FIFA’s U.S. bonanza begins with ‘alarming’ Club World Cup ticket prices, ‘adaptive pricing’

It’s $379 for an upper-deck ticket to Al Ahly vs. Inter Miami. It’s $172 for a seat at the very top of Lumen Field for a group-stage match between Botafogo and the Seattle Sounders. It might be $2,230 for a “lower tier” ticket to the final, according to a since-removed chart on Bayern Munich’s website. And some of those prices could change, because FIFA has partnered with Ticketmaster and will use a non-automated version of dynamic pricing for the 2025 men’s Club World Cup.

Tickets for the tournament, which will be played in the United States, went on sale to the general public Thursday. And they offered a window into how FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, will attempt to extract unprecedented profit from the U.S. market over the next two summers — first from the inaugural Club World Cup, then from the 2026 men’s World Cup.

The prices, which vary from match to match, ranged from $58 in the upper corner of the Rose Bowl to well over $100 for most upper-deck seats in the first batch of tickets released Thursday. They are over $200 for most lower- and mid-level seats in corners or beyond an endline.

In some cases, they are similar to what FIFA charged for tickets to its crown jewel, the men’s World Cup, in Qatar in 2022 — even though the Club World Cup is a novel, unproven tournament that has attracted significantly less interest from broadcasters, sponsors, and fans.

In Qatar, tickets to a World Cup semifinal ranged from $137 to $956. In the U.S. three summers later, conditional tickets to a Club World Cup semifinal will cost registered supporters of a participating team $526 in the “upper tier” of MetLife Stadium, and $995 in the “lower tier,” according to the post on Bayern’s website — which has now been amended to remove knockout-round pricing.

Tickets to those knockout games will go on sale to the public Jan. 16, FIFA said. Thursday’s opening of a four-week sales window was solely for group-stage matches — and does not yet include lower-level sideline seats, which figure to be the most expensive.

But already, the prices have been “alarming,” Bailey Brown, president of the Independent Supporters Council, a group representing soccer fans across the U.S. and Canada, told Yahoo Sports in an email.

“We are genuinely concerned about the overall increase in the pricing of tickets for large tournaments in North America,” she wrote, and [we] think that many of the most passionate fans will be priced out of enjoying the sport because of it. We are worried about ticket pricing for the upcoming World Cup in 2026 if the Club World Cup is a sign of what is to come.”

Club World Cup tickets and ‘adaptive pricing’

The prices, to some extent, are byproducts of a rushed planning process riddled with uncertainty. To get this Club World Cup off the ground, FIFA had to secure a dozen venues, and therefore had to negotiate with stadium owners across the U.S. Those negotiations, which finally yielded an announcement in late September, required compromises between two profit-seeking entities, the stadium owners and FIFA.

So, rather than sell tickets on its own website, FIFA agreed to sell through Ticketmaster, which has pre-existing partnerships with most of the 12 stadiums; and presumably agreed to share some ticket revenue.

They also agreed to a scheme similar to Ticketmaster’s notorious “dynamic pricing,” whereby prices fluctuate based on demand, so that sellers and event organizers can maximize revenue. A FIFA spokesman clarified that the Club World Cup’s “adaptive pricing” is not automated, but confirmed that organizers could adjust prices over time, between now and June, when the tournament starts. An “important event info” blurb on all of Ticketmaster’s Club World Cup match portals states: “Please note that ticket prices may change from day to day due to fluctuating market conditions.”

Typically, for major soccer tournaments like the World Cup or European Championships, organizers like FIFA and UEFA set fixed prices, and sell tickets via their own online portals. Ahead of Qatar 2022, FIFA divided tickets into four categories, and established a price that would apply to each category across all matches in a given round.