NY and – New York Attorney General Letitia James and New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport announced they will subpoena FIFA over alleged misleading World Cup ticket sales at MetLife Stadium, including seat-map changes after purchases and pricing that has ball
By the time Brett Prodzinksi clicked “confirm,” he thought he was paying for the kind of seat he could live with—even if the price was already climbing.
He had spent hours waiting in a cue last month and found two desirable tickets for a game at a Seattle stadium. The tickets cost $515 each. But minutes later, his confirmation email arrived with a different reality: his seats were behind the goal, on the opposite side of the stadium.
That kind of bait-and-switch feeling has helped push the World Cup ticket scramble into a legal spotlight. On Wednesday. New York Attorney General Letitia James and New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport jointly announced they are subpoenaing documents from FIFA about its ticket pricing practices and seating allocations for matches held at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium.
The attorneys general say the issue is not only the price tag. but also the seats fans thought they were buying. They allege that “fans may have been misled about the locations of the seats they were purchasing. ” and that FIFA’s public statements and ticket releases may have helped drive prices sharply higher.
Their investigation centers on MetLife’s seat maps, which they say were changed after tickets were sold. Before sales began, the stadium was divided into four zones—Categories 1 through 4—where the lower-numbered zones were understood to be the better areas.
After ticket sales started, FIFA created “new zones” and added a front section in each category. Fans complained that people who bought tickets for seats in the new zones “were excluded from those seats and instead assigned less-desirable seats. including seats far from the field or behind the goals.”.
The subpoena requests information from FIFA on how tickets are allocated to participating members. how tickets to each match are allocated. and the number of tickets available in each category. A spokesperson with the New York Attorney General’s office said that is part of what the attorneys general will seek as they examine FIFA’s ticketing process and seat maps at MetLife (renamed New York New Jersey Stadium during the tournament).
For fans, the confusion has played out alongside prices that have turned the tournament into a major financial outlier. FIFA’s ticket prices for group matches in the US began at $60 for a small number of tickets and rose to more than $600. according to the New York Times. Face-value tickets for the final were as much as $10,990.
On resale platforms, anger spread as the numbers went even higher. The article notes that some fans saw listings that climbed exponentially beyond face value, including $2 million for the final. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani responded last week by announcing an initiative to sell $50 tickets for city residents.
“This has become a gauntlet of confusion,” New Jersey AG Davenport said. “But FIFA has turned buying a ticket to the World Cup into a gauntlet of confusion, fake scarcity, and impossibly high prices.”
AG James framed the demand in terms of trust. New Yorkers “deserve a fair shot at affordable tickets,” she said, adding that “fans should be able to trust that the tickets they purchase will be the ones they receive.”
For Prodzinksi, today’s announcement landed like an acknowledgment of a grievance he carried after last month’s purchase. He told reporters that FIFA “baited and switched their product to a lot of people.” He said he was willing to pay prices he expected to be inflated. but that he felt the system was taking advantage of fans.
FIFA declined to comment. The organization previously told CNN that its “pricing strategy spans a broad range of price points and categories, reflecting market demand for each match.”
The legal pressure is widening beyond New York and New Jersey. Earlier this month, California Attorney General Rob Bonta requested information from FIFA “to assess whether California law may have been violated” during the sales process.
The 2026 World Cup is hosted by the United States, Mexico and Canada, with games played across all three countries, and begins on June 11. The first match in New Jersey is on June 13, with a total of 8 matches scheduled including the final on July 19.
For many fans, the question now isn’t only whether tickets are expensive—it’s whether the product being sold matches what buyers believed they were purchasing, and whether changes made after the fact left customers holding the short end of the deal.
FIFA World Cup 2026 ticket prices MetLife Stadium Letitia James Jennifer Davenport subpoena seat maps NY attorney general NJ attorney general Zohran Mamdani ticket resale