FIFA’s pricing for the tickets available to supporters of teams at the World Cup has been criticised by the leading European soccer fans’ group.
Football Supporters Europe has called on FIFA to “immediately halt” ticket sales for participating member associations (PMA) due to what it calls a “monumental betrayal of the tradition of the World Cup”.
Each PMA will receive eight per cent of the tickets for each game to sell to their travelling supporters, which FIFA has said they can start doing on Thursday.
The Croatian FA published a ticket price list on their website the same day, revealing that tickets for their World Cup opener against England will start at $265 (£198), eight times the equivalent price of the 2024 men’s European Championship in Germany.
The seats for that fixture that are immediately behind the goals rise to $700 (£523), due to their allocation as “premium”, or Category One. Standard tickets (Category Two), priced at $500 (£373), are also behind the goal but in the AT&T Stadium’s second tier, while the value tickets are in the corner of the second tier. Half of the PMA allocation will be in the “value tier” (Category Three), while the other half will be split evenly over Category One and Two.
Last month, tickets to the same fixture — before the teams playing in it were confirmed — were $445 for Category One, $335 for Category Two and $155 for Category Three. In the bid document put together and released by United States, Canada and Mexico officials in 2018, however, it was predicted that group-stage tickets would fall in the range of $21 to $323.
As explained by the Croatian FA, any supporter wishing to buy tickets for games in the knockout rounds will have to do so in the current window, which closes on January 13.
For Croatian fans wanting to make sure they have a ticket all the way to the final, they will be asked to commit $4,185 for value tickets and $8,680 for premium tickets. It is expected that the equivalent bill for England fans will be even higher, as their games will be priced at a premium.
Ticket prices for the 2024 European Championship in Germany, organised by UEFA, were much cheaper than next summer’s World Cup (Lars Baron/Getty Images)
In a statement released by FSE on Thursday, it referred to these prices as “extortionate” and at “astronomical levels”. The fans’ group pointed out that the lowest price category may not be available to all supporters due to the category four tickets being reserved for the general sales — which are subject to dynamic pricing.
“We call on FIFA to immediately halt PMA ticket sales, engage in a consultation with all impacted parties, and review ticket prices and category distribution until a solution that respects the tradition, universality, and cultural significance of the World Cup is found,” the statement concluded.
England and Wales fan group Football Supporters’ Association (FSA) also condemned the prices on their social media, saying that “matchgoers across the world deserve protection from these rip-off prices”.
Other PMAs, including the English and Scottish FAs, are still waiting to find out their full allocations, prices and seat maps. FIFA’s ticket pricing comes as the resale market has also experienced an expensive jump.
After the World Cup draw and fixture release last weekend, resale prices for matches involving Portugal and Argentina jumped by an average of nearly 300 per cent. The Athletic reported that for a group-stage match between Portugal and Colombia on June 27, prices rose up by 514 per cent from Thursday to Sunday afternoon.
A FIFA spokesperson has said its PMA allocations “are in line with what we have delivered at previous tournaments” in terms of the percentage of each venue that is ring-fenced for the travelling supporters, the blocks of seats behind the goals and the splits between the pricing categories. But there is no comparison in terms of price. FIFA also says that “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”.
FIFA has been approached for comment on the FSE statement.
