New York City offers $50 World Cup tickets with free bus rides

A small pool of 1,000 discounted World Cup seats put New York City’s affordability promise to the test against a tournament known for steep prices and heavy demand. The tickets, priced at $50 apiece, are available only to city residents and come with free round-trip bus transportation to MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey.

The program is built as a lottery that opens May 25 and spreads the tickets across seven matches: five group-stage games and two knockout-round contests. Each match will have 150 tickets. None are reserved for the July 19 final, the one game that will draw the sharpest premium and the largest global audience. The tickets are non-transferable, and the city plans to hand them out at the bus boarding location as an anti-scalping measure.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani unveiled the program in Harlem’s Little Senegal, a setting that carried its own political message. The neighborhood is one of the city’s most visible centers of West African life, and the announcement was staged to connect the World Cup with New York’s immigrant soccer communities rather than treat the tournament as an elite corporate event. The city said the effort was made in partnership with the FIFA World Cup 2026 NYNJ Host Committee and was intended to make sure working-class New Yorkers can take part.

The gap between the city’s offer and the wider market is stark. Tournament ticket prices already sit far above what most residents can reasonably pay, with the average get-in price for a New York group-stage match reported at $864 and top resale listings for the final climbing to nearly $33,000. FIFA president Gianni Infantino has defended the pricing as market-based, but New York’s $50 lottery is a clear signal that local officials know access has become a public issue, not just a consumer one.

The ticket program also fits into a broader attempt to spread World Cup benefits beyond the stadium. The city has already promoted the NYC Neighborhood Passport with NYC Tourism + Conventions and Team Wonder, along with free official fan events in every borough and World Cup field days for students at 50 public schools. That makes the 1,000-ticket lottery look less like a full answer to affordability than a narrow but visible intervention, one meant to give ordinary New Yorkers a small opening into an event that otherwise risks feeling locked behind luxury pricing.