By Amy Tennery

NEW YORK, July 18 (Reuters) - The World Cup football tournament, in which fans have shown a willingness to pay unprecedented sums for a seat at the quadrennial sporting event, will conclude on Sunday with the final match. Ticket sales have shocked even the most pessimistic observers given the exorbitant prices.

In the match to be held at the New York New Jersey stadium, widely described as the most expensive sporting event ever held in the United States, Argentina, led by Lionel Messi, will play against Spain and its young star, Amin Jamal.

This is a fitting conclusion to a tournament that tested the limits of what fans are willing to spend, and that FIFA's gamble paid off after concerns about visa restrictions and domestic unrest in the United States.

Scott Friedman, a ticketing expert who previously worked with the Cleveland Cavaliers of the NBA, said, "What FIFA did very well was estimate the size of the demand, because fans were paying these exorbitant prices for almost all 104 games."

He added, "A year ago, we didn't think people would travel given Trump's immigration and customs policies and all these other conspiracy theories. But it's the most popular tournament in the world by a wide margin, and FIFA deserves credit for setting high prices, and fans ended up accepting that and buying it."

A Reuters analysis of FIFA match attendance data showed that more than half of the 72 group stage matches were played at full capacity, while attendance at most other matches was only a few hundred fans lower. FIFA said that approximately 99.7 percent of available seats were filled during the group stage matches.

These figures dispelled early fears that FIFA’s notoriously high prices would lead to low fan turnout, after vast stretches of empty seats were seen around the Wadi Al-Hajar stadium during the South Korea-Czech Republic match, which took place on June 11.

FIFA reported that the attendance was 44,985 fans at the stadium, which has a capacity of about 46,000 seats, but the empty seats seen by a Reuters reporter around the stadium seemed to confirm the critics' biggest fears.

High prices and increased demand

With the tournament expanding in its new format to include the largest number of teams in its history, with the participation of 48 national teams, fan interest in it has also increased.

Prices were initially set at $575 per ticket for group stage matches, more than double the price of the most expensive ticket available in the group stage in the 2022 edition, but FIFA's dynamic pricing system meant that many ticket holders paid much more than that.

Hundreds of tickets were still available last Wednesday for the final match, priced at just over $7,000 on FIFA's platform, a surprising fact that sparked speculation about whether the international governing body of the game had overpriced its tickets.

Friedman explained that the presence of a number of empty seats was most likely the result of a process known as "slow ticket sales," a common practice at large events where organizers restrict the number of tickets available to encourage buyers.

Friedman, who runs the TicketTalk Network, which is dedicated to understanding how tickets for major sporting events are bought and sold, said, "They can pretend they've already sold out their seats, then gradually release them into the market in small quantities to clearly increase market demand."

He added, "They make people say, 'There are only a few tickets left in this section, I'd better buy now.'"

By Friday, almost all tickets appeared to have been sold out, with the exception of a few that were offered on FIFA's sales platform at a price of around $32,000 each.

* "No one really knows how this mechanism works."

The opaque "dynamic pricing" mechanism has proven to be a goldmine for FIFA, as the sport continues its turbulent transformation from a working-class game to a pastime for the wealthy.

FIFA implemented a dynamic pricing system for the first time in this tournament, allowing ticket prices to fluctuate based on real-time demand and other factors.

"One of the reasons for the frustration over the past few months is that nobody really knows how this system works," said Adam Al-Mashtoub, an associate professor of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University.

He added, "People are willing to accept dynamic pricing; we deal with it in airfare prices and even when buying clothes, but I think when it comes to an event this high-profile, transparency will help a lot."

FIFA offered a small number of low-cost tickets in response to negative feedback about the prices and pressure from some politicians, including Zahran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, to enable local residents to obtain affordable seats.

The high quality of the tournament contributed to increased demand, as the four highest-ranked countries reached the semi-finals for the first time since the ranking system was introduced, and tomorrow's final will see Messi (39 years old) participate in what is likely to be his last match in the World Cup.

Al-Mashtoub said, "The concept of fair pricing is complicated here because entertainment is not the same as necessities."

Continued fan turnout

The lax rules regarding the resale market in the United States accelerated the draining of fans' pockets during the tournament, as sellers of used tickets largely set their own prices.

The rules in place in the United States conflict with those in Mexico, one of the three host countries, where ticket sellers are prohibited from reselling tickets at a price higher than the price they paid, as well as in most other parts of the world.

The surge in ticket sales in the final week drove down prices on the resale platform SeatGeek, with the average price for a Super Bowl ticket exceeding $11,000 as of Friday. However, the platform confirmed that this figure easily made the Super Bowl the most expensive event it has ever sold, representing an eight percent increase over the price of tickets for the 2024 Super Bowl.

Chris Lyden, the platform's chief marketing officer, said, "What we're seeing in this year's World Cup is that demand is changing with each round and with each announcement of matches."

He added, "The turnout for this tournament has continued remarkably from the group stage through to the knockout matches."

The World Cup is for "a lucky few".

However, human rights experts warned that the tournament remained out of reach for a very large number of fans.

According to the Sport and Rights Alliance, FIFA President Gianni Infantino promised that this edition of the World Cup would be the most inclusive yet fans from many countries were unable to obtain visas.

"It was a World Cup for a lucky few," Ronan Ivan, executive director of the European Football Supporters' Organisation, told reporters.

He added, "Those in Europe, Norwegians and Scots, who have sufficient purchasing power to travel to the United States, do not need a visa to enter the country and can afford the exorbitant ticket prices."