I Waited Five Hours to Not Buy FIFA World Cup Tickets

Let me set the scene. It’s April 1st. I’m with my family on Spring Break in Omaha, Nebraska. I know, Omaha isn’t exactly “Spring Break” territory, but if you listen to For the Glory KC, you know my wife and co-host has been a bit obsessed with Omaha. So, we went. We had a good time. The Henry Doorly Zoo is everything it was promised to be. It’s a cool city and I recommend it.

Back to that scene. It’s the early afternoon and we’re sitting at the Inner Rail Food Hall (also recommended). I’ve got my Turkey Bacon Ranch from Sammy’s Sub Shop, and my family is waiting on their food from Nori. I realize, “oh no, the World Cup ‘last-minutes sales phase’ started a few hours ago!”

I think to myself, I should hop in and see what the prices are. Have they gone down? Spoiler: They have not!

I proceed to login to my FIFA account and I’m met with this screen.

At the top of the page there is a link to astronomically high “ticket inclusive hospitality packages” followed by the massive red circle telling me I’m in queue. How long is the queue? What spot am I? It’s impossible to tell.

So, I sit there and eat my sandwich and talk to my family, occasionally tapping my cell phone screen to see if the line is moving. Eventually, it’s time to go and we head to the car. It’s raining so I lock my phone and promptly forget I’m in the queue.

I realize the headline is a little dramatic, because I didn’t stare at that screen for five hours. I’m sure others did. There are reports of people waiting in queue and being sent to a dead page. I love soccer. But I’m disenchanted by this entire process.

And it’s not that I couldn’t have starred at the screen for five hours. My wife agreed to drive home since I had driven to and around Omaha, so I settled into the passenger seat. I didn’t touch my phone once on the two-and-a-half-hour journey home. Instead, I had been hearing my daughter talk about Animal Crossing: New Horizons the last few days and it gave me the urge to fire up our Nintendo Switch and jump back into that world.

If you’ve ever listened to my podcast, you know I’m a big nerd. I’ve been playing a variation of Animal Crossing for 25 years apparently. I didn’t have the original game on the Nintendo 64, but I had the one for the Nintendo GameCube (which I recently sold for a pretty penny). I played that back in college, where I met my wife, who also had a copy of that game. I also bought a version of Animal Crossing for the Nintendo DS and the Wii.

During the COVID lock down, we sprung for a Switch and a copy of the game. As much of the world apparently did as it truly blew up. I played it for a while and picked it up off and on, but it’s been a minute.

How do I know? When I was walking around the world, I ran into Syd, a punk-rock red elephant who lives in our town. He said he didn’t know what happened to me and he hadn’t seen me in four years and two months. Sorry Syd, I was busy!

I proceeded to play for the entire drive home.

But it’s not like when we walked through the door I suddenly remembers, oh dang, I’m in that FIFA queue. No. Hours passed. At some point after six o’clock I unlocked my phone and there was the queue. It was still about a quarter of the way full and still no timer had kicked in. I decided to leave my phone in front of me and see this process out. I was impressed I was still in line. At some point a timer comes up and there is under 30 minutes until I’m up.

When it got down to under 11 minutes, I realize maybe I should chronical this journey and snag a screenshot.

I keep tapping my phone to keep it active and eventually it counts down to zero but the “Enter” button I’ve been promised isn’t there.

What do I do? Do I refresh the page? Do I wait?

So, I just sit there, hoping something will happen. I know I’m only going to have five minutes to press enter, but there is no button. I decide I need to refresh the page, fearing I’m going to lose a whole day of sitting (I’m so dramatic, I was multi-tasking). The page refreshes and looks the same.

Eventually, the enter button does appear and I venture in to view the horror. There are only Category 2 tickets left for Kansas City and only for one game: Algeria versus Austria. And there is only one price. $380 per ticket! Are you kidding?!?!

I decide maybe I need to leave the host city, which I live in, to get an experience elsewhere. I stupidly click on the opening game between Mexico and South Africa. $2,985 per ticket! That won’t work. While I’m being stupid, let’s check out the USMNT’s opener against Paraguay. Ope, $1,940 to 2,735… that’s not in the budget!

I try Iran versus New Zealand. The United States is at war with Iran. They don’t even want to play games in the US, and this game is in Los Angeles. Surely there are plenty of cheap tickets for a game that may be moved or have a replacement team, right? Wrong! $450 is the only available price!

Finally, I find a couple games with Category 3 tickets still available. I could head to Houston for Cabo Verde versus Saudi Arabia or head to Atlanta for Congo DR versus Uzbekistan. All for the incredibly unreasonable price of $140 per ticket.

Reports from The Athletic say these prices are the same or higher than they’ve been at any other phase. They said, “FIFA did not lower any prices, despite suspicions that a handful of matches are not selling well at all.”

I made the tough decision to close the tab. I put in for some earlier lottery chances for tickets and backed out of some others because of these prices. I keep hoping prices will go down. And maybe in the days leading up to games they will, as they did with the Club World Cup last year.

Or maybe I’ll just end up at Kansas City’s free FIFA Fan Fest.

There are reports that FIFA are holding tickets still and creating a false sense of scarcity to drive up prices. It’s just hard to imagine people continuing to pay these outrageous prices for nosebleed seats for games with teams they don’t care about. But people are throwing down a ton for tickets, according to many reports across the internet. The final has gotten particularly out of control.

All this comes with UEFA announced tickets to cost less than £30 (~$39.61) for the 2028 Euros, which is below parking at the stadiums selling parking for the World Cup.

It may have felt like it, but no, this isn’t an April Fool’s joke. Although the process was and continues to be a joke by FIFA.