FIFA World Cup Tickets: How to buy them & how much they cost

The following article details the lessons that I learned on my journey to and through the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022. It will inform you of what you need to buy tickets, the various ways you can buy them through official channels, what types of tickets can be bought at what stage, how much tickets cost as well as the secrets that I learned during my time in Qatar.

I hope that it will help those seeking to watch the world greatest spectacle in 2026 and beyond.

To buy FIFA World Cup tickets you need:

• A valid passport
• A FIFA Account
• A link to the login portal

The reason why you need a passport is that FIFA links tickets to your identity, which is linked to your passport. It makes more tickets available to fans and games safer by making it difficult for scalpers to get their hands on tickets, removing duplicate accounts as well as making sure that if something happens at a game, the passport associated with the problematic seat will not be able to go to games in the future.

I strongly recommend creating your account ahead of time as time is precious when buying FIFA World Cup tickets.

You can buy FIFA World Cup Tickets through the FIFA ticketing portal which can be found on FIFA.com

Tickets can be bought in one of four phases:

• First Come, First Serve
• Random Selection Draw
• General Sale
• Last Minute Sale

Additionally, you can buy tickets through:

• The official FIFA Resale platform
• Hospitality

This sale occurs before the draw takes place and offers access to tickets that include:

• Individual Match Tickets
• Team-Specific Ticket Series
• Four-Stadium Ticket Series
• Accessibility Tickets

In 2022, this sale began on March 23rd and it took over 8 hours to get into the portal, which only had tickets left up and till the quarter final.

This sale occurs after the draw takes place and offers access to apply for a random selection for tickets that include:

• Individual Match Tickets
• Supporter Tickets (STs)
• Conditional Supporter Tickets (CSTs)
• Accessibility Tickets

In 2022, this sale began on April 13th and it took over 2 hours to get into the portal. As its a random selection draw, all tickets are available for application and you only have to pay for what you want after you win (i.e. you can apply for all of them and then pick the ones you want, if you get them).

This sale occurs before the draw takes place and offers access to tickets that include:

• Individual Match Tickets

In 2022, this sale began on July 5th. I had already won the lottery for Spain and therefore I did not attempt to access the portal.

This sale occurs once the tournament starts and offers:

• Individual Match Tickets

In 2022, I bought tickets to games that include France-Denmark and Holland-USA and witnessed openings for matches at 2am and 6am of every World Cup Match Day, as well as 3 hours before games were played (Brazil - South Korea, Japan -Croatia).

This is the official FIFA resale platform for you to sell tickets on and only offers Individual Match Tickets for purchase.

Tickets cost the same as they do in any of the phases through the standard portal but come with an resale fee. In 2022, this fee was 40 QAR (about 11 USD).

This is the premium offering with tickets being available on first come, first serve.

In 2022, these ticket started at $999.

Please consult the images below for the costs of tickets in Qatar 2022 and Russia 2018. As you can see from the pricing, costs multiplied by 1.5x between 2018 and 2022 and could show similar patterns in 2026.

There are four tips that I would give to those wishing to go to a FIFA World Cup.

Not only do residents of the host nation get access to CAT4 which the general public cannot access, but they have access to 40% of the total tickets (i.e. 60% available to general public, 40% to the residents).

This implies that in the 2026 US, Canada and Mexico FIFA World Cup; nationals from these countries will have exclusive access to 40% of the tickets. These nationals can buy tickets, put other people's names on the tickets and transfer them to their accounts.

I met a British man, Hass, in Qatar that had tickets (sometimes duplicates) to all the games through his Qatari family, who had put them on his name and transferred them to his account.

What's more is he had sold them off at a profit; making his world cup experience free overall (i.e. what he spent on tickets and travel, he had recuperated through the sale of other tickets).

This was a lesson I learned in Qatar, by which people broke FIFA's rules that limited the number of games they could see and what games they could see in a single day. They did this by using other peoples accounts and transferring tickets to their accounts - but which in this case I recommend to improve your chances of winning the lottery.

Two Argentine's i met did this together, for each other during Qatar and thus amounted 33 tickets; sometimes with matches 1 hour apart.

Get your family or friends to create accounts and apply to the lottery for you. You only need to pay for tickets after you win and this increases your chances of going.

From individuals that have attended the previous 5 FIFA World Cup finals and had tickets to the final in Qatar 2022, I learned that the way to guarantee a ticket to the final is to get a TST7 (Team Specific Ticket 7 series) of a small team.

The reason behind it is that TST7s for smaller teams sell slower and guarantee a ticket to all knock out rounds, including the final, and if the smaller team gets knocked out in the group, you follow the path 1st team of that group; if they get knocked out after you follow who ever wins round after round.

The man who taught me this, Gonzalo, had conditional tickets for all Argentina games through the AFA (Football Associations get a pool of tickets that are not open to the public and are harder to access) and had a TST7 for Cameroon, which led to him having all Argentina and Brazil tickets.

Having gone to 15 games in Qatar 2022, I can confirm that the best games are those which your nation plays in. I have also learned that when nations fall, fans from those nations place tickets on resale and leave the host nation (i.e. Qatar); as true football fans are few in numbers and for most, it's not worth the money if your nation isn't playing.

Conditional tickets (CSTs) are offered as part of "Follow your team" packages that are available in Random Selection Draw and work by paying up front. They guarantee you access to games if your team is playing, and refunds tickets when they get knocked out with a small administration fee for the service (In 2022, it was 40QAR per ticket which is roughly 11 USD).

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