$322,000 seats: Unlucky Socceroos fans hunt costly World Cup tickets

Scores of Socceroos fans are furious after being made to pay $99 just to lodge an application for World Cup tickets they ultimately missed out on, as opportunistic scalpers ask for as much as $322,000 for a single seat at this year’s global event.

Football supporters learnt this week if they were successful in a range of ticket ballots, including a global lottery conducted by tournament organiser FIFA and nation-based distributions organised by local governing bodies such as Football Australia (FA).

FA made headlines when it announced it was requiring local fans to pay $99 for its new membership program, Football Account+, just to be able to be in contention for the tickets FIFA allocated to Australian fans. FIFA’s ballots, meanwhile, are free to enter.

Lifelong fan Mark Bowman, who signed up for FA+ to better his ticket chances, has been following the Socceroos since their first World Cup appearance in 1974, and travelled to every iteration of the tournament since Germany hosted in 2006.

Despite “50 years of loyalty”, Bowman’s ticket efforts were almost all futile. The 65-year-old Sydneysider’s only partial success was securing tickets for one of Australia’s group matches, against Paraguay.

Bowman said he understands the logic behind FA+ but argued the organisation should have rewarded the Socceroos’ most loyal fans over the thousands of other applicants, which could include scalpers. He notes a family member he’ll be travelling with who had never purchased a ticket before got seats to all Australia’s games.

“To have created a scheme which charges money, knowing people are desperate and are going to pay, and that you have fans who have been with the Socceroos through thick and thin, but to ultimately allocate the tickets at random, that really bugs me,” Bowman said.

FA said that 3668 paid-up FA+ members applied for its Australia-specific allocation of tickets, for up to two tickets each. More than half of those who applied for the first and second group-stage matches were successful, and almost all who applied for the final match against Paraguay were successful.

However, thousands more Australians are expected to travel to the North American tournament.

Globally, more than 500 million individual ticket applications have been lodged for the roughly 6 million seats on offer at stadiums across the United States, Mexico and Canada. Running from June to July, the tournament is set to be sport’s most lucrative event ever, with FIFA’s projected revenues exceeding $15 billion, partly due to an expanded 48-team format.

Brisbane teacher Michael Stjepcevic, 60, had booked to travel to the tournament with three friends but despite paying the $99 FA+ fee, no one in their group got any tickets.

“We knew it wasn’t a guarantee but we figured with four of us we’d be a fair shot at getting something … [so] we’re pretty disappointed.”

Stjepcevic is now desperate for any tickets he can get. “It’ll be my first World Cup, it would just be nice to get a ticket for a match,” he said.

The anger is compounded by astronomical prices for which tickets secured in the ballot stages have begun being re-listed on FIFA’s official resale platform. They are already the most expensive of any World Cup due to the introduction of dynamic pricing, which has resulted in face values exceeding $US700 for early matches.

Tickets to Australia’s game with the US in Seattle are listed for as much as $US29,000 ($40,700), with FIFA charging a processing fee of 15 per cent to both buyer and seller – effectively taking $30 from every $100 transacted through resales. Tickets for the lowest-quality seating, category 4, with a face value of $60, are currently listed for $US4600. Tickets for later matches such as the final are listed for resale in excess of $US230,000 ($322,000).

In response to backlash, in December FIFA announced an additional allocation of fewer than 1000 cheaply priced “supporter-tier” tickets, for the FA and other governing bodies to offer to their most loyal fans.

But because its FA+ scheme is new, Football Australia has said it will allocate these loyalty tickets through an undisclosed process.

A spokesperson for the governing body acknowledged the problem and suggested that the FA+ membership program would lay the foundation for a supporter database that could be used to distribute tickets to loyal fans in the future.

Kevin Pollard, of tour organiser Travelrite International, said that only about half of fans booked for his tour successfully got tickets to all three Socceroos group matches.

“Thankfully we have some spare tickets within our tour group which we can match up with those who missed out, and for cost price,” Pollard said.

He said he’d encountered Australians looking to sell to him spares earlier in the week but who, after realising they could make a profit on FIFA’s resale website, went silent. “It’s stressful now but we’ll be fine,” Pollard said.

The lucrative resale market has also prompted concerns that armies of bots deployed by scalpers have been snapping up tickets from real fans. Critics say that because of the high processing fees it collects, FIFA ultimately gains from such bot activity.

FIFA figures show there have so far been 500 million individual ticket applications, representing one customer for every 16 people on Earth. This compares with 56 million and 40 million at the 2022 and 2018 World Cups respectively.

“In four weeks [of the ticket applications] we’ve had a request for 1000 years of World Cups at once,” FIFA boss Gianni Infantino said last month, while denying an issue with bots.

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