scathing criticism<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\nAnecdotally, scores of fuming ticket buyers, who allege they weren\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhenever any Mastercard cardholder has a dispute with a business or merchant\u00a0\u2014 including goods not received or if the goods received do not match what was expected\u00a0\u2014 their first step should be to try to resolve the situation with the merchant they made the purchase from,\u201d Seth Eisen, Mastercard\u2019s senior vice president of communications, told The News.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf 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\u00a0\u2014 starting with the transaction amount and date. Cardholders should also be ready to share any prior communication they\u2019ve had with the business.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Representatives with Visa, a long-time global sponsor of FIFA, and American Express did not return emails from The News.<\/p>\n
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California Attorney General Rob Bonta recently sent a letter to\u00a0FIFA raising concerns about reports of potentially misleading ticketing practices related to the 2026 FIFA World Cup.<\/p>\n
Damian Dovarganes\/AP<\/p>\n
California AG raises concerns with FIFA<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u201cIf you were purchased a Category Two seat and were placed in Category Three, that should not have happened,\u201d the spokesperson said. \u201cAnd if that did happen, it would be fixed by FIFA. We basically reseat them, but, again, that should not have happened.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s also contacted the Texas attorney general\u2019s office after seeing the attorney general in California address the seating criticism.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The AG\u2019s office said businesses and organizations \u201ccannot 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)\u00a0have 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u201cCalifornians should be able to trust that the seats they purchase match the representations made during the sales process,\u201d Bonta said in a statement.<\/p>\n
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AT&T Stadium is hosting nine World Cup matches, the most of any of the 16 North American cities.<\/p>\n
Smiley N. Pool\/The Dallas Morning News<\/p>\n
FIFA: Seating maps mere ‘guidelines’<\/p>\n
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 \u201cnightmare\u201d for FIFA.<\/p>\n
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\u201cThis is crazy\u00a0\u2014 this stuff about color-coded seating maps with category labels, there\u2019s an implication that consumers are getting those seats,\u201d Farragut told The News. \u201cThe fact that the credit card companies are now telling people don\u2019t use the tickets, OK, that\u2019s a double-edged sword, because, well, it\u2019s good that credit card companies will dispute the charge, but that\u2019s basically saying you can\u2019t have faith in the [ticketing] process.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat they thought they were getting isn\u2019t reality at all. And it\u2019s really sad to me that they feel like they\u2019re getting more help from the credit card company than FIFA itself.\u201d<\/p>\n
Farragut said it is unfathomable that FIFA changed portions of the stadium seating maps after some tickets were already purchased.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton\u2019s office did not respond to an email from The News seeking reaction to the concerns of ticket buyers in Texas.<\/p>\n
The issue is especially important in\u00a0D-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\u2019s least transparent World Cup despite the organization\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n
FIFA has been ‘allowed to commit fraud’<\/p>\n
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\u00a0\u2014 and plenty of unhappy ticket buyers. Even for long-entrenched soccer aficionados, it can be an enigma wrapped in a riddle.<\/p>\n
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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.<\/p>\n
FIFA said color-coded stadium seating maps, whose composition changed during the ticketing process, served only as \u201cguidelines\u201d 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 \u2014 other than supporter group areas \u2014 were made to the seating maps during the ticketing process.<\/p>\n
But a comparison of the maps tells a different story.<\/p>\n
Now Dallas resident Mabel has a dilemma: Use the World Cup tickets or wait out Mastercard\u2019s 90-day investigation. He said all he wants are the seats he paid for. As for FIFA, he said, it\u2019s been no response\u00a0\u2014 crickets.<\/p>\n
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He is left shaking his head over the last line of the FIFA email confirming his purchase of tickets: \u201cThanks for being a true fan!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause 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\u00a0\u2014 period,\u201d Mabel said. \u201cMy 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kids hold tickets as official player escorts at the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Shafkat Anowar\/The Dallas Morning News…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":301422,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[150,152,151,8079,37274,110453,39304],"class_list":["post-304934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arlington","tag-arlington","tag-arlington-headlines","tag-arlington-news","tag-att-stadium","tag-fifa","tag-rob-bonta","tag-world-cup-tickets"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304934\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/301422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}