World Cup tickets in Toronto are expensive to begin with. Ontario's resale regulations don't help
CBC
When tickets went on sale for the six FIFA World Cup games being hosted in Toronto next year, Aidan D’Souza and his family were lucky enough to snag a few, but he says it wasn’t easy.
They got an email a week before the official ticket draw opened on Nov. 30, he says, asking if they wanted to secure “hospitality tickets.” They accepted, but D’Souza says that was just the beginning.
“We needed to act really quick when getting the tickets because FIFA was actually increasing the price as the day [went] on,” D’Souza said. “We had 15 minutes once we secured the tickets in our cart. So it was a really intense moment entering all the details in, but I'm just so happy we've secured those three tickets.”
Tickets in Toronto — one of 16 North American host cities for next summer’s FIFA World Cup — have sold out about as quickly as they’ve been released. For most other people looking to check out the action, the resale market is the only option.
Anyone who’s tried to get resale tickets to a major event in recent years will know the pain, frustration and, most of all, cost of the secondary market.
Tickets on StubHub, a popular third-party reseller, have gone for as much as $80,000, and are currently going for over $2,000 a pop at minimum. It’s not a new problem — ask any Swiftie about the Eras Tour’s Toronto stop and there was the Blue Jays’ run to the World Series — and it’s made worse by Ontario’s resale laws.
In 2019, Doug Ford’s government scrapped part of a law that capped ticket resales at 50 per cent above the original price, allowing sites like Ticketmaster, StubHub and SeatGeek to set whatever price they think people will pay.
That’s a big issue, leaving low- and middle-income fans on the outside looking in, says Vass Bednar, managing director of the Canadian SHIELD Institute, a policy institute focused on Canada’s economy.
Some people, Bednar says, might argue events are commodities and customers should be able to pay thousands for a ticket if that’s the value they place on the experience.
Take D’Souza and his World Cup tickets. He says he paid $2,500 each, even though he felt it was steep.
“But honestly, you're paying for the experience, right? Something that might not happen again in Toronto in our lifetime,” D’Souza said.
But Bednar says there’s a loud contingent of customers complaining that philosophy “creates a fundamentally inaccessible experience for fans.”
“And it's changing society, right?” he said. “If we're viewing major cultural events, major sporting events, as a luxury good that is only available to the highest bidder, then I think that really says something.”
It’s an issue Ford, backpedalling from 2019, said this year he would like to review. The change of heart came after World Series tickets in Toronto sold out almost immediately, only for resale tickets to pop up for sale shortly after, well above face value.
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