NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani secures 1,000 $50 World Cup tickets for New Yorkers: 'We don’t want sports to become a luxury commodity'
The tickets will be available via a lottery, which will open next week.
Obtaining tickets for the 2026 World Cup has been an expensive slog. But for 1,000 lucky New Yorkers, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani just made things a lot more affordable. In a press conference on Thursday, Mamdani announced that the city has secured 1,000 seats that will be sold to New Yorkers for only $50 each.
The move came after months of negotiating with the New York New Jersey host committee, which oversees everything related to the games at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium this summer. “Soccer at its heart is a working-class game. And yet we’ve seen so many working-class people get priced out of it,” Mamdani told The Cooligans on Thursday .
“We’re so excited to be hosting the World Cup, and yet I know that for many New Yorkers, they were looking at the prices and they were asking themselves, ‘how could I ever even try to purchase this ticket? ” The tickets will also include a free, round-trip trip on a bus to the stadium, which is located in East Rutherford, NJ. “Every New Yorker can actually see themselves as part of it, because we don’t want sports to become a luxury commodity.
We don’t want the in-person to be understood as exclusively remote,” Mamdani continued. “So many of us grow up as fans thinking the only way to interact is through a TV. But people should actually be able to go.