When FIFA first put tickets on sale for the 2026 World Cup final, its prices left fans aghast.
Many upper-deck seats cost $4,210; anything closer to the field was $6,730. In subsequent months, FIFA raised those prices, all the way to $10,990 in Category 1, and fans around the world howled.
But on the eve of Sunday’s final, the secondary market makes those FIFA prices look like bargains.
In fact, on some ticket resale sites, the 2026 World Cup final is on track to be the most expensive sporting event ever.
Spokespeople for SeatGeek told The Athletic on Thursday that the average price of World Cup final tickets purchased on their site was $12,751, more than $2,000 higher than the previous record set by the 2024 Super Bowl.
For that game, between the San Francisco 49ers and Kansas City Chiefs in greater Las Vegas, the average resale price was $10,540. It retained the top spot in historical rankings despite the craze around the 2026 NBA Finals, when Game 3 between the New York Knicks and San Antonio Spurs reached a $9,033 average resale price on SeatGeek.
A spokesperson for StubHub said that demand for the World Cup final, for now, ranks slightly behind that 2024 Super Bowl and also behind Game 6 of the NBA Finals. But the latter never happened, because the Knicks clinched their title in five games.
And, when accounting for scale, the World Cup final stands alone, because it will be played at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, the NFL’s largest stadium. Its capacity, 80,663 for World Cup matches, is far greater than Allegiant Stadium’s 61,629 for the 2024 Super Bowl or Madison Square Garden’s 19,812, which “makes the World Cup price even more impressive,” Keith Pagello, who runs TicketData.com, told The Athletic.
Pagello’s database tracks the ‘get-in price’ — or cheapest available ticket — across various resale sites for all sorts of sporting events and concerts. The get-in price for Sunday’s match between Argentina and Spain was around $7,600 as of Thursday evening.
That makes this World Cup final a more expensive ticket than:
- Every post-pandemic Super Bowl
- The two recent NBA finals games in New York, which closed at $6,728 and $3,406, per TicketData.com
- Every College Football Playoff championship. (For the 2025 game between Ohio State and Notre Dame, prices spiked in the hours before kickoff but still topped out at $6,103.)
Before one Super Bowl, the 2015 matchup between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks, prices surged the week of the game, and the get-in price hit at least $11,000 in the hours before kickoff. But that, Pagello says, was “a one-off, worst-case scenario” as “a large number of brokers had speculatively sold inventory they did not actually have, leading to a tremendous short squeeze in the days before the event.” It did not, in other words, reflect overall demand across the weeks and months prior.
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