ALBAWABA - While tickets are officially "sold out" according to FIFA, the tickets are being resold for millions on resale sites.
The World Cup final is shaping up to be the most expensive sporting event in United States history, with tickets requiring people to be literal millionaires to purchase them as their prices skyrocket on resale sites.
The most coveted seat at the New York-New Jersey event, which features the most famous football players in the world at the moment, Lionel Messi and Lamine Yamal, has crossed the $2 million mark less than 24 hours before the start of the match.
On Friday, two days before the final, the tickets were sold out on FIFA’s website except for a few listed at around $32,000.
On Saturday, the tickets completely sold out on FIFA’s website while resale tickets were starting to hike up in prices, with tickets available from $10,000 to the $2.3 million seat.
Screenshot showing ticket prices from FIFA's official resale website
"What FIFA did a very good job of was determining what demand would be because people [were] paying these absurd prices for just about all the 104 matches," said Scott Friedman, a ticketing expert.
"A year ago, we didn’t think people would be travelling with Trump’s ICE stuff and all this other conspiracy stuff. But it’s the most popular tournament in the world by far globally, and FIFA, to their credit, they set the prices high, and people ended up paying them."
More than half of the 72 group stage matches were attended to full capacity, while the rest of the matches fell just within a few hundred short of capacity - marking 99.7 of the seats filled for the pre-knockout stage, according to Reuters.
However, Ronan Evain, executive director of Football Supporters Europe, told reporters that the World Cup has been an event for "a happy few", citing that fans from multiple countries were unable to obtain visas, alongside the security checks and hassles the U.S. made for non-Western teams.
"Those in Europe, Norwegians, Scottish, who have enough purchasing power to travel to the US, don’t need a visa to enter the country and can afford the extortionate ticket prices," he said.
