The protests erupted over “unacceptable” £77 tickets. In 2016, when Liverpool announced new prices ranging from the equivalent of $13 to $110 for a seat at Anfield, fans united and voiced their disgust. A supporters committee called the pricing uptick “extremely disappointing” and “morally unjustifiable.” That weekend, around 10,000 fans walked out in the 77th minute of a match — and only after singing to the club’s American owners: “Enough is enough, you greedy bastards!”
A few days later, the owners apologized “for the distress” and walked back the top ticket price to £59. Nine years later, their most expensive ticket, to see one of the planet’s most popular sports teams, is £61 (or $82).
“I think [the 2016 uproar] scarred them,” Ian Ayre, Liverpool’s then-CEO, says of his former bosses.
A decade later, Ayre’s nascent MLS club, Nashville SC, sold tickets to a regular-season match against Inter Miami for hundreds of dollars. Was there any backlash?
“No,” Ayre told The Athletic. Season-ticket holders, he explained, already had their seats secured for a much lower price, and as for the rest: “I think people in this country, and in [U.S.] sports, are accepting that if you want the hottest ticket in town, it’ll come at a price.”
The contrast — between an immoral £77 Liverpool ticket and an uncontroversial $170 ticket in Nashville’s upper deck — highlights a dichotomy at the heart of a boiling dispute over 2026 World Cup ticket prices. British and European fans have called them “despicable” and “extortionate.” Some Americans have labeled them “exorbitant,” too, but many have simply conceded that, as former U.S. soccer star Landon Donovan said earlier this year, “sporting events are expensive, man.”
In fact, U.S. sports are more expensive than ever before. The price of attending an NFL or MLB game rose, on average, by around 300% from 1991 to 2023, according to the Fan Cost Index. The average NFL ticket now costs more than $300. The cheapest ticket to an average NFL game is around $169, per an Athletic analysis earlier this season — more than every single standard English Premier League ticket except those in the most expensive tier for the most appealing games at Arsenal.
The unparalleled costs are, in essence, FIFA’s justification for its own World Cup prices. “The pricing model,” a FIFA spokesman told The Athletic in a statement, “reflects the existing market practice for major entertainment and sporting events within our hosts on a daily basis.”
The question is why? Why have ticket prices soared in the U.S. while remaining comparatively low in most of the United Kingdom, Europe and elsewhere?
The answer, experts say, ranges from demographics to economics, from capitalism to socialism, from laws to the historical foundations of the teams now charging the divergent prices.
“Any thoughtful analysis,” says Paul Beirne, a ticketing executive who worked in multiple North American sports and also at Brighton & Hove Albion in England, “needs to include a study of business culture and on-the-street culture, before you even start talking about ticket buying.”
Fans pile into Hard Rock Stadium in Florida for one of Real Madrid’s matches at the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup (Robbie Jay Barratt / AMA / Getty Images)
Why U.S. tickets have gotten expensive
In the U.S., the story of rising ticket prices is an economic one. The cost of everything has doubled since the 1990s. And income growth, on average, has outpaced inflation. Americans, in real terms, have essentially gotten 20% richer over the past few decades, and the richest Americans — the top 10% — are pulling away from the middle-class pack. This, economists theorize, ups their willingness to pay for tickets. “It is certainly the case,” says Lindsay Owens, executive director of the economic policy think tank Groundwork Collaborative, “that wealthier Americans are doing more in-person attendance at events.”
The U.S. population has also grown, from around 290 million in 2004 to nearly 350 million today. And in that time, neither the NFL, NBA nor MLB has added a team. Several teams, meanwhile, have actually built smaller stadiums (with more premium seats). Demand, therefore, has theoretically increased while supply (especially of cheap seats) has decreased.
“Putting all those things together, you might have expected pretty significant increases in ticket prices,” says Victor Matheson, an experienced sports economist and professor at College of the Holy Cross.
Ticket prices, though, rose more than twice as fast as the price of goods in the U.S. generally from 2000 to 2019, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Matheson agrees that the macro factors explain a majority, but not all, of the increase.
The rest of the explanation begins in or around 2009, when baseball’s San Francisco Giants pioneered “dynamic pricing” in sports. The scheme — whereby prices are adjusted, either manually or automatically, based on actual or expected demand — has since become ubiquitous in major U.S. leagues, and has allowed teams to capitalize on Americans’ growing willingness to pay. Decades ago, they’d set a price and affix a sign to a ticket box, and even the people willing to pay more would pay that fixed price. Now, there are models, algorithms and technology that allow them to raise prices if they (or computer software) sense that fans are actually willing to pay more.
So, they can milk the wealthiest 10% of Americans, who, according to one (disputed) analysis, now account for nearly 50% of the nation’s consumption; but they can also lower the price of less desirable tickets when necessary.
The teams, Matheson says, “are extracting as much of that possible money out of as many people as possible.”
“And increasingly,” Owens argues, “many sports, live events, games, matches, are out of reach for many Americans.”
The games, in other words, are entertainment that must be bought and consumed; and the teams are businesses with a right to sell their product. Elsewhere around the world, however, they are viewed through a very different lens.
“Football clubs in the UK,” Ayre says, “and in other parts of Europe to some degree, are sort of like community assets.”
Man United fans protest ticket prices at a Europa League match vs. Athletic Bilbao in May 2025 (Oli Scarff / AFP / Getty Images)
The balance between revenue and fan unrest
Liverpool, like Barcelona, Bayern Munich and most prominent football clubs, were founded over a century ago as genuine clubs with paying members. They were not, and mostly are not, “franchises” owned by billionaires. For decades, and in some cases still today, they were run by the members (or presidents elected by members), who doubled as fans and were not eager to charge themselves exorbitant ticket prices.
In the 1990s and 21st century especially, the clubs evolved into commercial entities, and football accelerated toward big business. But its roots, as a working-class sport that knit together neighborhoods or entire cities, have remained somewhat intact. Supporters, or socios, see themselves as the lifeblood of a club. They pass allegiances down from generation to generation. And if owners or executives try to turn them into a more significant part of the business?
They resist.
They organize protests or release fierce statements.
When, in 2024, 19 of 20 English Premier League clubs raised some ticket prices (albeit relatively modestly), the Football Supporters’ Association, a nationwide group representing fans, launched a campaign branded “#StopExploitingLoyalty.” It wrote that “many fans have faced eye-watering price hikes,” and cited a 19% increase since COVID. “Anger has grown,” its statement said. Duncan Drasdo, CEO of the Manchester United Supporters’ Trust, said at the time: “We are all fighting the same fight on ticket prices. Clubs are exploiting loyalty and fans are united in saying enough is enough.”
Most clubs, therefore, have tiptoed into a middle ground between widespread unrest and maximum revenue. Pricing decisions, Beirne says, go all the way up to the owners or chairmen, whose reputations are at risk. From a business perspective, “there is absolutely value left on the table, 100%,” Ayre says — because there is overwhelming, unexploited demand. “However, philosophically and morally, I think the club and the owners feel, after several run-ins with fans, that the marginal difference they could achieve from additional ticketing revenue probably wouldn’t — it might change the outcome of buying one more player, or paying a salary, but it’s not transformational.”
So, prior to each season, English clubs set fixed prices by seat location and opponent, often with discounts for kids and seniors. Rather than ration a scarce resource based on a fan’s ability to afford it, and rather than use dynamic pricing to maximize revenue, they offer tickets first to loyal members, and sometimes use lotteries when supply can’t meet demand.
As a result, on the business side, soccer’s biggest clubs make less than 20% of their revenue from ticket sales and other matchday revenue streams — whereas most U.S. teams generate more than 30% of their income from those sources, according to Sportico. (The main exception is NFL teams, which benefit from colossal national broadcast rights deals while only playing eight or nine home games per season.)
And on the supporters’ side, while there is frustration, there is also persistent power and collective strength — and an expectation that commercialism won’t corrupt these public trusts, or break what Ayre calls a club’s “moral code.”
“You have a lot of teams in Europe that maybe haven’t [meaningfully] raised prices in five years,” says Ted Glick, the Chicago Fire’s chief ticketing officer, who previously worked in other U.S. leagues and then with multiple European football clubs while at Legends. “And so, fans get used to and conditioned to that. Whereas in the U.S., there’s more the expectation that prices are going to grow with the rate of inflation, or there’s going to be a new modern club or seating product that will be introduced that might slightly increase the cost of a ticket in that area — so on and so forth.”
“FIFA is making calculations that Americans have gotten used to this”
Another piece of the puzzle, multiple sports business executives said, is resale laws. In many countries, there are restrictions on “scalping” or “touting” — buying a ticket and then reselling it on the secondary market. In the United States, there are essentially no such restrictions. In the UK, although touting certainly still occurs, there are systems to ensure that the vast majority of ticket buyers are the ones filling seats. In the U.S., thousands of tickets pop up on third-party resale sites.
The lack of regulation, in some sense, helps broaden access to tickets, because anyone, whether or not they’re a member or loyal fan, can buy if they have the means. But it also encourages some people to buy tickets as an investment. It commodifies what fans in other parts of the world would see as a ritualistic or sacred experience. And it undercuts any U.S. team that tries to keep prices more affordable — because, if prices are well below “market value,” they tempt scalpers, who know they can scoop up tickets, or even buy season tickets, and resell them for profit.
Where doing so is restricted, such as in the UK, clubs can be reasonably confident that they’ll reap the moral and long-term benefits of lower prices, which breed fan loyalty and goodwill.
In the U.S., where there are fewer guarantees, teams in established leagues have moved much quicker toward reaping the financial benefits of higher prices.
“I also think some of the league structures are a big piece of that,” Glick says. “In the U.S., sports leagues are closed leagues; there’s not promotion and relegation, there’s revenue sharing, there’s a lot of collaboration, and there’s a real expectation league-wide that every team needs to pull their weight and really fill stadiums and drive revenues. Versus in Europe, every team is singularly focused on their own stadium, their own venue” — and their relations with members.
MLS clubs, in a way, exist between the two extremes — in a country where high prices have become the norm, and with ticket sales integral to balanced budgets, but in a relatively young league with a need to build a loyal fan base. Glick, Ayre and others around the league speak about offering a variety of experiences at a variety of price points. Glick compares it with the airline industry, where you can pay for a cheap seat with no amenities or for a front-row seat and hospitality. A working-class family buys the former, a CEO buys the latter, and hardly anyone complains. “In a free market,” Ayre says, “the way MLS does its ticketing is very good.”
Its prices, overall, are far lower than the NFL’s or NBA’s, but they are dynamic. An Athletic analysis in late September pegged the price range for an average regular-season MLS game, excluding premium seating, at $48-$199 — whereas the average range in the Premier League, whose popularity dwarfs MLS, was roughly $55-$90.
Because in the end, MLS is an American league. “This,” as Ayre says, “is the land of opportunity. Things like dynamic pricing and other elements are more accepted here across all sports and other things like concerts.” It’s a land where Taylor Swift and other artists can charge hundreds of dollars per ticket on tour. It’s a land that every prominent soccer entity, from the Premier League to CONMEBOL, tries to exploit.
And now, “FIFA is anchoring to some of those markets,” Owens, the Groundwork Collaborative director, explains.
With $700 group-stage tickets and four-figure prices in the 2026 World Cup knockout rounds, “FIFA is making calculations that Americans have gotten used to this, and we are comfortable with rationing scarce resources based on ability to pay,” Owens adds.
And thus far — after 2 million tickets quickly sold in October and November, and after FIFA said it received 20 million applications for tickets over the first five days of the latest sales phase, even at the “extortionate” prices — one conclusion seems clear.
“Their calculation, that they could charge a lot for seats,” Owens says, “was in fact correct.”
