FIFA Ticketing Schemes for the Club World Cup 2025 & World Cup 2026

Written By Kwan Ng

Club World Cup Ticket Update

As of the weekend of May 18th, there was a wide sweeping discount of group stage tickets across the tournament. It depends on the city and teams involved, but the average of the matches I looked at was about 50% off of their original prices. This is a bitter pill to swallow for anyone with tickets already, but it’s for the best that they lowered the prices to try and entice people to attend these matches. However it looks like the prices of the knockout rounds has stayed steady (the table below is a bit skewed and that average 11-12% change is likely just the fees that Ticketmaster charges, as my baseline was directly from the FIFA website in early April)

Here are those updated prices (5/19):

It’s possible that prices drop further, but I think realistically if you’re price sensitive, this is probably about as low as the official tickets will go. The resale market day of may be even friendlier for buyers as sellers try to offload. As always, I would advocate that FIFA, US Soccer, and the stadiums work to sell extremely discounted group tickets to quickly fill the stadiums with passionate groups. There must be plenty of youth programs they can basically hand tickets out to.

Hospitality Series Available for the World Cup

There are 3 packages currently available:

Hospitality guarantees you a “technically” decent seat, with some free food, drinks, and usually small knick-knack gifts.

Unfortunately, I simply don’t have the data available to compare this with previous World Cups or American events to try and predict what the regular tickets will be priced at. But let’s just take a brief and laughable look at the New York New Jersey Venue Package. There are four options with varying levels of experiences.

Yes, you’re reading those numbers correctly. And there’s even a slight premium for being in the front half of the section versus the back half, delineated by a +. Here are the stadium maps. They’re not even that great of seats. I don’t know what the stars represent amusingly.

And sorry, the brief laughable look has turned into a longer deeper dive, as all things on this blog become. I inevitably get curious, and then think, well, I might as well go through it all so others don’t have to. Providing some value to the public on my website. Free press. Though I’m going to focus only on the Venue Series, because I think it was the most interesting. This package would get you a ticket to every match played in the city, a nice option if you live / have a place to stay in one. The other packages showed less variation and were pretty standard. Here are the number of matches you would get with each Venue Series Hospitality ticket and the round that they would occur in (they’re only available in the US host cities right now):

Okay, so while there is some significant variation in number of matches and when they occur. Now here are the prices:

I mean… wow. But of course, it is for multiple matches and not fair to assess them like this. Here is the data again, averaged for the number of tickets you get.

Still incredibly biased since of course New Jersey will be the highest since it has the final. It’s harder to correctly attribute the value of each round, so I instead think it’s best to look at just Houston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Seattle. Which means the average cheapest (Pavilion) group stage hospitality ticket is $1,486. With a 5x multiple (I made this number up based on some anecdotal experience) that means regular priced tickets for the Group Stage / Round of 32 will be around $297. Cross your fingers for those lotteries with better price points. Unfortunately, I don’t think the poor sales performance of the Club World Cup will influence pricing of the World Cup.

Follow the link here if you’re more interested in going to watch soccer than in owning a home

Expired Packs

I was genuinely excited for these… I wrote all about them in a previous post. However, they seem to have expired on April 28th. Which is unfortunate, since I was still just gauging people’s interest and trying to garner enough support to buy them, as a stipulation was that I have to attend with friends and family. They were only available for 25 days, which actually makes me think they were a good deal, and I’m more than a bit peeved that they just randomly took them away (I didn’t previously see an expiration date for the offer, and I read through the terms and conditions at length). That probably ends my interest in acquiring more Club World Cup tickets, I really thought it was going to be an interesting deal.

Dystopian Lootboxes

FIFA continues to push this insane dystopian NFT based lootbox / pack system called FIFA Collect. I’ve avoided talking about them even though it’s been available for months now, but given their ongoing prevalance I figured I should try and figure out what’s going on. Keep in mind, I have no experience with NFTs, I have not purchased any of these, and I’m deeply skeptical and biased towards them before researching it.

Let’s me start with, it’s not a scam, it’s a real thing and there are real benefits to it. That said, it’s definitely a thinly veiled cash grab likely influenced by the ever popular (dripping with sarcasm) video game mode formerly known as FIFA Ultimate Team (also known as FUT). FUT’s economy is an annual nightmare for gamers, and an absolutely imbalanced travesty. But it is very good at one thing, microtransactions that make Electronic Arts (the publisher) a lot of money, the last year I found public data for the system created $1.6B in revenue for them.

FIFA Ultimate Team Annual Estimated Revenue

(in Millions USD)

Using a similar and common model, they’ve designed a system where you can buy packs and hope to get different rewards. The rewards are mostly NFTs that can be sold on an internal market. Proponents will argue that the tech savvy and early adopters are getting an edge to compete with fewer people for tickets. Opponents will argue that it is essentially gambling and costing people more money nor is entirely legal or reliable. I won’t delve into the debate much, other than that there’s some semblance of truth to both.

What’s also strange is with all these NFTs and digital assets is that they’re clearly valuing them poorly. In most packs the money, tickets, jerseys, memorabilia, and other physical tangible items are worth more. So they’re pointing out… this digital fake thing we made up isn’t worth much, we need to create value with tangible assets to try and get money flowing into this ecosystem. I’m gagging while I’m writing I’m so disgusted by this.

The whole system for a long period of time require that you convert your actual money into the cryptocurrency Algorand. Which just added another forced layer of this random other currency. I guess it’s slightly better than than fake in game coins since it’s a real cryptocurrency and can be exchanged, but I imagine the fees and all of this is just done to boost the value to this cryptocurrency I’ve never heard of before. Cool guys, really cool. You’ve done a great job. Thanks for adding a cryptocurrency that does literally the same thing as… our normal currencies (by logging in, verifying your identity, and doing everything on FIFA’s platform, it’s no different than a bank monitoring you). But alas, on May 20th, 2025, FIFA Collect left Algorand and are just going to use normal currencies. So… I can probably just cross out this paragraph, but I think it’s amusing.

Anyway, I digress, I thought I would explore a few of the options out there, potentially breaking them down to see if there’s any value in them or at least how much money they’re generating from these schemes. Here are three of the many current options out there (Right to Final, City Glory Bundle RTB Boston, and Surprise - Defense Miracles)

Right to Final

This series features 18 of the 48 teams (funnily I guess they don’t think 30 of the teams even have a statistical chance). This is the… least random. As unlike the other packs, you are guaranteed in buying the Right to Buy a ticket to the final if your team makes it. But it’s still a bold hedge, since it is valueless if your selected team doesn’t make the final. Don’t worry though, you do get 2-3 Club World Cup tickets though you don’t get to pick which… is odd. Three teams are sold out as of the time of writing, Argentina, Spain, and England. A likely combination of the highest likely odds to be in the final and most willing to spend fans. So as far as I can tell, this pack is more of a call option (for those bold traders who may understand this). So I got in my head, I had to figure out what the Expected Value of the Right to Buy Final tickets should be.

First I took the purchase values and removed the Club World Cup tickets you get and got the FIFA assessed value of the Right to Buy final tickets or what I called the RTB Gamble Cost. I looked up the Odds to get to the Final on FanDuel and set the values of what a resale final ticket might be ($3,000) and how much FIFA would charge for the ticket ($1,400). These are just educated guesses. But I suppose if anyone has any thoughts, they can try it themselves. I got the Expected Value and then subtracted the value of the Right to Buy final tickets. Here are the results.

You can see the exp. RTB Value is just variable on the original purchase cost and the probability of appearance. Probability of Finals is skewed heaviest towards the normal big hitters. The Expected Value is directly correlated to that probability. And the answer is, unsurprisingly, that these are terrible deals. Anyone purchasing this is not making a smart financial decision. The average expected value of these packs are $335 / $669 for the $999 / $1,499 ones respectively. And honestly a good amount of that value is coming from the CWC tickets, which aren’t even that valuable.

That said, hopefully you can actually use or sell and value the CWC tickets at their face value… And if you are going to do it, at least give yourself the best value. That is: Croatia, Uruguay, France, Spain, and Colombia if you value the Club World Cup tickets as FIFA has set them as (which you shouldn’t, assign your own value), and if you don’t then: Uruguay, Croatia, Colombia, Morocco, and Japan. A long winded way to say the five cheaper priced countries are a better deal! Sometimes I wonder what the point of me doing this stuff is! But seriously, if you have $1,500 to gamble on this, just wait until the resale market goes live and just buy it there… again, this is under the assumption that the actually ticket will cost $1,400 and the resale ticket will be $3,000. Perhaps that assumption is off, but still… even marginally improved at $1,000 a ticket and resale market being $4,000, the Expected Value of the Right to Buy would still be a loss of $255-$700 for the best odds teams (Spain and France, depending on how much you value the CWC tickets). Remember, if you’re team doesn’t make it, this Right to Buy is worth absolutely nothing.

Of course there is some incalculable value of the fear of missing out, fandom, insurance, peace of mind, and increased stakes. But we don’t need to take it that far for this low quality blog.

As for how much money FIFA is making is a lot. The right to buy something that they previously didn’t charge for… amazing. It just cost licensing their brand to Modex. Respect for conjuring up money out of thin air. My estimate is they could make up to $873,660 - $1,224,100 if they sold all 900 and depending on how much they value the Club World Cup tickets. Which I doubt they currently value at the full face value they originally offered them at (especially given the recent price cut), so I’d say closer to $1,048,880 is the total potential. As of 5/19 they’re at 312 sold for $465,688. Removing a start up cost of $10,000, plus a $1 per pack sold in operational expenses, and $65,000 for the value of the CWC tickets they’ve thrown in), their net profit is $390,460; meaning the contribution margin of this so far is 84%.

The breakdown of which countries are purchased actually feels insightful. A combination of which countries people actually think have a chance to go to the final, as well as cryptocurrency adoption countries / high disposable income countries (assuming the people purchasing it are supporting their own country).

Number of Right to Final Packs Sold by Country

I was about to dive into the next pack and I hit this error, so guess not… but in hindsight, this is the migration away from the cryptocurrency Algorand.

City Glory Bundle RTB Boston

And we’re back.

This one is part of a series that are attempting to do for all host cities. It also is a more straightforward pack since it has a “guaranteed” reward you will receive like the previous pack, but unlike that one, this one is not contingent on any team’s performance, so it is a better guarantee because know you can use it. No gambling required. For $499 you get 2 category 2 tickets to a Club World Cup match and the RTB 2 tickets for a World Cup Match in Boston. Weirdly the CWC tickets aren’t in Boston (not that there are any games there, but even when I checked the City Glory Bundle RTB Miami, it too was offering the same CWC tickets in Philadelphia and Los Angeles).

The cost of this pack is an estimated $17,400 for FIFA, with revenues at $89,820. A profit of $72,420 if they sell out (which they’ve sold out other cities, so seems somewhat likely) and a contribution margin of 81%. With an expected value of $146.67, which is ~29% of the purchase price. Now obviously you can see that I value the Right to Buy a Group Stage ticket very low in this scenario. My logic is below, and as you can see it’s highly dependent on what FIFA will actually force their Right to Buy tickets be priced at.

$50 per pair is probably a bit too aggressive. Even if you upped it to $200 for the pair, which is quite generous, your expected value would still only be $296.67 or 59% of the cost, plus those Club World Tickets are likely going to cost you more since I assume a Boston focused attendee would have to pay to get to Philadelphia or Los Angeles to use them (or sell below market value to offload them).

Please don’t buy these packs. It’s just not a very prudent way to spend your money.

Surprise - Defense Miracles

This is more of what the typical lootbox / pack contains. It has these odds, and you may or may not get the things that you want. Lots of garbage, some mediocre things, and a few good things. Let’s start with FIFA’s profit.

There are 12,000 of this $39.99 pack available. You can earn 8 types of NFTs, a FIFA Collect gift card of $39.99, or a combo Club World Cup Ticket(s) and Right to Buy World Cup Ticket(s).

  • Common - 8,208 of 4 different NFTs

  • Rare - 1,944 of 2 different NFTs or a FIFA Collect gift card for $39.99

  • Epic - 648 of 2 different NFTs

  • Iconic - 960 ticket combo packs

I then I used the following cost structure:

  • To develop an NFT I was very generous and set $1,000 per for FIFA

  • The gift cards are their values (which isn’t particularly true either)

  • Ticket packs are broken into two values

    • The Club World Cup Tickets were assessed as to the lowest value of the game and category that they claim on Ticketmaster

      • Given that they are available at face value and are not sold, there is a very big asterisk here that they clearly aren’t worth this amount…

    • The RTB Value was based on a chart I made up, based on the delta face value and resale values of the 2022 World Cup, and I took the lower values because there is no guarantee you get a good seat as per the terms and conditions

      • So a Group Stage RTB is $25 and Round of 32 is $50, this may be totally incorrect, but you can at least see my logic

      • And there’s an argument that since these never existed before, that these actually cost FIFA $0, and they’re all profit…

For each pack I baked in an another generous cost of $1. That’s $12,000 for the number of packs, $8,000 for the 8 NFTs, $9,598 for the gift cards, and $218,760 for the ticket packs. That final one is probably a bit over inflated, but we can use this as a ceiling. That means the maximum cost of this pack for FIFA is $218,358. With potential revenue at $479,880 (and it looks like this pack will sell out based on my monitoring over the past few days), the minimum profit is potentially $231,522.40. This is a minimum contribution margin of 48%. But let’s be more realistic; let’s cut the RTB values which don’t actually cost FIFA anything, and let’s cut the CWC tickets in half because they aren’t selling (even at the lower category valuations) and are essentially worth significantly less that what they are offering them at. The cost is then only $108,227.60 for FIFA and their more likely profit is $371,652.40 or a contribution margin of 77%.

Well that explains why they’re doing this pack system.

Below are all 960 ticket combos that are available so you can see my work:

M18 was the only sold out CWC match (I think it featured Real Madrid)

So what is the pack actually worth? How much should you actually be paying for it? It’s hard to technically tell. I don’t feel like getting into the value of all the NFTs, the system of burning them for challenges / upgrades, it’s all very complicated. But at the very least, I could just take what they’re going for in the marketplace (which I’ll go into more below).

Well there’s your answer. At best, the pack is worth $20.61. If we adjust for the four $1 common NFTs that are basically garbage, there’s hundreds of them available and it looks like it’s only priced at $1 because that’s the minimum you can sell them for, and adjust for the Coupon, which as we see the pack is worth half as much as the price, then the lower end of the value is around $19.69. And I think I’m being generous still. Regardless, that’s a little less than 50% of what people are paying for… Predatory behavior. Well done FIFA / Modex.

So just summarizing these three, I found that FIFA is making a likely profit of $834,532. And this is just three of them and they’re quite profitable with low risk.

This is a huge amount of additional revenue that they’ve just conjured up out of thin air… and they’ve got a lot of packs out there.

Brad Bakshi (from Mythic Quest, portrayed by Danny Pudi) would be proud of FIFA, actually he probably works for them

The FIFA Collect Marketplace

I’m not going to dive into this much. It’s just too much for my sanity to handle. You can buy all the NFTs here, as well as the Right to Buy tickets. It’s a frustrating marketplace, where you can’t always sort by price. And also be careful, there are a lot of Right to Buy tickets for the Club World Cup on there (and are valueless now).

You can check out the marketplace here for yourself. I guess if you really really want a ticket and don’t really care who is playing (for the most part) this is how you could do it. The amounts seem pretty crazy. People seem to value the RTB quite high (way overvalued). There’s one RTB for 1 ticket for the Final. It’s currently being valued at $16,500. Which just doesn’t make any logical sense. Because you could buy a hospitality ticket for $25,800… for that game and 7 others… and you actually would have a ticket, which the RTB doesn’t actually give you… unbelievable.

Here’s a quick snapshot of what New Jersey tickets I could find available right now. Single tickets are kinda crazy. So I went through for all the RTBs for a pair and recorded their prices. There were no pairs available for the RTBs for the two knockout stage games, so I asterisked them because they are singles. There are 45 pairs currently available for the group stage with the cheapest going for $310 ($155 each). The prices below are the cheapest value currently available (average / median doesn’t really matter in this type of product).

Marketplace Value for RTB a Ticket for New Jersey World Cup Matches

Per Ticket Cost (Pairs Only), except Knockout Rounds which are only singles

Here’s just the M91 Round of 16 RTBs.

And because I researched it. The next question is why doesn’t FIFA just do auctions for tickets, certainly they can make a comparable amount of money if not more. The arguments for this NFT / pack system are that it is more accessible to less wealthy customers and keeps fans more engaged. The whole system can increase participation and brand buy in. There’s excitement and social media sharing that can be used as marketing. Plus they can control more variables than an auction, coordinating the cadence, scarcity, hype, and mechanics. With more stable income than a free auction and ongoing long term revenue form secondary market transaction fees. At the end of the day, it does seem like they maintain a method for it to not “exclusively” be about the money, while actually earning more money from it all.

Kwan Ng
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FIFA Club World Cup 2025: Prize Money Analysis and Ticket Update