World Cup Ticket Prices Dip After Schedule Reveal, But Toronto Remains Optimistic
The prices of some resale tickets to next summerS World Cup matches in Toronto and Vancouver plummeted after FIFA announced the full tournament schedule on saturday afternoon and revealed there will be few marquee matchups taking place on Canadian soil.
Still, most prices held steady and the head of the Toronto Secretariat, which is responsible for staging the games in the city, said she was pleased with the schedule and excited about the prospect of welcoming fans supporting up to 10 foreign teams to Toronto for the six games it will host.
Soccer fans had snapped up more than two million tickets over two sale blocks in October and November without knowing most of the details of the matches, such as the teams. (The three co-hosts, Canada, Mexico, and the U.S., knew the locations of their matches but not who they would be facing.)
What fans can expect from the World Cup group games
On Friday, during an event in Washington, D.C., FIFA assigned 42 of the 48 total teams into 12 groups of four for the initial round-robin stage. (The other six teams are still to be resolute by various regional playoffs over the next several months.) On Saturday, FIFA announced were those games would be played, finally telling fans which teams they would be seeing with the tickets they had already bought.
Toronto and Vancouver,with the two smallest stadiums among the 16 hosting the World Cup,aren’t hosting any of the highest profile tilts.
toronto’s BMO Field (official capacity, according to FIFA, of 44,315) will host a single game with four-time World Cup champion Germany (currently ranked 9th) and another with Croatia (10th), but it will miss out on welcoming other teams it might have hosted as a part of the Eastern Region locations, such as France (3rd), Norway (29th), and England (4th).
Cathal Kelly: Canada plays host to World Cup games that don’t live up to its dreams
Those teams will instead play in U.S. cities with larger stadiums, including New Jersey’s Met Life stadium (with its 82,500-seat capacity), Philadelphia (65,827 seats) – and even dallas (70,122 seats), which will host a hugely in-demand match between England and Croatia that could have been played in Toronto if FIFA had decided to put it there.
vancouver, meanwhile, learned the highest-ranked team it will host is Uruguay (ranked 15th).
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