Perhaps the most controversial aspect of this year’s FIFA Men’s World Cup has been FIFA’s ticket-pricing strategy. Fans have complained about exorbitant prices, opaque inventory releases, and a resale system that seems designed to extract every possible dollar from their love for the beautiful game.
But amid all these shenanigans, the secondary market is producing something valuable: information. Resale prices reveal what soccer fans, both domestic and foreign, are most excited to see—or at least, what sellers believe fans desire most intensely.
The obvious approach would be simply to compare the average ticket price for games involving different teams. But that would be misleading in such a geographically wide-ranging event. Argentina may command high prices partly because it plays in attractive locations. A match in Miami may be expensive partly because it features a popular team.
To separate those effects, we analyzed the lowest single-ticket resale prices for all 72 group-stage matches, estimating the independent contribution of each team and each host city. We used pretournament prices to ensure that underlying preferences, not the results of games played so far, drive the results. And we used secondary market prices from StubHub to get at market forces instead of FIFA’s demand estimates.
