Kids hold tickets as official player escorts at the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
Shafkat Anowar/The Dallas Morning News
Amid a torrent of backlash toward FIFA’s World Cup ticketing process, one credit card company allegedly has a message for ticket buyers who believe they aren’t getting what they paid for: Don’t use your World Cup tickets.
One Dallas resident, Matthew Mabel, spent $860 tickets on two tickets for Netherlands-Japan on June 14. He figured the second-highest pricing category would give him midtier seats inside AT&T Stadium.
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A FIFA World Cup soccer ball sits where the artificial surface and newly laid sod come together on the sideline.
Tom Fox/The Dallas Morning News
Not even close. He was assigned seats 10 rows from the top of the stadium.
So he reached out to FIFA’s “contact us” site and requested they relocate his seats to the area he said they showed him when he bought the tickets.
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Then he called Citigroup Mastercard. During a 16-minute conversation with a representative, he said, he disputed the charge and detailed that he didn’t get what he paid for. He said the company launched an investigation, gave him an immediate provisional credit of $860 back on his card and told him explicitly, “Do not use these World Cup tickets.”
“My request is the same: Relocate me in the section that I bought,” Mabel told The Dallas Morning News. “The representative told me not to use the tickets. There’s a 90-day investigation, which obviously is past the date of June 14 match. …
“I told Mastercard that FIFA showed me the [seating] map, I accepted the section on the map, and then they sent me tickets in a different area on the map. Once I said that, Mastercard didn’t ask me again. Imagine if you bought a business class plane ticket and you get to the airport and they put you in row 44.”
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Mabel’s ordeal represents the latest flash point in the ticketing maelstrom that has embroiled FIFA, the governing body that controls the entire World Cup ticketing process. Action by credit cards may be the only recourse for ticket buyers who say they have been “scammed” by a ticketing process that has come under scathing criticism.
Anecdotally, scores of fuming ticket buyers, who allege they weren’t assigned the seats they paid for, have been airing their grievances on various Reddit forums and social media platforms, with many asking what avenues of recourse their credit card companies offer.
“Whenever any Mastercard cardholder has a dispute with a business or merchant — including goods not received or if the goods received do not match what was expected — their first step should be to try to resolve the situation with the merchant they made the purchase from,” Seth Eisen, Mastercard’s senior vice president of communications, told The News.
“If things are not resolved with the business or merchant, cardholders should check to see if they have trip insurance or purchase protection plans that might cover the purchase. The final fallback is to call the bank or credit union that issued their card. If cardholders take that step, they should have all the key details ready to help the process — starting with the transaction amount and date. Cardholders should also be ready to share any prior communication they’ve had with the business.”
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Representatives with Visa, a long-time global sponsor of FIFA, and American Express did not return emails from The News.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta recently sent a letter to FIFA raising concerns about reports of potentially misleading ticketing practices related to the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
Damian Dovarganes/AP
California AG raises concerns with FIFA
A FIFA spokesperson told The News in a recent phone call that the organization would relocate ticket buyers if they were assigned seats in pricing categories that they did not choose to purchase.
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“If you were purchased a Category Two seat and were placed in Category Three, that should not have happened,” the spokesperson said. “And if that did happen, it would be fixed by FIFA. We basically reseat them, but, again, that should not have happened.”
But Mabel, a Dallas Mavericks season ticket holder and former Dallas Cowboys season ticket holder, is still waiting for a response. He said he is in contact with attorneys about possibly joining a potential class-action lawsuit against FIFA. He’s also contacted the Texas attorney general’s office after seeing the attorney general in California address the seating criticism.
Last week, California Attorney General Rob Bonta sent a letter to FIFA raising concerns about reports of potentially misleading ticketing practices related to the 2026 FIFA World Cup and requesting information to assess potential violations of California law.
The AG’s office said businesses and organizations “cannot justify misleading practices by pointing to fine print or other terms that a reasonable consumer would not have seen or understood. It added that recent reports (including a story in The News) have raised concerns that FIFA sold tickets based on seating categories displayed on stadium maps and later altered those seating categorizations before assigning precise seat locations.
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“Californians should be able to trust that the seats they purchase match the representations made during the sales process,” Bonta said in a statement.
AT&T Stadium is hosting nine World Cup matches, the most of any of the 16 North American cities.
Smiley N. Pool/The Dallas Morning News
FIFA: Seating maps mere ‘guidelines’
Paige Farragut spent more than 20 years with the Texas Rangers, including serving as senior vice president of ticket sales and service and being responsible for all ticket revenue streams. She called the World Cup ticketing issues a “nightmare” for FIFA.
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“This is crazy — this stuff about color-coded seating maps with category labels, there’s an implication that consumers are getting those seats,” Farragut told The News. “The fact that the credit card companies are now telling people don’t use the tickets, OK, that’s a double-edged sword, because, well, it’s good that credit card companies will dispute the charge, but that’s basically saying you can’t have faith in the [ticketing] process.
“What they thought they were getting isn’t reality at all. And it’s really sad to me that they feel like they’re getting more help from the credit card company than FIFA itself.”
Farragut said it is unfathomable that FIFA changed portions of the stadium seating maps after some tickets were already purchased.
For ticket buyers who were assigned seats in different areas than what they purchased, relocating them may not be possible at this point because those seats have been purchased. But Farragut said there are other ways for FIFA to remedy the issue, such as offering those ticket buyers premium hospitality offerings, merchandise, discounts or vouchers.
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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office did not respond to an email from The News seeking reaction to the concerns of ticket buyers in Texas.
The issue is especially important in D-FW because AT&T Stadium is hosting nine matches, the most of any of the 16 North American cities. Many longtime soccer stakeholders and fans call this FIFA’s least transparent World Cup despite the organization’s stated intent to be as open as possible. The widespread criticism is playing out as FIFA anticipates generating $13 billion in the current cycle (2023 through 2026).
FIFA has been ‘allowed to commit fraud’
The ticketing process, a lightning rod from the start, has further devolved into a dizzying blur of old price categories and new price categories; old ticketing phases and new ticketing phases; old color-coded stadium maps and new color-coded stadium maps — and plenty of unhappy ticket buyers. Even for long-entrenched soccer aficionados, it can be an enigma wrapped in a riddle.
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FIFA rolled out its ticketing process in several phases, and navigating them is akin to solving a puzzle. The organization has been widely lambasted for a process characterized as convoluted and opaque, framed by sticker shock that prices out a large group of long-entrenched or would-be fans.
FIFA said color-coded stadium seating maps, whose composition changed during the ticketing process, served only as “guidelines” rather than a precise map for where seats would be in each price category. In a subsequent phone call, a FIFA spokesperson said no price category changes — other than supporter group areas — were made to the seating maps during the ticketing process.
But a comparison of the maps tells a different story.
Now Dallas resident Mabel has a dilemma: Use the World Cup tickets or wait out Mastercard’s 90-day investigation. He said all he wants are the seats he paid for. As for FIFA, he said, it’s been no response — crickets.
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He is left shaking his head over the last line of the FIFA email confirming his purchase of tickets: “Thanks for being a true fan!”
“Because we are dealing with an international organization that has no roots here, and we have no access to these people, they have been allowed to commit fraud — period,” Mabel said. “My greatest wish is to go to the match and get the tickets they sold me. My second wish would be for someone in our government to come down on these people before the matches happen and correct this.”