When I was home during summers from college, with no cash to speak of, I had a failsafe secret for getting a box seat behind the plate at Yankee Stadium. I would simply put on a suit and when I got off the subway at the stadium take an easy, slow walk toward the gates. Invariably someone else in a suit—a Wall Street trader or salesman—would offer me a spare ticket. The seat he or his company paid for was going to go to waste, so why not give it to someone who’d use it? That box seat the mayor sat in when the Yankees got good in the late 90s? I was often yelling at the ump from it in the early ‘90s, when relatively few people felt it was worth the time and effort to get up to the Bronx to watch Andy Hawkins, Pat Kelly and crew lose.
That pre-ticket broker method of filling seats came to mind when the Daily Mail, a London newspaper, reported earlier this month that FIFA was slashing ticket prices for this summer’s Club World Cup—as much as $385 to $592 off original prices, due to weak demand for the 32-club event. The supporters of the mostly European and Latin American field, so far, don’t see it worth the time and cost to get to the U.S.-hosted event. The seat’s going to go to waste, so why not give it more cheaply to a fan who will use it?
When FIFA opened up ticket sales for the event in December, its decision to use dynamic pricing seemed like it was going to end up running up prices on soccer supporters, most of whom are used to static prices for any match their club plays at home. The fears were understandable. After all, Lionel Messi’s 2023 move to Inter Miami sparked what appears to be the ideal scenario for dynamic ticket prices that respond to demand. MLS revenue and attendance jumped as clubs were able to charge hundreds of dollars for seats that ordinarily fetched $50 for a typical game.
“Tickets ceased to be goods with a fixed face value and instead turned into speculative assets, their ‘worth’ being based on customers’ demand at any given time,” said Martin Mulyadi, a business professor at Shenandoah University in Virginia. “Messi’s arrival in Miami demonstrated the ideal circumstances for these pricing methods.”
The FIFA Club World Cup aimed to build on the frenzy for tickets Messi showed can exist in the U.S., laying the groundwork for even more aggressive dynamic pricing for next year’s North America-hosted World Cup, according to the professor. “It will be a scenario where data-driven pricing tools have free rein to respond to the global spotlight,” he said. “Dynamic pricing makes sense from a business standpoint, adjusting prices to reflect current demand helps maximize profits and guarantees that no ticket is ‘undersold.’”
Mulyadi is right about that, but unfortunately for FIFA, the pricing tools are responding the way most event tickets move in dynamic pricing: by going down.
The music industry is a tell. “There’s a lot of stuff you’ll read about how … dynamic pricing, or demand pricing, is really about [prices] going up. It’s as much about going down—more than 50% of the changes we make are downwards,” Live Nation’s Omar Al-joulani, president of concerts, said on a November call with analysts. “We only have about 5% of the tickets that we sell overall or sold as a premium or a platinum ticket.”
The other 95% consists of 32 million unsold-seat inventory, he said.
In sports, the dynamic is much the same, according to research by Automatiq, a software platform that enables dynamic pricing for ticket sellers. The company analyzed 73,780 events held over 2023 and found fans “saved” $322 million on sports tickets because of the tendency for dynamic prices to go lower, rather than higher.
On average the typical ticket price declined by $70, a 60% discount, just a few weeks out from a game compared to the first month it was on sale, Automatiq found. Most events—about six out of every 10—had at least some seats selling below face value, with a third of tickets sold within a month of the game going for below the original price.
The decline in prices isn’t necessarily a bad thing: Empty seats for a game are inventory teams can’t get back, and so to a great extent, it’s worth getting bodies in through the turnstiles. Concessions operator Aramark says many of the sports stadiums it operates in are seeing record food and beverage spending. One MLB team it didn’t name saw average fan spending of $40 last year, up from $25 five years earlier.
Still, it’s probably better business to sell a ticket for a good price than slash prices just to get bodies in the door: The typical spend on a ticket is three to five times what fans spend inside the arena, according to data from Shift4 Payments, a publicly traded company that is now the largest payments platform in sports arenas.
Plus, there has to be some consideration of the type of fan and where they’re sitting; few want a hooligan who got in cheap to be sitting next to the middle-class father who paid up to treat his kids. One lesson from my early ‘90s forays to the south Bronx: Those Wall Street traders don’t give you a ticket to sit near them if you’re in jeans and a T-shirt.
And just because dynamic pricing tends to fill most seats at a discount doesn’t mean it’s a net positive. The 2026 World Cup is almost certainly going to see more demand from global soccer fans and so, possibly, ticket prices running away from the ability of die-hard fans to pay.
“Soccer’s widespread accessibility contributes to its allure,” Mulyadi said. “The capacity of the game to bring people from different social classes together is what makes it so successful. Dynamic pricing runs the risk of alienating the very fan base that is the lifeblood of the sport when it reduces tickets to commodities dictated by the market.”
One solution may be using the data insights available to ticket sellers and clubs today to ensure a crowd more representative of the everyday fan base, much like FIFA did with revising the Club World Cup pricing to offer deals for fans through participating clubs. Price caps could be imposed on tickets, too, Mulyadi suggests, both in primary sale demand pricing and in the secondary market.
“We might discover that the essence of the beautiful game and data-driven innovation can actually coexist,” he added. “If they don’t, we run the risk of seeing the most popular sport in the world deteriorate into a place where only a select few can afford to see its most spectacular events live.”
