Ticket sales for the United States’ high-priced World Cup opener are lagging behind other matches in Los Angeles, according to a document distributed to local organizers and a variety of other indicators.
The document, dated April 10 and shared with hosts to ensure adequate planning, listed 40,934 tickets purchased for that June 12 match between the U.S. and Paraguay, compared with 50,661 for the Iran-New Zealand match three days later at the same venue, SoFi Stadium.
FIFA lists the stadium’s capacity at 69,650 for the 2026 World Cup. The document, though, does not necessarily suggest that there are tens of thousands of seats still available, because it’s unclear if the numbers include hospitality and other types of tickets that weren’t sold to the general public.
FIFA, when asked to clarify on Saturday and again on Monday, declined to provide that context. (The Los Angeles host committee also declined to comment.)
A FIFA spokesperson, responding after publication Tuesday, said in an emailed statement that “ticket sales for the FIFA World Cup remain strong with a high degree of interest for all matches, including the ones you have highlighted.” The spokesperson argued that the document “does not accurately reflect actual sales to date” (The Athletic’s report cites ticket data as of April 10), and said “it would be misleading and irresponsible to publish such figures as fact,” but did not say why or how the numbers were inaccurate reflections or misleading.
The document seems to confirm a growing body of evidence that the U.S. opener has not been selling as well as expected. When FIFA first put tickets on sale in October, it priced that June 12 match as the third-most expensive of the entire World Cup, behind only the final and one semifinal. But Category 1 and Category 2 tickets — priced at $2,730 and $1,940 — have remained available throughout subsequent sales phases, a clear indication that fans have been deterred by the price tag.
For most other games, on the other hand, fans have gobbled up available tickets. Sensing “unprecedented” demand, FIFA has raised prices for a majority of matches, often by hundreds of dollars.
But FIFA has kept prices frozen at $2,730, $1,940 and $1,120 in its three main categories for U.S.-Paraguay. It’s the only match featuring a co-host — the U.S., Canada or Mexico — that has not seen prices hiked over the past six months. (The Category 1 price for Mexico’s opener against South Africa, by contrast, has jumped progressively from $1,825 in October to $2,985 currently.)
And at those prices, tickets to U.S.-Paraguay have been selling slowly. Thousands have been listed on FIFA’s ticketing site ever since the so-called “Last-Minute Sales Phase” began April 1. On April 9, when The Athletic started tracking availability daily, there were 2,529 available on a first-come, first-served basis. Ten days later, on April 19, there were 2,232.
The USMNT last played Paraguay in November 2025 at the Philadelphia Union’s Subaru Park. (Drew Hallowell / Getty Images)
In other words, it seems that tickets to that match — billed as the glitzy curtain-raiser for the American portion of the tournament — are selling at a pace of a few dozen per day. (A handful of tickets were seemingly added over that 10-day period, so perhaps more than 300 were sold, but for the most part, section-by-section inventory remained static.)
The document distributed to Los Angeles officials, meanwhile, suggests that many more than 2,232 tickets are still unsold.
For most or all World Cup matches, FIFA appears to be holding back tickets, creating an illusion of scarcity. FIFA president Gianni Infantino said last week that his organization has “sold around 5 million” of the roughly 6.7 million expected to be available. “We could have” sold all tickets, Infantino added, but “we want to keep a few for continuous sale until the start of the tournament to give opportunities to latecomers.”
On Sunday, only nine matches on the ticketing portal showed more than 100 tickets available, even though many of the other 95 matches have not yet sold out. FIFA’s expectation, presumably, is that it will be able to sell most or all of those tickets over the final two months before kickoff, with a rush of sales every time new batches are made available.
Those nine games with significant and persistent availability are perhaps the exceptions, and seemingly the ones for which demand has not materialized, at least at current prices.
Unsurprisingly, they include seven matches featuring mostly low-profile teams — three between Austria, Jordan and Algeria; New Zealand vs. Egypt; Uzbekistan vs. the Democratic Republic of Congo; and Saudi Arabia’s games against Cape Verde and Uruguay.
But the other two are the Canada and U.S. openers.
The sales data shared with Los Angeles organizers suggested that, as of April 10, the other U.S. match at SoFi Stadium was also lagging. It listed fewer than 40,000 tickets purchased for that match — which will be against Turkey after the Turks won a European playoff late last month — compared to around 47,000 for Switzerland vs. Bosnia and Herzegovina, and over 50,000 for both of Iran’s matches in L.A. (against New Zealand and Belgium).
But the current lack of availability for the U.S.-Turkey match, coupled with previous price hikes — a Category 1 ticket to that game originally cost $805; it now costs $990 — and the fact that Turkey only just qualified, likely suggests that FIFA isn’t worried about it.
The opener, on the contrary, was the subject of a targeted sales push last week. U.S. Soccer supporters group members received an email advertising an “additional opportunity” to “access a limited number of tickets for the U.S. men’s national team’s opening match.” They were offered tickets in any of the three main categories, but at the same prices freely available on FIFA’s website plus a 10 percent “processing fee.”
SoFi Stadium outside L.A. will host two of the USMNT’s group matches at the 2026 World Cup (Frederic J. Brown / AFP / Getty Images)
Meanwhile, earlier buyers are now listing tickets to that U.S. opener on resale sites for under face value. There are over 4,000 tickets listed on FIFA’s own resale platform, and as of Sunday, at least 19 sections showed prices lower than the primary-market price. There were also 377 listings on StubHub, 10 of which were offering tickets at below face value, even after taxes and fees were added.
Those secondary-market trends and the slow primary sales could compel FIFA to lower prices as the opener nears, as it did for many Club World Cup games last summer. As that unproven tournament approached, FIFA walked back its initially high prices, but not sufficiently or soon enough to avoid thousands of empty seats at most matches.
Some of the starkest Club World Cup examples — $13 tickets to a semifinal, for example, or a five-for-$20 deal on the eve of the tournament — have given fans hope that FIFA will do similarly for some 2026 World Cup games. But the global soccer governing body has held firm thus far. It has frequently trumpeted overwhelming demand, including 508 million ticket requests in a winter lottery phase, though industry experts assume that those requests were heavily skewed toward popular matches and cheaper categories. (Infantino said in February that FIFA received more than 1 million ticket requests for 77 of the 104 matches.)
The relatively slow sales for U.S.-Paraguay are likely a product of FIFA’s pricing, but also perhaps a misjudgment of the USMNT’s popularity. The team has struggled to attract strong home crowds to a variety of stadiums across America during the 2026 World Cup cycle and previously, with U.S. fans occasionally outnumbered by supporters of the opponent.
In Southern California, especially, the USMNT has hardly ever played in front of a partisan crowd. When it faced Panama and Canada at SoFi Stadium in Concacaf Nations League doubleheaders in March 2025, the vast majority of seats were empty at kickoff, with most ticket buyers seemingly more interested in the Mexico match later that evening.
At other games since the turn of the century, stadiums in greater L.A. have been filled by fans of other countries throughout the Americas and further afield. The region is home to dozens of vibrant diaspora communities, including hundreds of thousands of Iranian Americans. Decades ago, they coined the nickname “Tehrangeles” (a play on “Los Angeles” and the name of Iran’s capital, Tehran).
That may help explain why Iran’s two matches at SoFi have seemingly sold better than the U.S. matches, per the document shared with local organizers.
The data is broken out into “local,” non-local “domestic” and “international” ticket buyers. For the U.S.-Paraguay match, only 8,487 of the nearly 41,000 buyers as of April 10 were “local,” compared to 17,080 — more than twice as many — for Iran-New Zealand on June 15.
Still, the overriding factor seems to be pricing. FIFA has sold the Iran-New Zealand tickets for $450, $380 and $140 in its three main categories. USMNT fans were forced to pay more than six times as much, and many have told The Athletic that, because of the cost, they’ve instead focused on finding a ticket to the June 19 match against Australia in Seattle.
The remaining tickets, for these L.A. games and others, will be made available over the coming weeks and months, with some potentially released as soon as this week.