The final window to buy World Cup tickets is about to start.
On Wednesday, FIFA will launch a first-come, first-serve sales period for the men's flagship soccer tournament, which will be held across the U.S., Canada and Mexico beginning in June.
The last sales phase comes as FIFA continues to be criticized for record-high ticket prices and a dynamic pricing system being used for the first time.
Tickets for high-profile games or popular teams such as Argentina and Portugal, are likely to be hard to get – but it won't be that difficult to score seats for every match.
And ticketing experts say don't let FOMO — fear of missing out — or FIFA's hard-sell marketing get the best of you. Take a deep breath.
If you want tickets, here are five things to know about how the ticket process will work.
How it will work
The so-called "last-minute sales phase" will start at 11 a.m. EST Wednesday. The window will remain open until the tournament starts, but big games, such as the June 27 match-up between Colombia and Portugal in Miami, are expected to sell out quickly.
That's if they are even available at all. FIFA has not specifically said tickets to all 104 tournament matches will be available.
It also noted in a news release that it may sporadically release tickets for any game at any time.
How much will tickets cost?
There is no standard ticket cost and FIFA is notoriously opaque about its pricing system, much to the frustration of World Cup fans. As in previous sale windows, fans won't know how much tickets will be until they log in.
This year, FIFA also instituted a dynamic pricing policy, a first for the World Cup. For example, in the initial release last year for final match tickets, the least expensive seat cost $2,790. During its last sales window, prices jumped 50% to $4,185.
But dynamic pricing can work both ways — and not every game has increased in price. A number of games saw prices decline, including all five games to be held at the beginning of the tournament in San Francisco, such as Austria versus Jordan or Qatar vs Switzerland, according to checks of prices verified by NPR.
Are prices still controversial?
Yes, very.
The prices FIFA is charging for the 2026 World Cup are dramatically higher than in any previous tournament. When the tournament was held in Qatar in 2022, the most expensive tickets for the final were about $1,600 per seat. For this tournament so far, the highest priced ticket costs nearly $9,000.
That has spurred a group of Democratic lawmakers, led by California Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove, to write a letter to FIFA demanding to know why ticket prices are so high.
"The extreme high demand for World Cup tickets should not be a green light for price gouging at the expense of the people who make the World Cup the most-watched sporting event in the world," the lawmakers wrote.
Meanwhile, two groups representing European fans and consumers filed a formal complaint with the European Commission demanding that FIFA lower prices.
The complaint cites what it calls FIFA's "exorbitant prices for tickets," its lack of transparency on prices and its "pressure selling tactics" intended to spark a fear of missing out among fans.
"By creating artificial urgency, FIFA pressured fans into making rushed decisions," the groups cite in their complaint.
A FIFA spokesperson said the organization had not yet formally received the complaint and therefore couldn't comment — but defended its sales practices.
"FIFA is focused on ensuring fair access to our game for existing and prospective fans," the spokesperson said. "As a not-for-profit organization, the revenue FIFA generates from the World Cup is reinvested to fuel the growth of the game — men, women, youth — throughout FIFA's 211 member associations globally."
Counting on FOMO
Using urgency to sell things is a common tactic, but those who follow the ticket industry say FIFA's marketing has been particularly aggressive.
Marketing emails from FIFA often tout the global demand for the World Cup with words like "extraordinary" or "unprecedented" or "unbelievable."
This year, FIFA also is not disclosing how many tickets it's selling or how many it has left to sell. So far, FIFA has only acknowledged it has over 6 million tickets to sell in the 2026 World Cup — and has sold more than 3 million tickets so far, not including premium tickets that provide food and drinks.
FIFA says it can't be more specific because it has yet to decide on ticket allocations to groups such as sponsors or soccer officials around the world.
But Stefan Szymanski, a professor at the University of Michigan who co-authored the best-selling book Soccernomics thinks FIFA uses that lack of clarity to its advantage.
"One way in which FIFA can rack up the highest possible ticket prices is if they can create a belief that these tickets are incredibly scarce and that they are going to be really hard to get hold of," he said. "And one way they seem to be trying to do that is just to keep you in the dark so that you don't know."
Keith Pagello, who runs a website called Ticketdata that tracks prices across resale platforms such as StubHub, said he can't recall another event with such murkiness around the ticket sales process.
"I feel more in the dark regarding what the situation is in terms of the remaining inventory with the World Cup than pretty much any other big event in recent memory," said Pagello, a 15-year veteran of the ticketing industry.
The system gives FIFA a strong advantage.
"They're playing poker," he says. "And they can see all the cards and nobody else can see."
So what to do?
Patience — and diligence — are key.
The World Cup is more than 70 days away, and in each of its previous tournaments FIFA has continued to drop tickets for games beyond its last sales window even after the matches have started.
Fans should check FIFA's ticketing website regularly. This year's World Cup is the biggest ever, with 104 games held across three countries, and despite the lack of clarity from FIFA, there should still be a sizable number of tickets left to sell.
For those without the patience to regularly check the FIFA site, there's also the resale market. (FIFA is pushing fans to purchase tickets from its own resale platform, another first for the organization, where it gets a 30% cut of each transaction.)
Pagello, who has tracked ticket prices for multiple high profile events, offers basic advice for fans.
"In the ticketing industry, we have this phrase we like to throw around. 'It's called: It pays to wait,'" he said.
For example, Pagello's Ticketdata shows that four out of the past five Super Bowls saw prices fall steeply ahead of the event.
"I don't want to throw out a specific number," he said, "but more often than not, it pays to wait, meaning the prices go down."
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