NYC offers discounted World Cup tickets: Should Boston follow suit?

... in New York.

There are 11 host cities in the US, including Boston and New York, scheduled to hold World Cup games in just a few weeks. But it is only Boston’s most storied rival that secured the dramatic deal for 1,000 tickets for New Yorkers, and only after Mayor Zohran Mamdani reportedly secured a meeting with FIFA’s president to help broker the offer.

Now that New York has them, could we see a similar $50 ticket in Boston, before kickoff at Gillette Stadium, when Scotland faces Haiti on June 13?

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s office and the Boston 26 host organizing committee did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday. A spokesperson for FIFA declined comment.

While it may be good news for those lucky 1,000 fans, the deal is also a sign of just how inequitable the rollout of the games has been: Even in New York, the cheaper tickets will only be available to residents of the city of New York, even though those games will be played at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.

In Massachusetts, where even train tickets for the seven local World Cup matches will cost $80 each, there is a sense fans are being nickel and dimed for any chance to share in the festivities.

“We live for the World Cup every four years,” said Heloísa Galvão, 78, of Boston. “I think it’s ridiculous that they charge so much.”

Circumstances in New York suggest that city may have been a few steps ahead, thanks to Mamdani.

Mamdani, elected mayor last fall, and a political admirer of Wu, reportedly secured the concession for $50 tickets after lengthy negotiations with FIFA. That included raising the issue directly with FIFA president Gianni Infantino during a meeting in March at City Hall in Manhattan, The Athletic reported.

He scored the tickets after months of petitioning FIFA to lower its ticket prices through his “Game over Greed” campaign. Starting prices for the games in Gillette start at around $600 for the cheapest, with the priciest approaching $3,400.

FIFA uses a “variable pricing” strategy for its World Cup 2026 tickets, which allowed it to charge millions of dollars more from sales, according to an analysis published in The Athletic in April.

On average, prices grew by 34 percent across FIFA’s three major ticket categories. Ticket prices for the World Cup final, for example, soared from $6,730 to an eyewatering $10,990, The Athletic reported.

Mamdani reportedly bonded with Infantino over soccer, and raised concerns that high ticket prices would mean fewer young people would become interested in the sport, The Athletic reported.

“A World Cup is coming to our backyard, and we want to ensure working-class New Yorkers have the opportunity to be part of it,” Mamdani said in a statement.

Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, the relationship between political leaders and World Cup organizers is far rockier.

It took months of negotiations for World Cup organizers to secure permission from officials in Foxboro, home of Gillette Stadium, to hold the games. It was a David and Goliath situation for a while: FIFA, with its billions of dollars in revenue, versus the town of Foxboro, population less than 19,000.

But Foxboro refused to front the millions of dollars in taxpayer money for World Cup security.

Ultimately Bob Kraft, the billionaire Patriots owner who led the initiative to bring the games to the region, had to personally contact the head of Foxboro’s elected Select Board to begin to broker a deal. That agreement included funding for the town’s security plan.

That was March. By May, more infighting broke out, this time between the state and the city of Boston over security plans at South Station. Thousands of fans are expected to use trains to travel to Foxboro for the matches, and the state wants to close down a stretch of Summer Street between South Station and Fort Point Channel to vehicle traffic during the games.

The city has refused. So the state has said it’s moving forward with its plans anyway, leading to finger pointing and complaints that this issue wasn’t resolved much earlier.

Once the World Cup was coming to Boston, communities across the state wanted to get in on the action by hosting watch parties for fans who couldn’t — or wouldn’t — pay for tickets to the games themselves. The state even ponied up $10 million for the parties in cities and towns, where thousands could attend.

But in order to show the games publicly, FIFA needed to give the OK. And in more than a dozen communities across the state, organizers have been frustrated as FIFA has apparently slow-walked the approval process. To date, only a handful of communities have secured permission to show games publicly.

Boston is one. Brockton, with its huge Cape Verdean community, is not.

“We can do a celebration but if you can’t show the game, then who’s gonna come?” Nelson Fernandes, deputy chief of staff to Brockton Mayor Moises Rodrigues, has said.

In what finally counts as a break for Massachusetts, Governor Maura Healey on Tuesday said that more than a dozen communities could get FIFA’s approval this week to hold watch parties.

But in some communities, it may be too late: It takes time to nail down logistics, like security, food, and the large screens to show the games.

Snafus aside, the World Cup looks likely to roll out as planned next month.

But there’s been little talk among leaders about the price of tickets themselves, which for fans like Rachid Chakri of Malden, remain frustratingly out of reach.

“They are very, very expensive,” Chakri said. “I don’t think I’m going to pay that much.”

John Hilliard can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at john_hilliard.70. Follow him on Bluesky at iamjohnhilliard.bsky.social. Omar Mohammed can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter (X) @shurufu.