'Thousands' of Scotland World Cup Haiti tickets for sale on resale sites

Potentially thousands of tickets for Scotland’s opening World Cup match against Haiti remain unsold with less than a week to go until kick-off.

There are still more than 2,000 listings on Seatpick – a ticket comparison aggregator site – showing tickets ranging from £275 to £51,923 for the Group C clash at the Boston Stadium on June 14, 2am UK time.

Originally, tickets were sold for between £45 – a category 4 ticket most fans couldn’t access due to Fifa restricting their availability – to category 1 the most expensive ticket for the match at £371.

FIFA has also set up an official resale platform, where it takes 15 per cent cuts from the seller and the buyer of each ticket, with tickets there also going well over their face value.

Football’s global governing body has faced a barrage of criticism over the pricing of tickets for the finals, and the decision to adopt a dynamic pricing strategy.

It comes as a resale platform has denied being in cahoots with FIFA over World Cup tickets.

Posts from an X account belonging to Florian Ederer, a professor at Boston University Questrom School of Business, highlighted blocks of tickets being available on the SeatGeek site for the Saudi Arabia v Cape Verde match on June 26, rather than the usual single, pair or quartet of tickets that are usually made available on resale sites.

The account alleged this was evidence that FIFA was “colluding with third-party resale platforms for its own supply management”.

A spokesperson for SeatGeek told the Press Association: “SeatGeek is a trusted marketplace that gives fans secure access to tickets across tens of thousands of live events, including the World Cup. We do not have a partnership or distribution agreement with FIFA.”

FIFA has also been contacted for comment.

The social media post said it looked like tickets were being “dumped in bulk onto secondary markets, at prices below FIFA’s official site”.

It claimed the rationale might be to avoid demands for refunds or charge-backs if ticket prices were lowered on the primary, official ticketing site.

Last month FIFA president Gianni Infantino said the prices being charged were justified in the North American market.

“We have to look at the market – we are in the market in which entertainment is the most developed in the world. So we have to apply market rates,” Infantino said at a conference in Beverly Hills.