how easy will it be to get them?

Soccer fans now have their first chance to throw their names in the proverbial hat to snag some tickets to the FIFA World Cup next year but it might not be so easy to actually score seats.

Starting at 11 a.m. on Wednesday, Visa cardholders can sign up for a nine-day pre-sale draw for all 104 matches for the 48-team tournament co-hosted by Canada, Mexico and the U.S. The FIFA lottery is open to fans all around the world, with this pre-sale to be followed by additional phased releases of tickets.

A random draw is then held after the pre-sale closes and those selected will be notified by email by Sept. 29 with a dedicated purchasing time slot sometime in the first few weeks of October.

About one million tickets will be up for grabs in the first draw and fans can buy up to 40 tickets, spread out across 10 matches with a max of four per game.

Tickets start at US$60 (just shy of C$83) with the “most exclusive” seats in the World Cup final reaching prices as high as US$6,730 (roughly C$9,300).

With some tickets potentially costing less than $100, coupled with the fact that the World Cup will take over Canadian fields for the first time, how will this impact the demand?

Rotman School of Management Associate Professor Richard Powers says while some tickets are going for a “very reasonable” price, fans may not want to get their hopes up.

“I wouldn’t get too excited about that, I suspect tickets are going to go for a lot more once the resale market kicks in,” Powers told CTV News Toronto. “The other thing they’re doing is they’ve really increased—someone can bid to buy 40 tickets (…) so some people might view this as an opportunity to make some money off of fans.”

Ontario’s previous Liberal government had once put forward a law that capped ticket resale prices at no more than 50 per cent of the original face value, but the current Progressive Conservatives scrapped the regulations, deeming them “unenforceable.”

This has been taken advantage of by ticket resellers, notably seen during Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, when resale tickets cost at times thousands more than what they initially cost (even prompting calls on the Canadian government to assist with better protections for ticket buyers).

FIFA is set to launch its own official resale platform for eligible ticket holders as a means of protecting fans from falling victim to fraudulent resale. Its platform will be subject to federal and local regulations, something Powers says is noteworthy, especially because of Canada’s—and the United States—lack of a resale price cap.

“In Mexico, they have to get face value,” Powers said, due to the country’s resale regulations.

Outside of what could happen with the resale market, FIFA is planning on using dynamic pricing for tickets—meaning the cost of tickets will fluctuate depending on the level of demand for each match.

So while some tickets may initially be offered for less than $100, that might not remain the case.

“The reason any seller does dynamic pricing is because they’re trying to optimize their revenue from the event while still making sure that the stadiums are full, that’s sort of the name of the game,” David Soberman, professor of marketing at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, told CTV News Toronto.

“It’s a business and they, of course, have to pay huge amounts of money themselves for the stadiums, for the venues, for all the things associated with putting on the event.”

There has been some competitions in the past where prices have gone down, Powers says, but demand will likely ramp up as soon as fans know what teams are playing when and where.

“Once the group games have been established and everything, that’s when the real interest is going to come about—when we find out who’s actually playing in Canada,” Powers said.

So far, only the general landscape of what sorts of matches will be played at what stadium has been announced, with Toronto slated to have six World Cup matches, including a round of 32 game.

The draw for group-stage matches is scheduled to take place on Dec. 5 at the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

“I think you’re going to have some kind of segmentation,” Soberman said. “Some people just want to go to a World Cup game, and if it happens to be two countries that they’re not interested in, they don’t care. They just want to go to a World Cup game whereas avid fans will wait until they know.”

In the pre-sale, fans can either apply for tickets based on the venue where they want to view a match or based on the team they want to watch, which includes three group-stage matches for a specific side.

‘Taylor Swift plus Oasis and Blue Jays playoffs all in one’

To paint the picture of the level of demand World Cup tickets will likely yield, Powers likened it to trying to nab a ticket for three highly sought-after events.

“Think Taylor Swift plus Oasis and Blue Jays playoffs all in one,” Powers said. “Toronto is such a multicultural city, it’ll go crazy, and there’s a limit.”

That limit, Powers says, is being beholden to the number of fans BMO Field can fit in the stands. The venue, called the Toronto Stadium for the duration of the World Cup, is expected to have 17,756 extra seats for the tournament, bringing capacity to a total of 45,736.

Even with the boosted capacity, the Toronto Stadium offers the fewest number of seats across all 12 venues hosting FIFA World Cup games. For example, Vancouver Stadium (BC Place) can hold around 54,500 people, while New York/New Jersey Stadium (MetLife Stadium), where the final match is set to be hosted, has a capacity of 82,500.

“In (Toronto), we’ve seen what’s happened every FIFA World Cup, the city goes crazy from Little Portugal to Greektown,” Powers said. “Horns blowing, flags waving—if their team wins, it’s amazing. I think these tickets will be a really hot item, particularly in Canada.”

In the last World Cup, FIFA reported selling around 3.18 million tickets across the tournament’s 64 matches. The sporting organization said the World Cup generated US$686 million in revenue from ticket sales with the average attendance rate hovering around 96.3 per cent.

Though there aren’t any baseline projections for ticket sales expectations from FIFA at this time, the event is likely to break all-time attendance records due to the expansion of the field from 32 to 48 teams.

The next lottery, the “Early Ticket Draw,” is scheduled to have a registration window from Oct. 27 to 31, with timeslots for purchase from mid-November to early December. Then there will be the “Random Selection Draw,” held after group-stage matches are announced, where fans can apply for specific matches.

Whatever tickets that remain after will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.

Another way to score World Cup tickets

If fans are unable to score tickets through FIFA’s draws, Canada Soccer will also have its own lottery system through its revamped Canada Red program.

Canada Red has said tickets through their lottery are sold through a weighted random draw based on the tier fans are part of. The tiers range from a free membership to one that costs $5,000.

Canada Soccer gets eight per cent of the “purchasable inventory” for every single Canada game during the World Cup, which are distributed across various price categories.

With files from The Canadian Press