Football Supporters Europe (FSE) and consumer rights organisation Euroconsumers filed an 18-page formal complaint with the European Commission on Tuesday, accusing FIFA of abusing its monopoly over World Cup ticketing to impose prices on European fans that no competitive market would allow.
The two organisations allege that FIFA breached Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which prohibits abuses of a dominant market position, and have identified six specific violations as the basis of the complaint, including sky-high pricing, bait advertising of a limited number of discounted tickets, uncontrolled dynamic pricing and a lack of transparency in the ticketing process.
The cheapest openly available tickets for the July 19 final at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey are currently priced at $4,185, more than seven times the cost of the cheapest 2022 World Cup final ticket in Qatar. By contrast, the lowest-priced tickets for the UEFA Euro 2024 final were 95 euros. FIFA’s own bid documents had projected an average ticket price of $1,408, a figure the actual market has far surpassed.
The North American bid had initially promised tickets from as little as $21. In practice, the cheapest tickets to go on general sale have been $60, such as for the Group J opener between Austria and Jordan at Levi’s Stadium in California, and most tickets for matches involving leading nations cost at least $200.
FSE also criticised FIFA’s official resale platform, where tickets have been listed well above face value and FIFA collects a 30 percent cut from every transaction. FIFA has been using dynamic pricing for the first time at a World Cup, with the organisation noting that some tickets rose 25 percent between sales phases, leaving fans with no clear way of knowing the final price before joining the queue.
Following a fan backlash in December 2025, FIFA slashed some ticket prices to $60 for every round including the final, reserved for national team supporters. However, those discounted tickets represented just 10 percent of each federation’s allotment.
The two organisations are calling on the European Commission to intervene immediately with interim measures, including a ban on dynamic pricing for all tickets sold within the European Economic Area and a freeze on April sale prices at the levels FIFA itself announced in December 2025.
FIFA president Gianni Infantino has defended the pricing, saying demand for the tournament is the equivalent of 1,000 years of World Cups at once and predicting that all 104 matches will sell out. FIFA had not responded to the complaint at the time of publication.
The 2026 World Cup opens on June 11, with matches across the United States, Canada and Mexico.
