Cote: A month out, tickets are high. No duh. Savor the World Cup anyway | Opinion
The men’s FIFA World Cup begins one month from today across North America. “Uh-oh,” seems a pretty common reaction.
Some make the countdown clock sound like a ticking bomb, with the buildup drenched in consternation over exorbitant ticket prices, travel costs and concern about U.S. immigration policies. Your Friend the Media is playing its predictable part in the overemphasis on costs, because, why not? Low-hanging fruit.
Yes, you can spend around $2 million for a single luxury ticket to the July 19 championship match in East Rutherford, New Jersey, if you are some combination of obscenely rich, gullible and stupid. Or you can spend around $65,000 for one of the more economical remaining seats. (Or you can watch the Fox broadcast for free from your couch, with a better view, cheaper food and drinks, and a private bathroom five steps away.)
There’s a lot not to like about FIFA, the governing body of the world’s most popular sport. But one should not blame, or be surprised by, its “dynamic pricing model“ that sets ticket costs across the 16 host cities (including Miami) in the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
“Dynamic pricing” means high-demand tickets cost more. Well, no duh! So do concert tickets to see Beyonce, Springsteen and Taylor Swift. Stuff costs lots of money. God Bless America.
You can buy a nice little rib eye at Publix for 15 bucks. You can get pretty much the same steak at Morton’s for around $65. Or you can go to Papi Steak on Miami Beach and get “The Beef Case,” a 55-ounce Australian wagyu tomahawk with a marbling score of 9. It costs around $1,000. They bring it to your table in a diamond-studded briefcase.
It can cost almost that much for a family of four to attend a Miami Dolphins home game, including tickets, parking, food and drink.
So what’s more obscene? World Cup ticket prices? A $1,000 steak? A $900,000 Ferrari SF90 XX? The runway at the Met Gala? All of it? It’s all relative. What you can’t afford, somebody else can. Doesn’t always seem fair. Neither do gas prices. But that’s life. That’s sports, too.
As the NFL releases its 2026 regular-season schedule this week, the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating America’s most popular sport as it moves more and more games to streaming platforms that require subscriptions. Turning on your TV and watching the big game for free is getting closer to a risky assumption.
And yet so many fans and media are some cocktail of shocked and outraged over tickets to a World Cup being high, or the travel cost to get here being a lot, or local hotels and public transportation jacking their prices.
Guess what? The World Cup final is around 97% sold out. Five of the seven matches to be hosted by Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium have fewer than 5% of seats remaining. Colombia vs. Portugal June 27 and Scotland-Brazil June 24 are especially hot sellers, cost be damned.
This tri-hosted World Cup will be bigger than ever with 48 national teams for the first time. Yes, there will be empty seats. Maybe South Korea vs. Czechia won’t sell out. You can get a ticket to Ghana-Panama for the (relatively) low, low price of $467.
But if the World Cup match, anywhere, involves the likes of Lionel Messi and defending champion Argentina, Cristiano Ronaldo and Portugal, or Brazil, Germany, Spain, England or any other world power, the cost will be exorbitant, and met, by maniacal super fans paying the price of passion. These folks likely have planned and saved for years for what to them will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. They are buying a lifetime of memories.
This World Cup will be a monumental undertaking, especially for the United States, which will host 78 of the 104 matches. It is bigger than an Olympics. Like a month-plus of Super Bowls. More than 7 foreign million visitors are expected for games in U.S. alone, with some 1.2 million of those descending on the New York/New Jersey area.
Naturally, with such an undertaking, there are concerns beyond the cost of it all. There is politics at play as usual; this time, it’s a team from Iran playing in the country bombing its homeland. There are worries the massive global influx of visitors might bring the threat of disease. There are concerns of mass shootings.
“The whole health care system in New York City will be on the alert for all these events,” Dr. Vikramjit Mukherjee, chief of critical care at Bellevue Hospital, told Healthbeat New York. “We’re looking at it like a huge migration event. We feel that we will be the ones who will be affected first for the next outbreak, and therefore have an additional responsibility of keeping prepared.”
Certainly, behind the scenes, health care and law enforcement in every host city will be on the same alert they’d be hosting a Super Bowl or a major political convention.
But when the games begin on June 11, and stadiums are full and excitement is palpable and nobody is talking ticket prices anymore, the global phenomenon will take over. The breadth and majesty of it. Futbol will rise up to remind us why it is unparalleled, worldwide, in sports.
We will see what the world knows in the magic of players like Kylian Mbappe’ of France, Erling Haaland Norway, Jude Bellingham and Harry Kane of England and Vinicius Junior of Brazil.
We will discover the budding sensation of Spain’s teenage wunderkind Lamine Yamal.
Who knows, maybe the host United States, ranked No. 16, will surprise us with a deep run?
And maybe this: Messi vs. Ronaldo in the World Cup final?
It is possible. They are in opposite group-stage brackets. It is plausible, too. Inter Miami’s megastar plays for No. 3-ranked Argentina and Ronaldo for No. 5 Portugal. These are soccer’s two legendary, aging-yet-still-marvelous rivals, their fight against time adding a sentimental pathos. Messi will turn 39 during this World Cup — a trophy he finally got to lift in 2022. Ronaldo, at 41, still seeks the one grand prize that has eluded him. Just maybe...
Time to leave the obsession with predictably inflated ticket prices behind and start savoring the anticipation of the one sports spectacle most able to knit together a divided world with its one shared passion.
One month away. Almost time to dream.
This story was originally published May 11, 2026 at 12:11 PM.
