New York Attorney General Letitia James and New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport on Wednesday announced a joint investigation into FIFA's ticket sales for the 2026 World Cup, issuing subpoenas for internal records related to the eight tournament matches scheduled to take place at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, including the July 19 final. The two offices said they were responding to a flood of consumer complaints about pricing and seat assignments.
According to the joint filing, prices for more than ninety of the tournament's one hundred and four matches have risen between October 2025 and April 2026, with prices in the three main ticket categories up an average thirty-four per cent over the period. FIFA, in a departure from prior World Cups, has used what it calls "dynamic pricing" to adjust ticket costs based on demand, a model more familiar from concert sales than from international football.
The states' filings also focus on what they describe as a "zone-switching" practice. After initial sales began in late 2025, FIFA created new ticket zones and added front-row sections in each existing category. According to the filings, fans who had bought tickets for the original zones were "excluded from those seats and instead assigned less-desirable seats, including seats far from the field or behind the goals," in some cases more than a hundred rows from the position they had paid for.
FIFA said in a brief statement on Wednesday evening that it would "cooperate fully" with the state offices and that its dynamic-pricing approach was "consistent with industry practice and the published terms and conditions" of the ticket sale. The governing body added that fans who had been reassigned seats had been offered upgrade and refund options, and that take-up of those options had been "in line with expectations."
The economic stakes are substantial. The 2026 tournament will be the largest in World Cup history with forty-eight participating nations, and FIFA had budgeted gross ticketing receipts of $1.7 billion across the tournament; analysts at Stifel said this week that dynamic pricing could push that figure to $2.4 billion. MetLife Stadium tickets for the final have changed hands on resale platforms for between $14,000 and $42,000 at recent peak.
The probe is the second major US legal challenge to FIFA's commercial conduct in the past month. A class action filed in the Southern District of New York earlier in May alleged that FIFA had violated New York's consumer-protection statute by misrepresenting seat locations. FIFA has moved to compel arbitration in that case, citing its terms of service. The attorneys general's investigation is procedurally separate but is expected to use overlapping evidence.