Just one day before it begins hosting FIFA World Cup matches, Levi’s Stadium faces a problem that has become all too familiar this tournament: entire rows of empty seats.
Ticketing for the global soccer showcase has been under a bright spotlight ever since it began last fall. Not only were the prices exorbitant — and they have only gone up since — but FIFA also used a dynamic pricing model and split those tickets into multiple broad categories, rather than offering fans specifically assigned seats. Then, in April, FIFA revealed new sub-categories that offered front-row seats in many sections for higher prices than what fans had previously been offered during the fall presale, with no indication that their fall presale order would not include the opportunity to sit in the front rows. The lack of transparency around ticketing has led four state attorney generals, including California’s Rob Bonta, to say they are looking into whether FIFA misled customers with these ticketing moves.
Tickets at Levi’s Stadium (which the tournament refers to as the San Francisco Bay Area Stadium) have been among the cheapest, primarily because the group stage matches in Santa Clara are so underwhelming. The best team in the FIFA World Ranking that’s playing at Levi’s is No. 19 Switzerland, and no match involves two teams in the top 40. Regardless, it’s not totally clear how many tickets FIFA has actually sold, and how many of those tickets will actually bring butts to seats, given how the organization has rolled this out.
SFGATE tried to find out, going into FIFA’s ticketing portal on Thursday afternoon and counting how many tickets were available for direct sale, as well as how many were available on the resale marketplace. At least for the five group stage matches at Levi’s, FIFA was down to under 250 tickets available to buy direct, including just four for Saturday’s first match between Qatar and Switzerland.
But for the one knockout stage match, a round of 32 match on July 1 that could feature Team USA if it wins its group, nearly 400 tickets were still available as of 4 p.m. on Thursday. All of those tickets were in “Front Category 1” and located in the first three rows of sections closest to the field. Eight of the sections had entire rows of tickets still available for purchase, including one section where all 60 seats in the first three rows were for sale. The price to sit that close? A cool $1,995 per seat.
That entire rows in the very front of the stadium are still available this close to the start of the tournament prompts a key question. Have these tickets gone unsold for months — or, perhaps more likely, were they only recently put up for sale? SFGATE asked FIFA when those tickets were made available for sale but did not hear back in time for publication.
FIFA’s internal resale marketplace, meanwhile, had over 26,000 tickets listed as available for purchase as of Thursday afternoon, with a range from 2,700 available for the round of 32 match on July 1 to more than 6,900 available for the Jordan-Algeria match on June 22. That doesn’t even include any available tickets on the other secondary ticketing websites (or the accusations that FIFA is using those websites to dump its unsold tickets for cheaper than what it is offering on its own website).
In a news release Wednesday, FIFA said the 2026 World Cup is set to break the all-time cumulative attendance record for the tournament. But that wouldn’t be as momentous as FIFA makes it seem, considering this is the largest tournament by number of teams (48, up from 32) and number of matches (104, up from 63). FIFA also confirmed the capacity sizes for the 16 stadiums in the release, with Levi’s Stadium set at 68,827. However, the attendance claims have raised eyebrows. FIFA announced that Thursday’s match between South Korea and the Czech Republic had an attendance of 44,985, a little less than 700 below the Guadalajara stadium’s listed capacity. At kickoff, however, the stadium looked much emptier than that. It’s anyone’s guess whether the same fate awaits for the six matches in the Bay Area.
