The price of tickets for World Cup matches, inevitably, is one of the hottest topics in world sport. Even in a country like the USA, in which football is evidently the fifth national sport, people are raising the problem of the excessive costs to attend a sporting event. The precedent of the Club World Cup last year, with many matches played in half-empty stadiums, frightens FIFA and the stakeholders a little. The mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, a politician very attentive to social policies for the lower-middle segment of the population, tried to find a solution, at least for the matches that will be played in the city he administers. And to do so he started talking and “haggling” directly with FIFA.
As reported by The Athletic, in fact, Mamdani has obtained a rare concession from FIFA: he has obtained 1,000 tickets for the matches of the upcoming World Cup at a subsidised price of 50 dollars. The tickets will be assigned by draw to the city’s residents and will concern the matches scheduled at the MetLife Stadium, in nearby New Jersey: five of the group stage, one round of 32 match and one round of 16 match – not the final itself on 19 July.
The 50-dollar seats represent the most affordable tier available on the official World Cup market and will also include free return bus transport. The initiative stems from an electoral promise by Mamdani, who during the campaign for the office of mayor had asked FIFA to guarantee greater access to local residents. In an interview given to The Athletic last October, the mayor had criticised the «unprecedented» prices of the tickets, arguing that they risked excluding precisely those fans who make football special.
According to sources close to the negotiations, Mamdani is said to have addressed the question directly with FIFA president Gianni Infantino during a meeting that took place in March at the Manhattan town hall. During the conversation, the mayor, a long-standing Arsenal fan and great football enthusiast, is also said to have spoken via video call with Arsène Wenger, today responsible for FIFA’s global development. The agreement provides that the 1,000 tickets be divided in an almost uniform way among the seven matches concerned. The seats will be located in the upper tier of the stadium. The agreed price is markedly lower than the official rates announced by FIFA in April: some group stage matches had in fact reached costs of between 220 and 355 dollars for seats of the same category, while the knockout matches reached up to 415 dollars. The tickets will be reserved exclusively for residents of New York for more than 15 years. To take part in the lottery, applications will open on 25 May at 10 in the morning and will close at 5 in the afternoon of the same day. The winners will be communicated on 3 June and will be able to purchase up to two tickets each.
To avoid phenomena of ticket touting, the tickets will be non-transferable and delivered only on the day of the match, at the departure point of the buses heading to the MetLife Stadium. The negotiations with FIFA were not simple. According to several American sources, the world football federation initially feared that the initiative could create a dangerous precedent, opening the way to parallel ticket markets managed by local administrations. During the electoral campaign, Mamdani had unsuccessfully asked for the abolition of the dynamic pricing system, a cap on the markups of the secondary market and a 15% quota of discounted tickets destined for residents. Once elected, however, the mayor chose a more diplomatic approach, seeking at least to obtain an accessible quota for New York citizens.
In parallel, the city administration has promoted other initiatives linked to the World Cup, including the “Soccer Streets” programme, which will transform 50 city streets into areas dedicated to football and community events, as well as the opening of free fan zones in the five boroughs of the city. The official announcement of the agreement will be presented in the Little Senegal neighbourhood, in Harlem, symbolically linked to the presence of the Senegalese community in New York. Two of Senegal’s three group stage matches will in fact be played at the MetLife Stadium, even though many fans of the African country could encounter difficulties reaching the United States due to the recent visa restrictions introduced by the Trump administration.