With the World Cup just over one month away, ticket prices have fallen for the six matches played in Kansas City.
Overland Park-based reseller Tickets for Less has been watching the trends. Jason Durbin, senior vice president of operations, says FIFA’s lottery system has been confusing and some fans may be rethinking their asking prices after FIFA released exact seat locations in April.
“Some people that got some of the higher rows have decided to go down in their price a little bit,” Durbin says. “That's created a lot of fluidity with the market.”
According to TicketData.com, a website that tracks prices on sites such as StubHub, Vivid Seats and SeatGeek, resale prices for Kansas City matches have dropped in the last month – several games by $100 or more.
The get-in price for the Argentina vs. Algeria game remains strong, but prices have also dropped in the last month from $943 in early April to $817 on May 7. The match has drawn attention because it is defending champion Argentina’s first game of the World Cup. It also begins Lionel Messi’s attempt to help Argentina win consecutive World Cup titles for the first time since 1962.
- Quarterfinal match price dropped $288
- Knockout game price dropped $167
- Algeria vs. Austria price dropped $151
- Argentina vs. Algeria price dropped $126
- Tunisia vs. Netherlands price dropped $100
- Ecuador vs. Curaçao price dropped $56
Resale ticket prices for nearly every World Cup match have gone down in recent weeks. Another factor at play in ticket resale prices, according to Durbin, is that FIFA has been releasing more seats to fans who entered the lottery for tickets. Another last-minute sale dropped on the FIFA sales page, the official online portal for tickets where fans can legally purchase tickets for FIFA tournaments.
“They keep allowing people to win the lottery or go through the process and try to purchase more tickets, even though they keep saying that they're pretty much sold out,” Durbin says. “So it's creating a lot of uncertainty on how many tickets are really out there.”
The tournament also expanded this year, to 104 matches located in 16 host cities across Canada, Mexico and the United States. Durbin says more games in more places mean fans have to make hard choices.
“People expected any World Cup game to have really high demand, but because they've expanded the field this year and there's more games and it's spread out more, they're realizing that in some of these group stage games, if they don't have a Argentina or Brazil or United States, the demand has been a lot softer than they expected," Durbin says.
