Do casual fans still think World Cup tickets start at $2,000?
I think there may be something baked into the current zeitgeist that’s keeping a lot of people from purchasing tickets. There’s still a fairly widespread assumption that World Cup tickets start at $2,000 each. Many people stopped checking altogether because the early news coverage convinced them tickets were completely out of reach.
I recently met up with a friend in the greater Philadelphia area. He’s a serious football fan, follows the Premier League religiously, and his home country is playing a group stage match in Philadelphia. Even he had no idea that prices on the FIFA Marketplace Exchange and secondary sites like Ticketmaster and StubHub had dropped recently. He has enough disposable income to buy tickets even if they are $750 each, his home country is playing and he lives less than an hour from the Stadium.
This isn’t some casual observer who doesn’t pay attention. He’s highly interested in football and pretty tech savvy. And he’s not alone. I’ve had similar conversations with two other people who also assumed everything started at $2,000 because the only tickets they were finding were hospitality packages. They didn’t realize they had to navigate specifically to FIFA’s Marketplace Exchange to see resale inventory.
My friend can’t justify spending $8,000 for four tickets at $2,000 each, but $3,000 total for four tickets at around $750 each for a likely once in a lifetime chance an hour from his house is realistic.