World Cup ticketing brings waves of confusion, delay for Kansas soccer fans

Tickets for FIFA World Cup soccer matches held in Kansas City are almost impossible to find right now. (Eric Thomas illustration for Kansas Reflector)

My family knows to bring soccer questions to me. 

Given the trappings of my soccer fanaticism — a hat for my son’s high school team, a jersey for my favorite Premiere League team, an app for my fantasy team and a podcast for my fandom — I am the extended family’s commissioner of soccer, earning the office even over my son who plays soccer nearly every day.

Despite my expertise, I couldn’t help my mother-in-law a few weeks ago when she came to me looking for some way — any way — to buy World Cup tickets for an upcoming charity auction. They didn’t have to be cheap, but the auction needed them.

What I told her, to her understandable disbelief, is that tickets for the United States’ largest sporting event basically don’t exist. As we sit today, months before the first game across the state line in Missouri, essentially no one knows what games they will attend, where they will sit or who will be playing.

The details about the tournament are delayed for many reasons, some perfectly understandable.

For instance, the national teams that participate in this year’s version of the World Cup need to qualify first. Even Argentina, the 2022 champion, needed to earn a spot. Through last-ditch play-in tournaments, national teams that have slumped in their first qualification matches still have one last shot.

Today, with 250 days until the first game, only 18 of the 48 teams who will play have qualified. Please join me in shedding a tear for 86 nations that have been knocked out. Although I am not sure Mauritania or Mauritius had a chance.

For the 2022 World Cup, some national teams qualified as late as mid-June 2022 for the tournament that started 159 days later.

That will seem early as compared with the 2026 tournament: teams will qualify for the 2026 World Cup through March 31. That is 72 days before the first match, cutting in half the time before the first game that we will know who is actually in the World Cup.

That delay is just one variable that makes the ticketing difficult. Another basic scheduling component — the draw — must happen to know who is playing whom. That ceremony, slotting teams into pools that dictate their first three opponents, takes place Dec. 5. Until then, even the United States (which qualified as one of the three hosts) won’t know its opponents.

With all that waiting, ticket sales are an opaque labyrinth requiring quite a bit of studying and even more waiting. FIFA, the imperial worldwide soccer governing body, concocted a ticketing scheme that looks like an ATM wired into a Rube Goldberg contraption.

My family registered, along with millions of others, for the earliest ticket lottery that FIFA provided. To enter, you registered your VISA credit or debit card with a presale website. The lucky folks selected will be notified this week so they can purchase tickets later this month.

Early reporting yesterday from the Athletic suggests that tickets through the lottery in Kansas City will range from $60 to $410 for group stage games. For the quarterfinal hosted in Kansas City, tickets purchased directly from FIFA range from $275 to $1,125.

That VISA presale mini-maze is just the first option.

Soon, FIFA will open a second lottery that will not require a VISA card. Millions more will register for that chance. Roll your eyes with me as you notice this: there are still two more phases of sales after these first two. 

To further obscure what is happening, FIFA emailed everyone in my family Wednesday about something they call Right To Buy. Thinking we had earned a spot through that VISA-sponsored lottery, I gasped.

“We won,” I said. 

Not so fast. These Right To Buy packages essentially dangle the chance to cut the line in these lotteries and secure — well, not tickets, but the right to tickets. The timing seems especially cruel, if not predatory. During the week we hope to hear from FIFA about winning the ticket lottery, we receive an email from FIFA about a right to buy. Of course, we think we have “won.”

The FIFA website also markets these as collectibles, mimicking the baseball cards of my youth and the video game add-ons of my son’s generation. 

The “Road to Semifinal Glory – Double Edition” is “an exclusive drop” the website says: “This special bundle gives you the opportunity to secure 2 Right-To-Buy (RTBs) for some of the tournament’s most coveted knockout matches, from the Round of 16 up to the Semi-Finals! Each pack contains an opportunity to be there for a decisive match on the journey to the Final.”

Cost for that “collectible”? $1,399 each.

The number “claimed,” according to the FIFA website? A whopping 150 RTBs sold just for one of the Kansas City packages.

That’s more than $200,000 in FIFA revenue just for the right to buy one narrow kind of ticket. The website lists dozens of similar RTB packages, scraping millions more into FIFA’s already bursting pockets.

My RTB email arrived at my inbox at 12:32 p.m. Within three minutes, I was shopping, only to find out that all Right To Buy opportunities associated with Kansas City were sold out.

How to avoid the wait? Purchase tickets that include hospitality. These premium tickets include access to lounges near the playing surface and other VIP access. Some include tickets for luxury suites.

If you wanted to take a family of four to a single game, the lowest hospitality price you could expect? More than $5,000. However, you can get them now, using “buy now” button on the FIFA website.

That hospitality price tag comes with an unfortunate guarantee: You won’t be watching any of the host nations, including the USA, play. Those coveted tickets will cost even more.

FIFA’s tangled ticket-buying process will tempt many Kansas soccer fans to their default place to buy tickets: second-hand markets like the SeatGeek and StubHub or the Overland Park-based Tickets for Less. We know how to buy tickets through these sites for concerts, Chiefs games and more.

Beware though. Because the lotteries have just begun, because the teams have yet to qualify, because the RTB emails have just arrived, there are few actual tickets that second-hand sellers can precisely promise.

If you buy a ticket here, you should think about it as a stock-market future, similar to contracting with someone to snag you a ticket somehow — likely through another second-hand seller, rather than directly from FIFA. The person or company selling you that ticket will need to secure the ticket themselves before selling it to you.

Add to this confusion: President Donald Trump has threatened to move World Cup games from cities that are, in his judgement, too violent.

“If I think it’s not safe, we’re going to move it out,” Trump said.

FIFA’s reassurances this week that the host cities will indeed host matches should calm our fears a bit, but Trump’s words make World Cup tickets seem not just elusive but a bit tentative.

Soccer fans like me dread the patience that all of this demands. Knowing that our region’s metro area is hosting the World Cup fuels our jitters to have confirmed tickets in hand — whether for a charity auction or for our soccer-obsessed son.

Unfortunately, even though we live so close, FIFA asks that we wait and eventually spend lavishly.

Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.