Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced on Thursday that the city has secured 1,000 World Cup tickets priced at $50 each, launching a lottery aimed at keeping working class soccer fans from being priced out of the tournament.
The initiative, unveiled at a bar in the Little Senegal neighborhood of Harlem, represents a rare concession to local access. It marks the only program of its kind announced by a host city for the tournament, which begins next month across the United States, Canada and Mexico.
The $50 tickets, which represent the cheapest tier available on the primary market, will be paired with free round trip bus transportation to MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., where the matches will be played.
“To put that in perspective, that is five lattes in New York City,” Mr. Mamdani said, speaking alongside Timothy Weah, a forward for the United States men’s national team and a New York native.
The ticket allocation skips the highly anticipated July 19 final, where resale prices have reached into the thousands of dollars. Instead, the 1,000 tickets will be split into blocks of roughly 150 across seven other matches in East Rutherford. These include five group stage matches, a round of 32 match and a round of 16 match. Among the teams scheduled to play in those fixtures are Brazil, France, Germany and England.
The program fulfills a key campaign theme for Mr. Mamdani, a progressive Democrat who took office in January. During his mayoral run, he frequently criticized FIFA over ticket pricing and corporate access, demanding that local residents be given priority.
The tickets were not provided directly by FIFA, soccer’s global governing body. They were instead drawn from an allotment given to the New York New Jersey Host Committee.
“We are making sure that working people will not be priced out of the game that they helped to create,” Mr. Mamdani said. He added that the mission of his administration extends beyond basic necessities like housing. “It extends to making it possible for every New Yorker to take part in the things that make us human.”
To prevent ticket scalping on the secondary market, the city has designed a strict distribution process. The lottery will open on Monday, May 25, at 10 a.m. and run through May 30. Daily entries will be capped at 50,000, and the tickets will be distributed evenly among the five boroughs.
Winners, who will be notified on June 3, can purchase up to two tickets. The city will require winners to verify their residency using official identification, pay stubs, lease agreements or utility bills. The tickets themselves are entirely non-transferable and will only be handed over in person at the bus terminal on the day of the match as fans board the vehicles.
The free bus transit also addresses a parallel controversy over local travel costs. New Jersey Transit recently faced sharp criticism after announcing it would charge $150 for a round trip train ticket to the stadium during the tournament, though it later lowered the fare to $105. Regular bus transit from the city is expected to cost around $80.
For the lucky winners, the $50 fee will cover both the upper bowl seat and the ride across the Hudson River.
“It’s not a ton of tickets,” said Marcus Green, a youth soccer coach from the Bronx who attended the announcement. “But for the families I train, it is the only way they are getting anywhere near a World Cup match.”
