U.S. families splurge to see parents’ home countries at World Cup

For some U.S. families, the 2026 World Cup has become less a sports trip than a once-in-a-generation family purchase. One Pennsylvania fan said she spent $4,000 to take her Egypt-born father to the Egypt-Belgium match in Seattle, calling it the best thing she had ever spent her money on as the tournament returns to North America for the first time in three decades.

That spending is being driven by identity as much as soccer. Hayley Rodriguez, 21, said she and her two siblings secretly pooled their effort to buy World Cup tickets for their father, a longtime truck driver who had always wanted to attend a World Cup match. Rodriguez said she, her dad and her siblings live in Los Angeles, and she used multiple phones to hunt for affordable resale tickets after he first told them they should sell the tickets because he wanted to watch from home. Instead, he went to the Iran-New Zealand game in Los Angeles and spent the night calling and FaceTiming people from the stadium.

In Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, Shadi Ebrahim made the same gesture for his father, Mohamed. Ebrahim surprised him with tickets to see Egypt play Belgium in Seattle on Monday, June 15, 2026, saying it was the first time either of them had seen their native country play a soccer match in person. He bought the tickets months in advance as both a Father’s Day gift and a birthday gift, turning the tournament into a family milestone as much as a global event.

The Seattle match showed how powerful that pull has become. More than 66,000 fans filled the stands, with an official attendance of 66,775, and Egyptian flags rippled through the crowd before the game ended in a 1-1 draw. Belgian fans gathered hours before kickoff at Victory Hall and the Hatback Bar & Grille, then marched toward Lumen Field as Seattle’s first World Cup match unfolded under a heat advisory and temperatures reached 87 degrees.

Yet even as demand surged for sentimental reasons, tickets were still unevenly priced. As of June 10, KIRO 7 reported dozens of seats still available for Seattle matches, with the cheapest Belgium-Egypt single-game ticket listed at $586.85 and the most expensive at $6,171. Seattle officials and FIFA’s local organizing committee also planned to send more than 1,400 children and caregivers to matches with tickets, food vouchers, shuttles and scarves.

On social media, the father-daughter and father-son reactions have gone viral, with videos drawing hundreds of thousands of views. The pattern says as much about the economics of scarcity as it does about family love: for many immigrant and diaspora households, this World Cup has become an expensive chance to buy a piece of home.