The World Cup semi-finals feature two matches between world-class teams, and ticket prices for one match are currently more than twice as expensive as the other.
France is No. 1 in the FIFA men’s world rankings and will face No. 3 Spain in Dallas on Tuesday. European champion Spain spent most of the World Cup year at the top of the rankings, but was overtaken by the 2018 world champions in April.
Tickets for the semifinals were priced at $1,325 as of noon ET (16:00 GMT) Monday, according to ticket tracking service TicketData.com. This represents a 26% drop over the past three days, and the current price is less than half of the other semi-finals.
Defending champions Argentina continue to draw and will play England in the semi-finals in Atlanta on Wednesday.
Major League Soccer (MLS) franchise Atlanta United FC has a strong following in Argentina, where former Argentina national team manager Gerardo “Tata” Martino became the club’s head coach in November.
Argentina vs. England price is $2,841, up 34% in the last three days. Tickets rose to $2,966 on Saturday, but dropped to $2,537 the next morning.
That match costs almost twice as much as the third-place match. It will be held in Miami on Saturday and will cost $1,543.
Tickets for Sunday’s final game at New York-New Jersey Stadium remain $6,760, but have dropped 6 percent in the past 72 hours. Tickets for the finals reached $13,650 in October, but most recently they went for $12,301 on June 21st and $9,911 on July 6th.
On Friday, FIFA made available about 1,200 Category 2 tickets for the final at a price of $7,380.
The governing body’s last-minute ticketing site, which sometimes showed the game as sold out, had 1,178 seats available in five sections along the top deck sideline. The 344th section had 282 seats, the 343rd section had 299 seats, the 335th section had 139 seats, the 334th section had 443 seats, and the 333rd section had 15 seats.
Why are World Cup tickets so expensive?
FIFA has repeatedly faced intense criticism over World Cup ticket prices throughout the various stages of sales leading up to the tournament, with one fan group filing a lawsuit alleging that tickets are too expensive.
In April, FIFA put four tickets on the resale market for $2 million each. President Gianni Infantino joked about it, but otherwise defended the eye-watering price, arguing that soccer’s international governing body was obliged to take advantage of U.S. law that allows tickets to be resold for thousands of dollars above face value.
Experts have linked pricing to multiple factors, the biggest being the allocation of 78 of the 104 games to the United States.
“One of the main reasons the World Cup is held in the United States is because it offers a potential revenue-generating opportunity,” Simon Chadwick, professor of African and Eurasian sports at Emlion Business School in Shanghai, explained to Al Jazeera.
FIFA is tapping into what Chadwick calls a “mature” market, where “consumers are more likely to spend on sports, and premium pricing and enterprise segments are part of that.”
Sports industry experts believe that FIFA has introduced a “dynamic ticket pricing model” that has been used in the United States for several years.
Dynamic ticketing (also known as dynamic pricing) is a sales strategy where ticket prices are not fixed. Rather, it fluctuates in real time based on demand, supply, and timing.
