FIFA President Gianni Infantino and draw host Andrés Cantor during the World Cup schedule reveal on Saturday.Chris Carlson/The Associated Press
The prices of some resale tickets to next summer’s World Cup matches in Toronto and Vancouver plummeted after FIFA announced the full tournament schedule on Saturday afternoon and revealed there will be few marquee matchups taking place on Canadian soil.
Still, most prices held steady and the head of the Toronto Secretariat, which is responsible for staging the games in the city, said she was pleased with the schedule and excited about the prospect of welcoming fans supporting up to 10 foreign teams to Toronto for the six games it will host.
Soccer fans had snapped up more than two million tickets over two sale blocks in October and November without knowing most of the details of the matches, such as the teams. (The three co-hosts, Canada, Mexico, and the U.S., knew the locations of their matches but not who they would be facing.)
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On Friday, during an event in Washington, D.C., FIFA assigned 42 of the 48 total teams into 12 groups of four for the initial round-robin stage. (The other six teams are still to be determined by various regional playoffs over the next several months.) On Saturday, FIFA announced where those games would be played, finally telling fans which teams they would be seeing with the tickets they had already bought.
Toronto and Vancouver, with the two smallest stadiums among the 16 hosting the World Cup, aren’t hosting any of the highest profile tilts.
Toronto’s BMO Field (official capacity, according to FIFA, of 44,315) will host a single game with four-time World Cup champion Germany (currently ranked 9th) and another with Croatia (10th), but it will miss out on welcoming other teams it might have hosted as a part of the Eastern Region locations, such as France (3rd), Norway (29th), and England (4th).
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Those teams will instead play in U.S. cities with larger stadiums, including New Jersey’s Met Life stadium (with its 82,500-seat capacity), Philadelphia (65,827 seats) – and even Dallas (70,122 seats), which will host a hugely in-demand match between England and Croatia that could have been played in Toronto if FIFA had decided to put it there.
Vancouver, meanwhile, learned the highest-ranked team it will host at BC Place (capacity 48,821) is eighth-ranked Belgium.
Two hours after Saturday’s schedule reveal, tickets on StubHub to the June 17 match in Toronto featuring Ghana vs. Panama dropped more than 50 per cent in value, from a range of $1,553 to $2,764 only minutes before the teams were known to $763 – $1,163 once they were disclosed.
Tickets to the June 20 match in Toronto featuring Germany – the highest-ranked team to play in the city during the group stage – against Cote d’Ivoire (42nd) held more or less steady from the prices they were seeking before the reveal. Category 1 tickets were asking $1,882, a rise of about 20 per cent. But Category 3 tickets were down slightly, from $874 to $840.
The bulk of resale tickets to matches at Vancouver’s BC Place stadium were holding steady, with fluctuations of up to 10 per cent in either direction.
Sharon Bollenbach, the executive director FIFA World Cup 2026 Toronto, said she was not concerned that falling prices after the schedule disclosure might indicate dampened enthusiasm for the matches.
“I think it’s early times. Everyone’s just hearing the schedule,” she said, during an interview from Washington, D.C. on Saturday. “I think everyone needs to take a bit of a beat and digest it and figure out what it all means, but I think we’ll start seeing some of those other international markets pick up in interest. I’m not concerned.”
“The dust will settle with the draw and I think tickets will settle out as well.”
On Friday, FIFA had pre-emptively flattened what had been expected to be a frenzy of resale activity by temporarily closing its ticket marketplace to sales until Dec. 15. While tickets are being sold on unofficial sites, FIFA has promoted its platform as the only one that can guarantee fans will receive the tickets they purchase, rather than potentially get a refund and an apology at the last minute if a merchant is unable to obtain tickets they have promised to a purchaser.
Canada set to open World Cup campaign at Toronto’s BMO Field in June
Fans may also be sitting on the sidelines waiting for the final tranche of tickets – more than four million – to be released for sale beginning in January. FIFA has said that pricing for those tickets will be dynamic, meaning it will be based on what the federation and the algorithms baked into its online platform determine to be the interplay between supply and the fluctuating demand.
Ms. Bollenbach noted that many of the countries that are scheduled to play in Toronto have built-in fan bases in the Greater Toronto Area, including Croatia and Germany, as well as Italy – which, if it wins a European playoff in March, will face Canada in the first World Cup match to be played on Canadian soil, on June 12.
“I think we landed very, very well as a city in the draw and in the schedule. We have some amazing teams coming to Toronto who have strong fan bases in our city.”
She also played up the benefits of attending a game at BMO Field, which has been criticized for being an also-ran compared to some of the gargantuan temples of sport south of the border.
“You can come to Toronto and be so close to the action, and be part of this small … intimate stadium, in comparison to some of the mammoth stadiums in the U.S.”