NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani gets 1,000 $50 World Cup tickets from New Yorkers: ‘We don’t want sports to be a commodity’
Getting tickets for the 2026 World Cup has been an expensive proposition. But for 1,000 lucky New Yorkers, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani just made things more affordable.
In a press conference on Thursday, Mamdani announced that the city has received 1,000 seats that will be sold to New Yorkers for only $50. The move came after months of negotiations with the New York New Jersey host committee, which oversees everything related to the games at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium this summer.
“Football at its heart is a working-class game. But we’ve seen a lot of working-class people getting paid for it,” Mamdani told Cooligans on Thursday. “We’re very excited to be hosting the World Cup, but I know for a lot of people in New York, they were looking at the prices and wondering, ‘How can I even try to buy this ticket?’
Tickets will include free, round-trip bus travel to the stadium, in East Rutherford, NJ.
“Every person in New York can see themselves as a part of it, because we don’t want sports to be something fancy. We don’t want it to be understood that a person who talks to himself is far from himself,” continued Mamdani. “Many of us grow up as fans thinking that the only way to communicate is TV. But people have to be able to travel.”
Tickets will be determined by lottery, where New Yorkers can enter once a day for a chance to buy up to two tickets. The lottery opens next Monday and continues the following Saturday; entries will reach 50,000 per day.
Advertisement
The lottery system will ensure that tickets are distributed fairly – as Mamdani said, “it doesn’t matter who you know.” Additionally, to discourage scalpers, tickets are non-transferable.
The winners, who will be announced on June 3, will get a chance to play one of the five group stage games and the first two of the knockout rounds, along with around 150 ticket holders for those games.
Mamdani and the city announced a similar program with local NWSL club Gotham FC last month, giving away 1,000 $5 tickets to an upcoming game. Those tickets sold out in less than an hour.
The unusual move comes amid widespread complaints about World Cup tickets being unreasonably expensive for many fans. Overall, ticketing was far from smooth: Users reported long wait times, misdirected links and other technical difficulties while trying to buy tickets. Then there are the price tags, which were so high that even President Donald Trump said he would not pay that much.
Advertisement
According to Gametime, there are only five games with tickets available for less than $200, as of Thursday; the lowest of the five is Cape Verde vs. Saudi Arabia in Houston, with an entry fee of $143.
Prices have fallen slightly in recent weeks, in part as exorbitant prices threaten to result in empty seats at stadiums. But they are still incredibly high: At MetLife, for example, the cheapest tickets are $459 for the group stage match between Norway and Senegal. Tickets to the finals, which will also be at MetLife, have an entry price of $7,500.
