How Much Did Speculation Impact World Cup Ticket Prices?

As the tournament drew closer, some fans skipped FIFA’s platform entirely. A month before the June 25 Australia vs. Paraguay match at Levi’s Stadium, Marin County resident Lei Cai said the official site was no longer offering tickets for the game. “I wanted to buy a ticket directly from FIFA, but when that wasn’t possible, our only option was resale sites,” she said.

Those who bought tickets on resale websites — including Ticketmaster, StubHub and SeatGeek — were required to pay the vendor first on the site, and then claim their ticket on the FIFA platform. Cai paid for two tickets on StubHub, she said, but when she logged into the FIFA portal, “that’s when I found out there’s no tickets to claim.”

After calling StubHub multiple times for weeks, she was eventually informed by the company that the person who listed the seats online never actually made the tickets available to her. Only after KQED contacted StubHub requesting comment on Cai’s situation did StubHub reach out to her directly to offer two new, free tickets to the same match.

Cai is not alone. Soccer fans nationwide who paid for tickets on resale sites have been left empty-handed by vendors — sometimes even hours before the game. Some economists and consumer advocates say that what happened to fans like Cai — along with the dramatic swings in prices, like what happened ahead of the U.S. game against Bosnia — shows there are major flaws in how the ticketing system works for major sporting events.

Scalpers have helped ricochet ticket prices for major musical events like Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour and the comeback of Oasis. But the market set up by FIFA and resale sites for this year’s soccer tournament may have helped speculation get a lot worse this time around — where very enthusiastic fans all over North America have already spent millions of dollars and shattered the tournament’s all-time attendance record.

An age-old problem

Tickets for big cultural and athletic events easily attract the attention of speculators because they’re what economists call “perishable goods.”

Think of going to a bakery. A loaf of bread freshly baked that morning may be sold at $10. The bakery may also offer bread baked the previous day, but at a much lower price. But you most certainly won’t see bread baked a week or a month before — that’s no longer good.

“The same thing is true for game tickets,” said Steve Tadelis, professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, who has studied online ticket markets for years. “They’re worth practically zero after the game begins.” (In the case of the World Cup, that’s true an hour before the game begins. According to FIFA rules, if someone doesn’t claim their ticket an hour before a match begins, they can no longer use it to get into the stadium.)

The World Cup’s knockout stage can be especially attractive for speculators, Tadelis said. Speculators may have bought tickets for quarter-final or semi-final matches when fans had no confirmed information about which teams were advancing, but can then offer tickets at much higher prices if they see a popular team advance.

But while speculators may have good instincts on how soccer fans may behave, they can still make mistakes.

A seller may hope to sell a ticket for $3,000 a few weeks before a knockout-round game, assuming that enthusiasm among soccer lovers will keep growing with time. But the match is now just a couple of days away, and no one has snatched up the ticket. “They may be happy now to get a thousand or maybe even a few hundred dollars, because now they’re really worried that they’re going to be stuck with that ticket,” Tadelis said.

“There may be early excitement that overshoots the real demand,” he said. “Sellers will panic and try to all sell at the same time. And then prices are going to plummet.”

While many USMNT fans were hyped that their team advanced to the knockout stage, their enthusiasm perhaps didn’t match the prices that resale vendors were offering. The bubble quickly burst.

Who moves the market?

Price data alone, however, can’t confirm that a market has been entirely taken over by speculation, Tadelis said. Fans may learn new information that changes their feelings about their team — a star player previously blocked from playing by a penalty suddenly gets the green light to come back, perhaps.

“If you’re looking for real clues — are people actually buying and picking up tickets, or are the same tickets getting resold over and over?” he said, adding that the latter case would suggest speculation. But if prices spike and then sellers suddenly cancel on buyers — like what happened to Cai from Marin County — “that’s another red flag that probably these are speculative sellers that never had the tickets to begin with.”

Vendors “ghosting” ticket buyers has become a serious problem, said Scott Friedman, co-founder of the consulting group Ticket Talk Network, based in Cleveland, Ohio.

He said he’s talked to people from all over the globe who’ve saved up thousands of dollars to travel to a game hosted in North America, but once here, they don’t get anything from the vendor online and usually no replacement from sites like StubHub. “As a marketplace for the biggest live events, if a seller doesn’t fill that order, you’ve got to fill it,” he said. “It’s just a common courtesy to the fan.”

StubHub previously told KQED in a statement that the ticketing problems fans have experienced this World Cup “are largely transfer problems, not ticket problems.”

The company said that FIFA’s ticketing system, including a new app launched right before the tournament began, “has had significant performance issues that have affected transfers across all resale platforms.” According to StubHub’s rules for sellers, it’s OK for someone “to list tickets you own but don’t have in your possession yet … as long as you’re absolutely certain you will have them on the date you give us when listing the tickets.”

FIFA, for its part, told KQED it has “no visibility over, or control of, secondary market ticket transactions carried out on third-party platforms,” and it rejects “any suggestion that the functional issues being experienced by users of third-party platforms” are the result of its ticketing infrastructure.

But reining in speculation will require transparency from both FIFA and resale sites, Tadelis said. This means consumers should have access to information “like recent prices, how much inventory there is to really help people understand what’s going on in the market,” he said.

FIFA offered tickets through staggered releases, where consumers in the initial stages did not even know which teams were playing in any of the games — or even in which rows they would be sitting. Tadelis pointed out that the official FIFA resale platform also charged fees to both buyers and sellers.

“These create real opportunities to bet on price swings, and that’s especially true when fans can’t tell how much inventory FIFA is still holding back,” he said. “That opacity is what’s turning buying a ticket into basically a forecasting exercise.”

And for consumer advocates like Friedman, that also means having lawmakers require that resale sites confirm vendors actually have the tickets they’re offering. “It doesn’t matter if it’s the FIFA World Cup, the Super Bowl, or any live event that happens,” he said. “When you buy a ticket, it needs to be delivered instantly.”