World Cup final on track to be most expensive sporting event ever

When FIFA first put tickets on sale for the 2026 World Cup final, its prices left fans aghast. Many upper-deck seats cost $4,210; anything closer to the field was $6,730. In subsequent months, FIFA raised those prices, all the way to $10,990 in Category 1, and fans around the world howled.

But on the eve of Sunday’s final, the secondary market makes those FIFA prices look like bargains.

In fact, on some ticket resale sites, the 2026 World Cup final is on track to be the most expensive sporting event ever.

Spokespeople for SeatGeek told The Athletic on Thursday that the average price of World Cup final tickets purchased on their site was $12,751, more than $2,000 higher than the previous record set by the 2024 Super Bowl.

For that game, between the San Francisco 49ers and Kansas City Chiefs in greater Las Vegas, the average resale price was $10,540. It retained the top spot in historical rankings despite the craze around the 2026 NBA Finals, when Game 3 between the New York Knicks and San Antonio Spurs reached a $9,033 average resale price on SeatGeek.

A spokesperson for StubHub said that demand for the World Cup final, for now, ranks slightly behind that 2024 Super Bowl and also behind Game 6 of the NBA Finals. But the latter never happened, because the Knicks clinched their title in five games.

And when accounting for scale, the World Cup final stands alone, because it will be played at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, the NFL’s largest stadium. Its capacity, 80,663 for World Cup matches, is far greater than Allegiant Stadium’s 61,629 for the 2024 Super Bowl or Madison Square Garden’s 19,812, which “makes the World Cup price even more impressive,” Keith Pagello, who runs TicketData.com, told The Athletic.

Pagello’s database tracks the “get-in price” — or cheapest available ticket — across various resale sites for all sorts of sporting events and concerts. The get-in price for Sunday’s match between Argentina and Spain was around $7,600 as of Thursday evening.

That makes this World Cup final a more expensive ticket than:

• Every post-pandemic Super Bowl
• The two recent NBA finals games in New York, which closed at $6,728 and $3,406, per TicketData.com
• Every College Football Playoff championship. (For the 2025 game between Ohio State and Notre Dame, prices spiked in the hours before kickoff but still topped out at $6,103.)

Ahead of one Super Bowl, the 2015 matchup between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks, prices surged the week of the game, and the get-in price hit at least $11,000 in the hours before kickoff. But that, Pagello says, was “a one-off, worst-case scenario. A large number of brokers had speculatively sold inventory they did not actually have, leading to a tremendous short squeeze in the days before the event.” It did not, in other words, reflect overall demand across the weeks and months prior.

In other sports or parts of the world, where the resale market is restricted and therefore difficult to track, there are perhaps some events that could rival the 2026 World Cup final. The Masters golf tournament and Wimbledon tennis tournament are famously hot tickets. The occasional Olympic final or high-profile boxing bout also commands resale prices in the thousands. So does the UEFA Champions League final.

But given the size and average sale prices, this World Cup final is in a class of its own.

As of Thursday around 5 p.m. ET, 70 hours before kickoff, on FIFA’s resale platform, the cheapest available ticket was $8,280 — in the third-to-last row of an upper-deck corner section at MetLife. The lowest price for a Category 1 ticket was more than $12,000.

On third-party resale sites, the cheapest Category 1 ticket was around $11,500, per TicketData.com.

On StubHub, there were around 135 listings in the $7,800-$10,000 range, but all of those were in middle or upper decks. The best price in the lower level was $10,803 for two seats in the 39th row behind one goal.

Prices for the final on the secondary market are actually lower than they were a month ago, and lower than they have been for much of the past several months. From early December through early May, the get-in price mostly hovered between $8,000 and $9,000. From then through early June, it dipped into the $7,000-$8,000 range. But as World Cup excitement picked up immediately prior to and during the tournament, the final’s get-in price soared all the way to around $12,000.

It peaked on or around June 23, at which point it began to fall again. On Monday, a ticket could be bought for less than $6,700.

But as the semifinals approached, and then again in the aftermath of Argentina’s dramatic victory over England, the get-in price rose back toward $8,000.

Argentina’s presence in the final, and the likelihood that it will be Lionel Messi’s last World Cup match, is likely one factor behind the high prices, but the event was already driving unprecedented demand long before Messi’s presence was confirmed.

Chris Leyden, SeatGeek’s senior director or marketing, told The Athletic via a spokesperson that the demand is “a reflection of just how rare, and how global, this moment is.”

Other industry experts pointed out that the market for World Cup tickets is significantly more global than the market for Super Bowl tickets, which increases demand. On StubHub, for example, 19.8 percent of World Cup final ticket purchases have been made by international buyers, compared with just 4.5 percent for the 2024 Super Bowl, according to a company spokesperson.

And ticket prices in general, across all American sports, have risen in recent years, outpacing inflation.

Ever since the beginning of the World Cup ticketing process, FIFA has used those American norms and the resale market, which is relatively unregulated in the United States, to justify its unprecedented prices. For some games, it overshot the market, but for most, tickets ultimately sold on resale sites for above face value — an indication that FIFA actually could have set higher prices and still filled stadiums.

Despite the high prices, the 2026 edition has smashed World Cup attendance records. Stadiums have been, on average, more than 99 percent full. And while there are still tickets available for the third-place match on Saturday between England and France, Sunday’s final will be another sellout.

The World Cup final’s television audience will also dwarf that of any Super Bowl or other sporting event. More than 1 billion people are expected to watch. The game kicks off at 3 p.m. ET.