How the World Cup 2026 ticketing process will work (...hopefully)
By: Colin Martin
So you want to know how to get tickets to World Cup 2026 matches. Well, we have some good news, and some bad news. The good news first…
If we learned anything from comparing the fiasco of last summer’s Copa America ticketing process, to the ticketing process we’ve experienced first hand for the past four men’s World Cups, it was that the World Cup process has historically been:
significantly clearer (i.e. robust info on the FIFA website),
more well-organized & streamlined (i.e. through FIFA’s own, event-specific portal), and
cheaper & less prone to resale mark-ups (generally speaking).
And so, we haven’t been too worried that the ticketing process for World Cup 2026 will turn into the s**ts**w that unfolded for Copa America. The bad news, though? We might be wrong.
There’s really nothing saying FIFA can’t or won’t change their process and use one similar to that of the Copa America organizers (i.e. CONMEBOL). In fact, they’re currently using Ticketmaster, one of the two platforms tasked with ticket sales for Copa America, to sell tickets for the 2025 Club World Cup, as that tournament is hosted at 12 different venues, across 11 US cities.
Right now, there seem to be plenty of tickets available for most of the matches of the Club World Cup, with prices all over the map depending on the match-up, but nonetheless, with some tickets as cheap as $34 (Ulsan HD v Mamelodi Sundowns FC, June 17 at Inter & Co Stadium in Orlando anyone?). So if FIFA ultimately does go with handing over the ticketing process to the likes of Ticketmaster, maybe things won’t be so bad (i.e. competitive, expensive, frustrating)? Maybe.
If FIFA doesn’t go the “sub-contractor” route, and sticks to the process used over the last several World Cups (which by the looks of their “Register your interest” page, it seems like there’s still a chance they will; the page promises info on “...how to apply for FIFA World Cup 2026™ tickets”, an aspect of their past processes), then you’ll want to keep reading to be prepared — there’s a lot to know to navigate that process.
World Cup ticket phases: “Same-same, but different” than Copa America
First things first. Tickets for World Cup 2026 are not on sale yet. Just like with tickets for Copa America, where people were posting resale tickets before the box office tickets were even released, don’t be fooled by anyone who says they have them for sale. The only tickets available as of spring 2025 are the hospitality package tickets. And they ain’t cheap! Stadium seat tickets for World Cup 2026 will likely go on sale late summer 2025, after the FIFA Club World Cup is over. Right now you can only register your interest.
FIFA’s website is conspicuously advertising information on “how to apply” for WC26 tickets
Another thing that will likely look familiar to fans searching for World Cup tickets compared to what they saw when Copa America tickets went on sale, is that the ticket sales will happen in phases. The major difference is, when Copa tickets initially became available, their first phase made tickets available via direct sale, and to special groups (season ticket holders for a stadium’s NFL team, pre-registered fans, etc.). The first phase of World Cup ticket sales, on the other hand, has traditionally made tickets available first via an application period, and then a direct sale, first-come first-served (FCFS) period. Both periods have their advantages and disadvantages (for example, it doesn't matter when within the application period you submit, so long as it gets in before the deadline, but you also can’t be rewarded with ticket availability for getting in early). This process looks more similar to how tickets were sold for Euro 2024, for any fans who went through that process.
One major disadvantage of both periods in the first phase though, is that in the past, this phase has taken place ahead of the tournament’s draw, meaning that you can apply for or buy tickets for specific matches (or specific cities or teams — more on that below), but you won't necessarily know who is playing in those matches until later (unless it’s a match featuring a host nation, in which case those ones are usually set). On the upside, this can make the draw all that much more fun and exciting, as you fill out your match schedule and learn whom you’ll be watching. It also probably isn’t that big of a deal for anyone who intends to stick to a certain itinerary, in certain cities, over certain dates.
All that said, after the first phase has concluded, there’s usually a gap in time before the second phase begins. The second phase, after the draw, is where you want to go in with a plan on which games you want, as demand will certainly be higher now that teams, matchups, and pathways through the knockout rounds are set (we’ll be sharing more on plans and tactics in the near future).
The second phase historically, has repeated the two types of sales periods (application and FCFS) one more time each. After that, there’s usually a Last Minute (FCFS) Sales Phase, carrying on without pause until the day of the Final. Most tickets will be gone from that phase quickly, but it's near that point in time that a resale platform will also open up, allowing fans who already have tickets, to sell unwanted or extra tickets to other fans, although typically with a max put on the resale price (~10% in the past). With FIFA taking 5% from the buyer, and 5% from the seller, a 10% mark-up doesn’t really get any ambitious resellers all that much for their efforts, which honestly, is one thing we have to give the money-loving folks at FIFA props for — but again, will they stick to this system? All of it? Some of it? Only time will tell.
Types of ticket products (and a taste of the sales phases)
We mentioned being able to buy single match tickets, or tickets for a specific city or team, which brings up the question of what types of ticket ‘products’ you can get.
We’ll use the most recent example to help us speculate about what could be available for World Cup 2026. The 2022 World Cup in Qatar, being the geographical anomaly that it was, provided a variety of ticketing products and packages that allowed fans to maximize the number of games they attended if they wanted to. While you technically were restricted from purchasing tickets to multiple matches happening at the same time on a single account, there was nothing stopping your friend from buying one on your behalf on their account (and vice versa) and the two of you leaving one game early to scoot across Doha to get to the second half of another game — if that’s the kind of matchday experience you were into (it certainly was for this kid and several FFTs we spent time with in Qatar).
With that, apart from single match tickets, at Qatar 2022 there were a few different types of tickets you could buy.
During Sales Phase 1…
A couple different ticket packages were available:
Stadium Series Tickets - These tickets came in a package of 4, and allowed you to see a specific collection of matches across four different stadiums—again, easy to do in this iteration of the World Cup. You could choose from different combinations based on which stadiums you wanted to see, or which dates fit your schedule best.
Team Specific (TST) - These tickets allowed fans to attend matches of a specific national team, in either a 3-game (all group matches), 4-game (all group matches + a Round of 16 match), or 7-game (all group matches and a match in each knockout round - including the Final!) package. Notice we said “‘a’ match”. That’s because after buying this type of ticket, choosing how many matches you wanted in the package, and selecting the team, if that national team didn’t advance into any particular knockout round, you were still eligible for a ticket to attend the game they would have advanced into. If you wanted to follow Spain through the tournament and bought a TST7 package, after they lost to Morocco in the Round of 16, you simply moved along their anticipated pathway to your 7th game (the Final!) without them. You were essentially buying a team-specific ‘pathway’ ticket.
Things changed a bit though, once the 2nd Phase began.
During Sales Phase 2…
Now that teams and matches were set, a couple ‘supporters’ ticket types replaced the TST ticket packages (Stadium Series Tickets were still available).
Supporters Tickets - These tickets were available to ‘national team supporters’ (you have to indicate which country you support when registering a FIFA ticketing account) to follow their teams through the group stage. They were offered as individual match tickets, which might make you ask how they were, in fact, different from individual match tickets. Our guess is that FIFA simply reserved a certain allotment for fans identifying as supporters of certain countries in the profile, and used these ticket sales to group these fans together in seats at the stadiums, although we would also say they don’t really do this ‘en masse’ (we’ve been disappointed in the past not to be in or see truly huge sections of national team supporters that weren’t organized through a national federation’s ticket allotment, but that’s another story). If you got all three group matches, then it was essentially a TST3, but you weren’t necessarily guaranteed all three through a successful* application or purchasing session.
*When you put in an application that includes multiple individual matches, you might get some matches and not others, making your application ‘partially’ successful.
Conditional Supporters Tickets - These tickets were available to ‘national team supporters’ to follow their teams through the knockout stages, also sold as individual match tickets. The validity of the ticket for each round was conditional on that team advancing, and if they didn’t, then you got your money back. This essentially allowed tournament organizers to sell a certain number of tickets to as many confident supporters as there were upfront without ‘overbooking’, knowing that they could void the tickets allocated to supporters of eliminated teams and refund them their money—but, not before keeping a small 40 Qatari Riyals (~ $11 USD, or £8.50) ‘refund fee’. Kinda brilliant actually!
Other recent tournaments have offered similar variations of the ticket types above. Russia 2018, for example (much more spread out than Qatar 2022), had Stadium Specific Tickets, allowing fans interested in a single stadium or city (or those who simply didn’t want to hop on a plane or train every 2-3 days) to lock in to one place for a longer period of time and still get a bunch of matches. With some cities hosting two or three group games featuring a top 10 ranked team, this isn’t always a bad bet.
Apart from these different ticket types, there’s another important classification of tickets to explore… ticket categories!
Ticket categories
World Cup tickets (again, historically) have been grouped into four categories, which in our opinion are better described as seating categories. The category your ticket falls into determines where your seat is in the stadium. Category 1 tickets will get you seats, according to FIFA, in “prime areas”, generally on the sidelines (although they could be very high up). Category 2 tickets will get you seats generally in or near the corners, and Category 3, generally behind the goals and a bit higher up. Category 4 tickets are a unicorn. They are astronomically cheaper than all other categories, but there’s a much smaller pool of them, they’re limited to residents of the host nation(s), and they’re generally in the nosebleeds behind the goal. Besides, we think your odds of getting ‘Cat 4’ tickets are slim to none for World Cup 2026. As ticket categories really refer to seats and their location, it’s worth noting that there are also accessibility seats/tickets typically made available as well.
The other major takeaway, beyond the fact that your ticket category determines your seat location, is that it also determines ticket price.
Ticket Prices
Now, of course, we’re biased. But considering how big the World Cup is, and how amazing it is to attend a World Cup match, compared to your everyday sporting events in the United States, World Cup tickets really aren’t that bad from a price perspective (at least they haven’t been). Then again, our previous World Cup experiences have been in markets other than the US, Canada, and Mexico. So what will prices actually look like for World Cup 2026 tickets?
One approach to figuring this out is to look at previous tournaments’ pricing models. Below are prices for World Cup 2018 tickets, per round, in USD:
Remember when Cat 3 Group Stage tickets were approachable?
We know you can definitely go to a miserably cold, late-season Cleveland Browns game for more than $100. Probably. For roughly that same price, you could get a Category 3 ticket for a World Cup group stage match in Russia. Which one sounds like a better story?
These were the prices for World Cup 2022 tickets in Qatari Riyal (100 QAR = 27 USD):
Biting my tongue on so many jokes about what these figures could represent for this World Cup
A (Cat 3) World Cup group match ticket for less than $70?! Come on! That’s pretty amazing!
But what has happened in the past is no guarantee of what is to come in the future. Just look at FIFA’s recent shift to Ticketmaster for their Club World Cup ticket sales. We said earlier that there’s FCWC 2025 tickets as cheap as $34 available (at time of writing), but there’s also group stage tickets as high as $557.50 in Miami and $927 in Atlanta (which by the way are wheelchair accessible tickets on resale — the person selling those tickets is a piece of s**t!).
The best predictor of ticket pricing for World Cup 2026, or at least box office ticket pricing, we think, is the ticket pricing summary table from the official US/Mexico/Canada bid book:
If only prices were really going to be limited to these!
Just look at those averages! Nothing below $300. Even a Cat 3 group match for $174 is almost 150% more (more than double) than the $70 it was in Qatar. That said, a Final ticket, Cat 1 for $1550, would actually be cheaper than a similar ticket for Qatar 2022 by about $57, but let’s be honest. At that price point, if you’re in it for a grand and a half, whatever your reason, 57 bucks in either direction is likely inconsequential to you. Plus, that’s probably not going to be the price a lot of people wind up paying anyway (the second hand market will surely make out well as it always does). The Final is always expensive. And hard to get.
So what should you do?!
CRUCIAL NEXT STEPS
Beyond registering your interest, start saving yesterday. Money. Points. Miles. All of it! If you haven’t started saving already, or you’re not on track for that elusive raise at your awesome day job you just can’t stop raving about… good luck! Get to the fan zones. Block off “deep work” or “meetings” on your calendars now and make best friends with your favorite footy pub’s bartenders over the next year. But honestly, who knows what FIFA will ultimately do? Like we said at the beginning, we might be wrong about all this.
Truth is, we're not totally confident this whole ticketing thing won’t suck. So rather than frustrate ourselves trying to battle the crowd for tickets as prices go up and demand grows during the knockout rounds, we’re actually thinking about just heading off to Europe to watch games with their fans. No, seriously!
Group matches, sure! We’ll be in the mix trying to witness history should the USMNT sweep the group stage in LA and Seattle. But come knockout rounds, especially with an extra one now (Round of 32 FTW!)… Imagine catching a Germany v England match in a beer gar- excuse me, “biergarten” in Munich. Or an Italy v Spain game from a fan zone in a bustling piazza in Milan or Barcelona. If you’re already salivating and beginning to taste the Aperol Spritz, then you’re probably an adventurous footy traveler who would love our World Cup 2026 knockout stage travel plan. And… you should probably join us!
As for those tickets though. Stay tuned to our posts here, and on Instagram, or sign up for our newsletter to get information like this delivered straight to your inbox. We’ll be sharing a lot more in the coming months as World Cup 2026 ticket sales get closer, including some tips to navigate the FIFA online ticketing platform during the FCFS periods. Or who knows? Maybe there won’t even be a FIFA ticketing platform this time around!