With many soccer fans anticipating the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the City of Toronto’s World Cup committee is looking at ways to purchase ticket packages and potentially re-sell them for marked-up prices.
At Wednesday’s sub-committee meeting, councillors and staffers discussed the plans and the city’s goals from the potential purchase.
“We have an opportunity as a host city to sell commercial sales packages, varying types of packages and degrees, and part of it is a hospitality program for matches for corporations to purchase suites and to purchase tickets,” said Sharon Bollenbach, at the sub-committee meeting.
The city could spend $10.7 million to purchase packages directly from FIFA.
“What we are recommending is that we pre-purchase some of these hospitality aspects, so we secure and protect them from external vendors and, therefore, lose the revenue for our host city,” said Bollenbach.
At Tuesday’s meeting, the subcommittee recommended that the city look towards its special event reserve fund to foot the cost and then eventually re-sell the tickets to big corporations.
When the World Cup begins in Toronto in 2026, the city will host a total of six matches, five of which will be first-round games, plus one playoff round at a price point of $380 million with an estimated $200 million coming from the federal and provincial governments.
“If we ever needed businesses to come and do business in Toronto, it is now, and I’m predicting the impacts that we are seeing right now from the trade war.. we will still be seeing them in 2026, so anything that becomes an attraction of business retention (is good),” said Shelley Carroll, City Councillor for Ward 17.
However, it’s a sentiment drawing some mixed opinions on whether a city should buy, sell, and then make a profit on game-packaged tickets.
“When you buy tickets at one price and mark it up at a different price, you know I, don’t have the definition of scalping, but that’s my understanding of it, and I think that’s the public understanding of it as well,” said Brad Bradford, City Councillor for Ward 19.
As for the cost of these ticket packages, the city says they haven’t quite figured that out yet and did not provide information on which Canadian corporations would be in discussion to purchase packages from the city.
City councillors will meet on March 26 to vote on the idea.
