The race is on. On Wednesday, the first application phase for 2026 World Cup tickets opened to a lot of fanfare and a ton of frustration. Tens of millions of soccer fans from around the world tried to access the Visa Presale Draw application and, naturally, ran into a ton of issues with excruciatingly long wait times and short patience.
The Visa Presale is the first chance fans have to try and secure tickets to next summer’s tournament, but the presale application is a bit different than in previous
World Cups. The initial application phase normally allows fans to apply for the first wave of tickets that go on sale for each of the matches. For this Visa Presale, it almost operates as a no purchase necessary sweepstakes.
Fans first need to head to the FIFA ticket website and register an account. The first few questions request which rounds of the tournament a fan is interested in, along with which venues they would be interested in purchasing matches to during the World Cup. Fans can also mark which team they are a fan of, which doesn’t really do anything for the application and only serves as a likely survey question marker for FIFA.
After filling out those questions, there are other questions like filling in your name, mailing address, and filling in any Visa credit or debit card information that you have to confirm your eligibility for the presale. After a few clicks, the application is complete and you get a verification that your entry has been submitted.
Sounds easy and straightforward, right? Well, in true fashion, nothing is for sure, nothing is for certain. Widespread miscommunication about the details of the Visa Presale led many to think that this was the first opportunity for fans to purchase tickets for the World Cup directly from FIFA. That created the logjam of millions of people waiting hours in some cases to access the application, only to find that the application was not one where you picked individual matches for which you desired tickets, like the group stage matches for the USMNT. Because of that logjam, fans were met with several screens letting them know that they needed to wait a short or long time to access the application.
The first day of the Visa Presale application phase, which opened on Wednesday, is where the majority of fans saw the longest wait times. Accessing the application on Thursday or Friday for most yielded little to no wait time, with some fans reporting being able to submit their application for tickets in just a couple of minutes. The application phase is open until September 19th, and fans are encouraged to submit their application sooner rather than later. Waiting until the very end of the window can mean a surge in wait times and the possibility of not being able to submit your application before the window officially closes at 11:00am ET (8:00am PT) on September 19th. There can only be one application per household, and multiple applications from a single household will cause them all to be rejected.
The biggest thing to know is that if you submit an application, FIFA will begin letting people know via email on September 29th if their application was selected. Those successful applicants will then be given a date and time slot beginning on October 1st to go in and purchase tickets using a Visa credit or debit card. Fans can purchase up to 4 tickets per match per household and up to 40 tickets total during the FIFA ticket sales period.
Future sales phases from FIFA, U.S. Soccer, and other places will be announced in the future. FIFA also will open its ticket resale platform at a later date, which will likely be the only official ticket resale platform for the World Cup. Fans are discouraged from relying on ticket resale sites like StubHub or SeatGeek for World Cup tickets, as those people likely do not have any tickets to fulfill your order.
It’s going to be an interesting few months as fans from the experienced World Cup traveler to the fan hoping to check out a game in their city navigate the many FIFA ticket sales phases. It won’t quite be like The Hunger Games, but may the odds be ever in your favor.
