The FIFA World Cup opened with visible empty sections at Estadio Akron during the South Korea-Czech Republic match on Thursday, the second match of the tournament

The FIFA World Cup opened on Thursday to an image it had hoped to avoid.

Visible patches of empty seats appeared in stadiums on the very first day of competition as the consequences of the governing body's controversial World Cup ticketing strategy became immediately apparent to a global television audience. Earlier in the day, greedy FOX violated a FIFA rule in the very first game.

The second game of the tournament, South Korea against Czechia at Estadio Akron in Guadalajara, offered the starkest early evidence of the problem. Empty sections were clearly visible throughout the match, particularly in the VIP areas and sections opposite the main camera. It came after controversy erupted in the very first game.

It was a visual that FIFA had spent months and millions trying to prevent. As recently as the start of June, the governing body quietly slashed prices across all 104 matches and returned 70 percent of its block-booked hotel rooms in what appeared to be a last-minute effort to fill seats. It was not enough.

As of the eve of the tournament, approximately 180,000 tickets remained listed across FIFA's official resale portals. Around 15,000 group-stage tickets were still available directly through FIFA's website.

For the United States' opening match against Paraguay on June 12, one of the tournament's most anticipated fixtures, more than 4,400 seats were still unsold on official channels, with the cheapest tickets still priced at $1,120 directly from FIFA and the median resale price above $800 even after a 20 percent fall in prices over the previous month.

The origins of the crisis sit squarely with FIFA's decision to use variable pricing, a model it has distinguished from "dynamic pricing" largely as a matter of semantics, for the first time at a World Cup.

Prices for 90 of the 104 matches rose by an average of 34 percent between October 2025 and April 2026. The cheapest standard ticket to the final reached $5,785.

The most expensive seats hit $10,990 before later tripling again. Final tickets on the resale market were at one point listed at close to $33,000.

When the United States, Canada and Mexico submitted their original hosting bid, a seat at the final was promised at a maximum of $1,550.

The attorneys general of New York and New Jersey launched a formal investigation into the pricing practices, issuing subpoenas to FIFA. Congressional figures called for Gianni Infantino to appear before Congress. A day before the tournament began, Infantino defended the pricing by arguing cheaper tickets would have been resold on the black market.

The empty seats on day one are the clearest response yet to that argument.

FIFA bragged in January that its ticketing site had received over 500 million booking requests. On the evidence of Thursday's opening fixtures, demand at the prices FIFA set was considerably lower.