Soccer, or football for most of the world, is supposed to be a game for the people. It’s arguably the easiest sport in the world to play (though playing it well is another matter), in that very little equipment is required. You can wrap some rubber bands together for a ball, shove a few sticks in the ground for the goals, and boom—you’ve got yourself a game. It can be played almost anywhere, from a patch of dirt to a blacktop in the middle of a bustling city. That’s what makes this game so magical. At its core, soccer is egalitarian and accessible, which is a huge part of the reason it’s by far the most popular sport in the world.

Professional soccer also has working class roots: Factory workers and miners in England and Scotland helped lay the foundations for the modern game by organizing their own teams. Arsenal F.C., the club that just won the English Premier League, was founded by munitions workers.

Soccer, or football for most of the world, is supposed to be a game for the people. It’s arguably the easiest sport in the world to play (though playing it well is another matter), in that very little equipment is required. You can wrap some rubber bands together for a ball, shove a few sticks in the ground for the goals, and boom—you’ve got yourself a game. It can be played almost anywhere, from a patch of dirt to a blacktop in the middle of a bustling city. That’s what makes this game so magical. At its core, soccer is egalitarian and accessible, which is a huge part of the reason it’s by far the most popular sport in the world.

Professional soccer also has working class roots: Factory workers and miners in England and Scotland helped lay the foundations for the modern game by organizing their own teams. Arsenal F.C., the club that just won the English Premier League, was founded by munitions workers.

Today, though, the game has been commercialized across virtually every professional league in the world. The amount of money spent by major clubs on transfer fees alone is enough to make your head spin. But FIFA, the sport’s global governing body, has helped set this standard—and it’s on full display with this year’s World Cup, which kicks off on June 11.

Rather than leveraging the unifying power of sport during a period of historic geopolitical tensions, FIFA has made it harder to bring the world together. The Trump administration’s immigration policies are also not helping. Such hurdles—on top of the exorbitant cost of attending—help explain why ticket sales and hotel bookings in host cities are far below projections. Many fans are apparently opting out of attending.

Having spent years trying to get tickets for myself, I can relate.

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I managed to secure tickets to two games, but it’s cost me countless moments of confusion and frustration (and a small fortune) to accomplish this. The amount of money that I’ve collectively spent on the World Cup so far—factoring in the cost of transportation and lodging on top of tickets—is roughly equivalent to what my wife and I pay per month for our two-bedroom apartment in New York City.

I’m not alone. Fans around the world have expressed dismay over the high ticket prices and other costs surrounding the tournament, which has only added to long-held perceptions of FIFA as a bloated, corrupt institution that aims to fill its pockets above all else. Professional sports have always been plagued by those seeking to rake in as much money as possible from every possible angle. But FIFA has taken it to new extremes with this tournament.

Tickets to the 2026 World Cup—taking place in the United States, Mexico, and Canada—are the most expensive in history. That’s in part because FIFA is using a “variable pricing” model for the first time, meaning costs change based on demand, which has pushed ticket prices into mind-boggling territory.

The average price for the cheapest tickets to opening matches in U.S. metro areas hosting the tournament ranges from $253 to $1,399, per an NBC News analysis, and the average price for the cheap seats at the World Cup final at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey is $8,586. By comparison, tickets for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar ranged from $70 to $1,600 once games were announced.

On FIFA’s resale/exchange marketplace, tickets for the final have been listed for millions of dollars. While FIFA doesn’t directly set prices on its resale marketplace, it does charge a 15 percent purchase fee to the buyer and a 15 percent resale fee to the seller.

It feels like FIFA and its president, Gianni Infantino, have orchestrated this tournament with a level of indifference for the average soccer fan akin to the detachment the royal court at Versailles displayed toward the general population in the lead-up to the French Revolution. In a true “let them eat cake” moment, FIFA is even selling limited-edition host city jerseys at a whopping $375 a piece. That’s equivalent to roughly 37 percent of the monthly cost of food for the average family of four in the United States ($1,013, per the U.S. Department of Agriculture).

Meanwhile, FIFA expects to bring in $9 billion in revenue in 2026.

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In a recent interview with the Athletic, Gary Lineker, a legendary former player for England who won the Golden Boot (the trophy for being the tournament’s top goal scorer) at the 1986 World Cup, expressed fears that FIFA is pricing out international fans.

“The great thing about the World Cup, the joy of it, is the Brazilian fans arriving in their thousands, and the Argentinians, and the Dutch in their orange, and us and all the other fans from around the world,” Lineker said. “But are FIFA going to price them out? Is it going to be purely corporate? How can people afford those prices? I know in Qatar, there were Argentinian fans who had sold their cars to get there. That’s not going to be enough this time.”

U.S. President Donald Trump, who received the inaugural FIFA Peace Award from Infantino in December 2025, has also criticized the high price of tickets. When asked about fans having to pay up to $1,000 for a ticket to the U.S. men’s national team opening game against Paraguay, Trump in early May said, “I wouldn’t pay it either, to be honest with you.”

Most of the United States appears to agree with Trump, as a recent poll from Ipsos found that 59 percent of Americans said the overall cost of attending a World Cup game is too expensive for the average American. Just 2 percent said it was affordable.

Indeed, the discontentment over World Cup ticket pricing has been all anyone can discuss in the run-up to the first game—and it’s caught the attention of U.S. prosecutors. In late May, the attorneys general of New York and New Jersey announced an investigation into FIFA’s ticketing practices.

When asked for comment on the ticket pricing controversy, FIFA told me in a statement, “Fans are at the heart of the FIFA World Cup, and never before in the tournament’s history have more tickets been sold directly to fans.”

“FIFA’s variable pricing ticketing approach aligns with industry trends across various sports and entertainment sectors, where price adaptations are made to optimize sales and attendance and ensure a fair market value for events,” the statement continued. It went on to state that FIFA “is a not-for-profit organisation” and that “revenue generated from the FIFA World Cup every four years is reinvested to support the development of men’s, women’s and youth football across all FIFA 211 Member Associations, every day of the year via FIFA Forward and other key initiatives, in line with the FIFA Statutes.”

At Foreign Policy’s Sports Diplomacy Summit on June 3, I asked Republican Rep. Darin LaHood, co-chair of the congressional soccer caucus, for his thoughts on the World Cup ticket prices. He acknowledged that prices started out “very high” for some of the games, but he said they are “now coming down a little bit, and I think that’ll stabilize.”

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But the frustrations go further than just prices. Many fans have felt misled and let down by FIFA over how it handled ticket allocation and seating assignments.

I can personally attest to the ticketing process being headache inducing. I’m going to the Argentina vs. Algeria match on June 16 in Kansas City. I didn’t receive the ticket until a week before the game, despite making an initial payment almost a year prior to kickoff.

I acquired the ticket through FIFA Collect, which is officially FIFA’s digital collectibles platform but feels more like a convoluted NFT scheme. Fans who’ve also gone this route, hoping to have more luck than those who attempted to get tickets through FIFA’s lotteries, have reported feeling exploited by the process. It’s hard to disagree with them.

In order to get the ticket through FIFA Collect, I initially had to purchase a “right to buy” (RTB) token in July 2025. I then waited months to pay even more money and convert the RTB into a “right to ticket” (RTT) in November 2025. I then waited months (again) to convert the RTT into an actual match ticket. After the conversion process, which initially did not work (I received an error message multiple times, for reasons that remain unclear), FIFA Collect sent me an email that said, “Tickets will be accessed in the FWC2026 Mobile Tickets app once made available a few days before the match start.”

I’m a massive soccer fan, which is why I’ve subjected myself to this circus. I began playing the sport when I was a toddler, played in college, and have continued to participate in recreational and pickup leagues in New York City since I moved here over a decade ago. I love the community this game breeds, and cherish the friendships and connections it’s helped me build around the globe.

But as excited as I am to potentially see Lionel Messi play in Kansas City, I’m also disheartened by how this tournament has been organized. I just hope it will prove to have been worth the time and money that I and millions of other fans have poured into it.