has not felt marginal for fans or rights holders. And FIFA. in at least one way. operates under a schedule that makes the strategy easier to pursue: 32 years have passed between the last men’s World Cup in the U.S. and the upcoming one. In other words. FIFA can be more extractive when it knows it will return to the market only every four years. then wait.
“Mansson-Perrone said FIFA sits in a fairly unique position where it comes into a market every four years and then doesn’t return to that market for a while,” the reporting notes. “That allows them to be a little bit more ambitious—or aggressive—with their initial pricing.”
FIFA’s next stop after this World Cup is five years away, with the 2031 Women’s World Cup scheduled to take place across the U.S. and North America.
For now. the legal pressure from New York and New Jersey signals that the question of how FIFA prices and releases tickets is no longer only a fan grievance. With subpoenas now seeking information about FIFA’s World Cup ticketing practices. the lingering inventory—and the revenue strategy behind it—has stepped into a bigger arena than online listings and blue dots.
FIFA World Cup ticketing slow ticketing Gianni Infantino New York attorney general New Jersey attorney general ticket pricing hospitality packages resale market TicketData TicketManager