Obtaining tickets for the 2026 World Cup has been an expensive slog. But for 1,000 lucky New Yorkers, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani just made things a lot more affordable.
In a press conference on Thursday, Mamdani announced that the city has secured 1,000 seats that will be sold to New Yorkers for only $50 each. The move came after months of negotiating with the New York/New Jersey host committee, which oversees everything related to the games at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium this summer.
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“Soccer at its heart is a working-class game. And yet we’ve seen so many working-class people get priced out of it,” Mamdani told The Cooligans on Thursday. “We’re so excited to be hosting the World Cup, and yet I know that for many New Yorkers, they were looking at the prices and they were asking themselves, ‘how could I ever even try to purchase this ticket?”
The tickets will also include free, round-trip transit on a bus to the stadium, which is located in East Rutherford, NJ.
“Every New Yorker can actually see themselves as part of it, because we don’t want sports to become a luxury commodity. We don’t want the in-person to be understood as exclusively remote,” Mamdani continued. “So many of us grow up as fans thinking the only way to interact is through a TV. But people should actually be able to go.”
The tickets will be determined through a lottery system, with New Yorkers able to enter once a day for a chance to buy up to two tickets. The lottery opens Monday and runs through Saturday, May 30; entries will be capped at 50,000 per day.
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The lottery system will ensure that the tickets are distributed fairly — as Mamdani said, “it doesn’t matter who you know.” Additionally, to discourage scalpers, the tickets will be non-transferable.
Winners will be informed June 3 and will then get the chance to see one of the five group stage matches and the first two knockout round matches, with around 150 ticket-holders at each of those games.
Mamdani and the city announced a similar program with local NWSL club Gotham FC last month, offering 1,000 tickets priced at $5 to an upcoming match. Those tickets sold out in less than an hour.
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The unconventional move comes amid significant complaints about World Cup tickets being prohibitively expensive for most fans. In general, the ticket rollout has been far from smooth: Users reported lengthy wait times, misdirected links and other technical difficulties while trying to buy tickets. And then there’s the price tags, which have been so high that even President Donald Trump said he wouldn’t pay that much.
According to Gametime, there are only five games with tickets available for less than $200, as of Thursday on secondary markets; the lowest of those five is Cape Verde vs. Saudi Arabia in Houston, which has a get-in price of $143.
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Prices have fallen slightly in recent weeks, in part as the exorbitant prices threaten to result in empty seats in stadiums. But they’re still incredibly high: At MetLife, for example, the cheapest tickets are $459 for a group stage game between Norway and Senegal. Tickets to the final, which will also take place in MetLife, are up to a get-in price of $7,500.
