You had one job, FIFA: FIFA cancels World Cup 2026 tickets sold at wrong prices and tells fans to buy them again at the correct ones

FIFA has had a ticketing nightmare, and thousands of football fans have been caught in the middle of it. The governing body has confirmed that a pricing error on FIFA.com/tickets on May 21, 2026 caused a small number of tickets to display inaccurate prices at checkout and in completed transaction records. All affected orders have been cancelled outright.

Fans who bought tickets in that window have been told they will receive full refunds for all payments made. But the refund comes with a catch: FIFA has reserved the same tickets for the affected buyers to repurchase at what it calls the correct price. Those reservations will hold for seven days from the date of the notification email, after which the tickets will be removed from accounts and the opportunity to attend will be gone.

In a separate but related embarrassment, FIFA confirmed that around 60 fans received a communication on June 3 about tickets that had been allocated at no charge, listed at $0, due to a prior payment issue during the checkout process. Those tickets remain reserved, and the affected fans have been asked to complete payment of the correct amount.

FIFA said it regrets the error and any inconvenience caused, which is rather the minimum one might expect from a governing body asking fans to repurchase tickets they believed they had already secured.

The FIFA World Cup 2026 is scheduled to be held across the United States, Canada and Mexico, with demand for tickets already intense. A ticketing system that cancels confirmed purchases and asks buyers to start again is unlikely to have improved confidence in the process. With the tournament approaching, FIFA will need its ticketing operation to work considerably better than this.