"Every match is sold out" — that's what FIFA chief Gianni Infantino told the world. It's not even close to true.
With the 2026 World Cup just a month away, not a single one of the 104 scheduled games has actually sold out. Thousands of seats remain available across all three host nations — the US, Canada, and Mexico — and even secondary market touts are dropping their prices to shift tickets nobody wants at current rates.
The price tag says it all
For England's opener against Croatia on June 17, there are still 67 Category One tickets sitting there at £1,874 each. The Ghana fixture on June 23? 252 tickets at £1,482. The Panama game on June 27 has 126 available at £1,365. And that's before you get to the hundreds more in Categories Two and Three, plus nearly 10,000 additional seats on FIFA's own resale platform — starting from £430.
These aren't nosebleed seats at a meaningless group stage game nobody cares about. These are England matches, at a World Cup, a month out. The demand should be overwhelming. It isn't.
FIFA ran "last-minute" sales windows to shift the remaining stock. They didn't work. TicketData.com reports that resellers are now asking less than face value — the clearest possible signal that the market has decided FIFA overplayed its hand.
Fans aren't buying the spin
Simon Harris, a 67-year-old retired finance worker from Bridgnorth and an England supporter, put it plainly: "Given the extreme prices, it's no surprise not a single game has sold out." Max Veltman, 45, from Birmingham, was blunter: "FIFA have only themselves to blame. They're a bunch of crooks."
The Football Supporters' Association called it "the most expensive World Cup in history" and said FIFA's pricing and opaque policies have pushed ordinary fans to conclude they simply can't afford to go. Hard to argue.
The embarrassment here isn't just reputational. Empty stands at a World Cup broadcast to hundreds of millions of viewers would expose the gap between FIFA's self-congratulatory PR and the reality it's created. Infantino already made his claim publicly. The stadiums will give the actual verdict.
FIFA declined to comment.
