Bridging research, policy and public debate on Europe
Ronnie Das
June 30th, 2026
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Bridging research, policy and public debate on Europe
Ronnie Das
June 30th, 2026
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
The price of tickets at the 2026 FIFA World Cup has been widely criticised by football supporters attending the tournament. Ronnie Das argues this is a classic example of a monopolistic power monetising against fan loyalty and shows the need for the EU to regulate algorithmic pricing in its Digital Fairness Act.
Many of the millions of football fans who have queued online for FIFA World Cup 2026 tickets have been shocked at the price of tickets once they reach the front of the line. For the first time, FIFA has been accused of pricing the tournament with what appears to be demand-based algorithmic pricing – letting the prices climb in real time as interest surges.
Adjusted for inflation, a premium Category 1 seat for the World Cup final has averaged about $1,300 across the 1994 to 2022 tournaments. In contrast, equivalent tickets for the 2026 World Cup final cost a staggering $32,970. This is almost twenty-five times higher, while the cheapest final ticket has increased from roughly $540 to $4,185.
The same pattern essentially runs through the whole tournament, as more popular games appear to have been priced at a much higher rate. Within the resale platform, some tickets were even advertised for $11.5 million, with FIFA taking a 30% commission.
The case for dynamic pricing
Economists often defend this kind of pricing – and in theory the case is strong. Demand-based pricing is the same revenue management system that fills airline seats and hotel rooms: by letting the price move with demand, a seller can ration scarce supply to the buyers who value it most.
This fills capacity that might otherwise be empty and even widens access by enabling price-sensitive fans to buy cheaper tickets. A rising price is a signal: it tells producers to supply more, and it sorts a fixed stock to those willing to pay, so the market clears and little is wasted.
However, this market dynamic depends on two assumptions: that supply can actually respond to the price, and that competition keeps the seller in check. Both of these assumptions are visibly absent in the case of the FIFA World Cup.
The World Cup has a fixed number of seats and supply cannot change with higher pricing. Similarly, FIFA has direct control over the only sale and resale platform. This has created a situation where the algorithm does not need to follow a market price and could instead set prices according to how much it estimates each buyer will pay.
FIFA’s pricing experiment and the conditions for dual market power
FIFA’s pricing experiment has already triggered a formal complaint to the European Commission from Football Supporters Europe and Euroconsumers. Members of the European Parliament have put written questions to the Commission. The attorneys general of New York and New Jersey have launched an official investigation into artificial price inflation.
The real issue is not simply that tickets are expensive, it is that, with supply fixed and no real competition, the algorithm does little to serve the interests of fans. Jean Tirole’s 2014 Nobel Prize winning analysis of market power and regulation precisely illustrates this point.
Tirole used game theory to study how firms with market power behave and how they should be regulated. His recommendation was that a dominant firm cannot be judged by a single rule. The right approach depends on the structure of the market because the same conduct can be efficient in one market and harmful in another. The same demand-based pricing that fills empty airline seats, meets a fixed supply and a single seller in World Cup ticketing. Therefore, algorithmic ticket pricing in this case chases demand with nothing to pull it back.
At the World Cup, the market structure leaves the price free to chase demand under the assumption that loyal fans will pay higher prices. This serves as a vital lesson for policymakers on how to protect fans and how to regulate the future of monopolistic tournament pricing.
Pricing by each buyer’s willingness to pay – what economists call price discrimination – has a built-in weakness, namely the resale market. Fans who buy cheap can resell in the market to those who are willing to pay more. This arbitrage reduces the price gaps the seller built, and firms that price this way usually fight against the secondary market.
In FIFA’s case, monopoly disrupts competition. It owns the secondary market, running the major approved resale platform and charging both the buyer and seller. In this setup, the arbitrage that would normally undercut it becomes revenue. With the 2022 caps gone, FIFA profits more the higher resale values climb. Although FIFA has claimed that the additional money will be directed towards global football development.
Why EU regulations are falling behind the market
Decades ago, in the United Brands case, Europe’s courts accepted that a price with no reasonable link to a product’s value could be an abuse by a dominant firm. But that idea is rarely used and hard to prove, and it was built for one firm in one market, not an algorithm repricing millions of tickets by the hour.
In 2023, in the European Super League case, the courts found that a body which both governs football and profits crosses a line when it does so without open, even-handed rules. FIFA’s ticketing appears to be the same conflict in another guise. Although European fans are impacted, the law and policymakers may find it hard to reach an appropriate conclusion. The tournament is being played in North America, and EU policies have major limitations in affecting and regulating these types of cases.
Where regulators can act, they have had to improvise. In the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) went after Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing during the 2024 Oasis sale. In the United States, a jury found that Ticketmaster’s owner, Live Nation, had run a harmful monopoly over major concert venues. Even so, the price itself was not the charge. US law does not necessarily treat a high price as something that is wrong in itself, so the case turned on how the firm shut out rivals.
The EU’s anti-competition policies are not fully developed enough to capture the complexities of World Cup pricing. Europe may hold better tools on paper, but the way they have been implemented often holds the Commission back from using them in time.
The case for digital fairness
Ticket pricing at the 2026 World Cup serves as an important example for EU policymakers. It underlines the need to separate harmful, dominant and opaque pricing from genuine dynamic pricing. This is all the more relevant because the EU is currently preparing a Digital Fairness Act after a 2024 review found that existing consumer rules do not reach practices like algorithmic pricing.
The temptation is to overreact as some MEPs want to ban dynamic pricing outright, but a blanket ban would penalise regular competitors like airlines and hotels alongside monopolistic organisations. This would remove a tool that works well wherever supply can move.
Before treating demand-based pricing as a problem, a regulator should instead apply this framework asking five questions. Is supply fixed? Is the price hidden rather than published in advance? Can the buyer see how it was set? Does the same seller also control resale? And is the result proportionate to a real aim, such as managing scarcity, rather than a pure transfer to the seller?
Where supply is flexible and the price open, this is the economics of market working, and Europe should leave it alone. Where supply is fixed, the price hidden and one firm owns both sale and resale, the case for action is strong. The World Cup ticket pricing problem is a preview of the future of algorithmic pricing and the monopolistic price dynamics heading to European markets. The real test is whether Europe builds this into the Act in advance, before the next event runs the same play.
For more information, see the author’s accompanying paper in the European Competition Journal.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of LSE European Politics or the London School of Economics.
Image credit: Walter Cicchetti provided by Shutterstock.
About the author
Ronnie Das
Dr Ronnie Das is an Associate Professor in AI and Digital Transformation at the University of Western Australia (UWA). He studies how artificial intelligence and big data are changing the way organisations, managers and governments make decisions. His work explores, both, the benefits these tools deliver and the governance problems they create. This is an impact article based on the author's published article, “When Algorithmic Pricing Becomes a Problem: FIFA, World Cup Ticket Pricing, and Market Power”, in the European Competition Journal. Ronnie is also a Visiting Professor at Audencia Business School, France.
Source: Lse.ac.uk