With less than four weeks to go until the start of the men’s World Cup, The Athletic has been speaking to secondary ticket sellers in the U.S. who are working on the tournament market.“It’s legal. A service. I help people get tickets. I’ve never held a gun to anyone’s head,” says one who, like the others quoted in this article, spoke on condition of anonymity to be able to talk freely about the inner workings of an industry that is likely to play a key role in fans’ ability to attend World Cup matches in the U.S., Canada and Mexico this summer.“Nobody ever feels bad for me when I lose money.”Our conversations take place on Zoom with three brokers — as they all like to be called, rather than ‘touts’ or ‘scalpers’. “We normally think of guys who work the streets as touts or scalpers,” the first one adds.“I look at us no different than a travel agent, when you go on holiday,” says another. “If I know these tickets are going to come down, I’ll let you know.”They go through spreadsheets revealing millions of dollars of sales, orders and discounted tickets made available to the secondary market. They also discuss the number of tickets they believe are still available for the tournament and provide advice for fans negotiating controversial prices.Broker one: ‘I had sold a lot of tickets before actually owning any’“Shall I share my screen?,” says the first broker. It is at this point that the scale of his operation — albeit a one-man show — becomes clear.It is a spreadsheet listing the number of tickets sold to individuals for World Cup games via the 10 platforms he operates on.The most telling columns are those detailing how much he paid for the tickets, and how much he sold them for.He puts his cursor over game four (they all refer to them by a number out of 104 — the total number of matches at this World Cup). It is the United States’ group-stage opener against Paraguay on July 12 at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. Bought at an average of $1,300 (£974 at time of writing) and sold at $2,200, he has made a $900 mark-up per ticket, meaning a $45,000 profit for him on just one game.“There are thousands of brokers in the U.S.,” he says. “How many do over £1million a year? Probably 500.”He has already done very well out of the 2026 World Cup. He skips over from the spreadsheet to his sales hub, which reveals he has already seen his best year of sales.“For a typical Super Bowl, I’ll usually sell about $1million worth of tickets in a year,” he says. “I usually do about $3m a year. But this (the World Cup) is 104 matches, so it’s bigger.”Brokers sell via secondary platforms and, according to the terms and conditions on that particular site, are obliged to fulfil orders to members of the public or face penalties, sometimes up to 100 per cent of the ticket price. “That’s the reason why most orders get fulfilled,” he says. “Once you have a pattern or history of not fulfilling orders, you would be out of business.” Brokers are charged a premium by the sites, which also take a cut from the buyer.Back on the spreadsheet — with colour-coded columns — there is meticulous detail. He seeks out the best margin he has made on a single game. “Here we go — South Africa,” he says. “I bought four at $225 and sold them for $3,000 for the Mexico game (the first match of the tournament on June 11), so I make around $11,000.”He had invested in those tickets via one of the early FIFA sales rounds prior to the group-stage draw last December, when you could commit to buying tickets to follow your team without knowing who their three opponents would be in the tournament’s initial phase or where those matches would be staged. It’s the risk-reward game brokers play. “You could end up with Curacao versus Ivory Coast or Colombia-Portugal — in which case it’s a home run.”During the first three lotteries, which all ran before the group-phase draw nailed down teams and locations, he invested in a large tranche of tickets, varying in price from $140 to $1,000. “It was like shooting fish in a barrel those first couple of rounds, because there was plenty of availability.”Exactly how he managed to buy that many is where one of the tricks of the trade comes in.When the initial official sales phase started last September, many brokers became frustrated by being blocked by the purchasing system. Soon, messages appeared in brokers’ WhatsApp groups — some have as many as 400 members — about ways to circumvent it, for a fee, to make multiple 40-ticket (the maximum permitted) purchases. With the process still ongoing, the broker does not want to reveal exactly how this is done, for now.FIFA opened one of its official ticketing windows in September 2025 (Carl De Souza/ AFP via Getty Images)Although FIFA applied limits to the number of tickets people could buy, he thinks these worked in the brokers’ favour. You could only buy tickets (four maximum) for one game per day but get the same amount for 10 matches, wherever they happened to be, across subsequent days.“It didn’t matter the itinerary or how impossible or onerous it would be, it was just, ‘Get them out’. ‘Take as much as you want’, in a way.”It was well before the official sales window opened in September that he and other brokers started to speculatively sell tickets for the tournament on various platforms.“From June to the end of August, I had sold a lot of tickets, before actually owning any,” he says.