2026 World Cup Faces Empty Seats. It's Not a New Problem

The organizers of the 2026 FIFA World Cup are battling weaker than expected demand and fears over undersold games, but the issue of empty seats and far-from-full stadiums is one that has dogged previous tournaments.

FIFA, soccer's global governing body, maintains that sales are solid and demand is high enough to justify the prices at this year's tournament-which have resulted in lawsuits from fans and investigations by host-city officials. And the high costs have also been cited as a reason why some fans appear to be foregoing the competition, with surveys of host city hoteliers revealing that booking rates have been trending below forecasts.

According to figures from TicketData.com, around 25,000 seats are still available through FIFA's main ticketing platform, though the number has shifted significantly in recent days as the organization released several last-minute batches. And, according to data shared with Newsweek last Thursday, around 17,000 were available through the organization's resale terminal for host nation matches alone.

Is This a New Problem?

By most indications, seats for many games will still be unfilled once the competition-which will be played in the U.S., Mexico and Canada-commences on Thursday, a situation potentially worsened by the tournament's expanded 48-team, 104-game format.

But this is far from a new issue for FIFA or the quadrennial World Cup.

South Africa 2010

Overall attendance was strong in 2010 by historical standards, with ESPN calculating that nearly 3.2 million attendees at the South Africa-hosted competition ranked third in World Cup history at the time.

However, a number of group-stage matches featured blocks of empty seats inside the stadiums.

"Pretty sad that there are empty seats, lots of them, inside the Free State Stadium for the hosts’ final game," sports journalist Mark Ogden tweeted during South Africa's June 22 match against France.

And after thousands of seats were clearly empty for a match between Greece and South Korea, FIFA launched a probe into transportation issues in South Africa that they believed may have prevented certain fans from attending.

According to remarks quoted in Reuters Africaat the time, FIFA blamed the issue on corporate and government ticket holders, as well as overseas fans, not attending games despite having purchased or received seats.

Brazil 2014

While other recent hosts-such as South Africa and Qatar-could not boast a deep-rooted soccer tradition, Brazil's hosting was seen as a chance for one of the sport's powerhouses to reliably fill stadiums over the course of several weeks.

But the competition likewise battled reports of underfilled arenas, attributed by some to local fans being priced out by the organization, as well as FIFA failing to redirect tickets that were returned by sponsors and other groups.

However, as in South Africa, FIFA again blamed the issue on no-shows, with a spokeswoman telling ESPN: "Most are uncollected tickets because people who have not been coming to the match have not put them on the resale platform.”

Russia 2018

The issue of empty seats at the Russia-hosted competition came to a head during the June 15 match between Uruguay and Egypt, despite it being only the second match of the tournament.

Whole blocks of Ekaterinburg Arena were visibly empty on broadcasts, and FIFA confirmed that around 5,000 seats went unfilled.

"We can confirm that the official attendance for the match between Egypt and Uruguay in Ekaterinburg is 27,015," a FIFA spokesman told The Guardian. "The FIFA World Cup stadium capacity is 33,061. The fact that the actual attendance is lower than the number of allocated tickets can be due to different factors, including ‘no shows' on match day, which FIFA is currently investigating."

Qatar 2022

By some estimates, Qatar spent a decade and more than $200 billion preparing to host the World Cup in 2022, meaning many were surprised when the competition was similarly beset by reports of empty seats.

According to a report from The Athletic, despite all games being sold out on FIFA's official ticketing platform, many seats were visibly empty for the opening games of the 2022 tournament.

That was the case throughout the competition-including for the December 18 final between Argentina and France-leading some pundits to posit that organizers had published incorrect estimates for stadium capacity for the matches.

Is FIFA Struggling to Sell Tickets?

In late May, FIFA told Newsweek that ticket sales for the 2026 tournament were "strong" and that there was a "high degree of interest for all matches."

"More than 5 million tickets have already been sold, and tickets will continue to be made available on a first-come first-served basis at fifa.com/tickets until the end of the tournament as part of the Last-Minute Sales Phase," a spokesperson for the organization said.

And the majority of those that remain purchasable are on the resale market-either FIFA's own terminal or sites like StubHub and SeatGeek-which may or may not be used by the sellers if they cannot find buyers at their asking price.

But prices on these sites were plummeting until mid-May-taken as an indication that resellers were struggling to shift the inventory-and a recent analysis by the Financial Times found that nearly 180,000 are still listed on the official resale portal only days before the competition.

In late May, the number of tickets available directly from FIFA unexpectedly dropped by around 44,000. The organization did not offer an explanation for the decline, after which some observed an uptick in the number that were then listed on the resale marketplace, speculating that the organization was shifting the inventory to artificially lower resale costs and ensure there was not an abundance of unsold seats.

According to analysis by a source familiar with the data who spoke with Newsweek, the number of tickets that disappeared in late May closely matched the volume that then appeared on resale marketplaces, indicating that they were transferred in bulk from FIFA's official ticketing system. However, that’s not confirmation that it was an official strategy by FIFA to influence either demand or pricing.

2026 NEWSWEEK DIGITAL LLC.

This story was originally published June 10, 2026 at 2:54 AM.