Reddit community uses AI-powered tools to expose FIFA World Cup ticket price volatility and circumvent resale fees

A subreddit called r/WorldCup2026Tickets, with more than 140,000 members, has built free AI-powered ticketing tools to track FIFA's official marketplace in near real time. On May 17, a game became the first to fall below $100 a ticket on the resale market. Luke, a Chicago-based member, released SeatSidekick on April 18—built in five days using Claude Code—which received 178,000 unique visitors and over a million pageviews within a month, scanning FIFA's ticketing backend to provide seat availability sorted by price.

The community has organized informal resistance to FIFA's pricing model (which includes dynamic pricing and a 30 percent commission on resales) and scalper markups. Members post "do not buy" and "HOLD" memes encouraging others to wait for prices to drop further, share price drops as victories, and have created back-channel WhatsApp marketplaces to circumvent FIFA's resale fee entirely—with two separate groups created after the first reached WhatsApp's 1,024-member limit.

As of the article's publication, more than 260,000 tickets remained unsold with little over a week before the tournament begins. One ticket to the final on July 19 is priced at $11.5 million on the official resale market. On May 27, the attorneys general of New York and New Jersey subpoenaed FIFA as part of an investigation into its ticketing practices.