World Cup fans spend £4,500 on tickets – only to be left stranded outside stadium
Thousands of football fans travelling to the 2026 World Cup have been caught up in one of the largest ticketing collapses in history.
Thousands of football fans travelling to the 2026 World Cup have been caught up in one of the largest ticketing collapses in history.
As football’s biggest event on the planet continues to sweep across 16 cities in the US, Canada and Mexico, many fans are finding their dream tickets cancelled at the last minute on secondary marketplaces.
The culprit is believed to be due to ‘speculative ticketing’, which is when unverified sellers list tickets they do not yet own, hoping to source them cheaper and closer to the time of the event.
When these ticket prices then soar, sellers back out of the deal to resell them for a higher profit, leaving buyers empty-handed with a refund for their tickets that doesn’t cover travel costs.
One fan, Sergio Enrique Alvarado Montalvo, 45, paid $1,700 (£1,300) on StubHub to surprise his father with World Cup tickets, only to be told that the seller could not deliver them
‘I was so sad and so frustrated, and so filled with rage, anger. It was a mix of feelings that is hard to explain,’ he told BBC News.
Another fan, Eben Pingree, 44, from Boston, faced a nearly identical scenario after his wife Caitlin paid $2,800 on StubHub for tickets to the Scotland v Haiti match to surprise their 11-year-old son Cole.
However, edspite co-ordinating an extensive trip, the tickets vanished on match day.
‘They basically had to just leave us there, and so my son was just devastated,’ they said.
Two separate football fans have also filed a lawsuit against StubHub in a proposed class action on Tuesday after accusing the resale platform of failing to deliver the tickets that they had paid for.
Julie Reeker Moghal and Reuben Renteria said in a court filing they were acting on behalf of themselves and all others in a similar situation after they paid at least $1,900 each for tickets that were never delivered.
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