Sluggish World Cup ticket sales hit Trump where it hurts: his crowd size obsession

President Donald Trump is famously obsessed with crowd size to the point where he will outright lie about visibly poor attendance. With that in mind, the Daily Beast noted on Tuesday that he is poised to be “humiliated” by dismal World Cup ticket sales.

According to a new analysis by the Financial Times, “almost 180,000 tickets for the tournament, which kicks off on Thursday, are still available on FIFA’s official resale portals. FIFA also has around 15,000 tickets for group-stage matches unsold on its website.” As a result, “scenes of thousands of empty seats in stadiums across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico could prove particularly embarrassing for the crowd-size-obsessed Trump.”

The same analysis found that the U.S. is having a particularly difficult time selling tickets. For example, there are nearly 5,000 tickets still available via FIFA’s resale portal for the USA-Paraguay opener in Los Angeles mere days before the whistle blows.

Experts say there are a number of factors contributing to poor sales, but the key problem involves sky-high, unpredictable pricing. Even with resale price cuts, median ticket costs are upwards of $800, and it’s worse when it comes to new ticket sales, with the lowest direct-from-FIFA price at $1,120.

“For the first time,” explains the Daily Beast, “FIFA has used so-called ‘variable pricing’ — also known as dynamic pricing, in which ticket prices rise or fall based on demand — at a World Cup. This has seen prices for some tickets, such as Thursday’s World Cup opener between Mexico and South Africa at the iconic Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, skyrocket to as much as $3,000. Even tickets for lower-profile games in the 48-team tournament still cost at least $140. As noted by The Athletic, the ticket price for any game at any stage of the 2026 World Cup is higher than the equivalent ticket at any previous tournament.”

As a result, New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport and New York Attorney General Letitia James have launched an investigation into FIFA’s ticketing and pricing practices.

Whatever the investigation turns up, the games this year are going to be sparsely attended. This isn’t going to look great for FIFA president Gianni Infantino, who famously — and according to some reports, embarrassingly — bestowed Trump with FIFA’s first “peace prize,” which was widely viewed as an effort to curry the president’s favor after he failed to win the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s also sure to rile Trump, who has a famous crowd size fixation.

As the Daily Beast explains, “Throughout his political career, Trump has desperately tried to prove his popularity by citing crowd sizes at his rallies and other public events. This obsession dates back to his 2017 inauguration, which the president claimed had the highest-ever attendance for such an event despite photos proving otherwise. Trump has also frequently inflated the size of the crowds at his political rallies, sometimes by tens of thousands of people.”

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