FIFA is selling parking passes at 2026 World Cup games in Los Angeles for $250 or $300 per matchday and per spot — more than the price of some actual match tickets.
The passes are for parking spaces more than a mile away from SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., according to listings on FIFA’s “official World Cup 2026 parking website.”
SoFi will host eight World Cup matches, including the U.S. team’s opener and a quarterfinal. For those two matches, a single parking spot is priced at $300. For the other six, including Iran vs. New Zealand and the third U.S. group match, a pass costs $250. (A Category 3 ticket to some of those matches costs $140 or $180.)
A FIFA spokesperson, when asked to justify the prices, told The Athletic that “parking prices are determined based on local market conditions and benchmarking against comparable major events previously held in each host city.”
The $250 spots appear to be in or near the “VIP West Garage” at the Intuit Dome, the Los Angeles Clippers basketball arena, which is just outside SoFi Stadium’s Hollywood Park campus. FIFA’s parking website, which is operated by JustPark, estimates that the walk from parking spot to stadium would take 21 minutes, though the exact length would depend on security checkpoints, entrances and other factors.
For Clippers games, parking in the garage costs $56.50; and for the upcoming NBA All-Star Game, it costs $88.
At Los Angeles Rams NFL games, parking cost $71 per game in 2025 for those who bought season passes in lots directly adjacent to SoFi Stadium.
Those stadium-adjacent lots, however, are unlikely to be open to fan parking at World Cup matches, and will likely be inside security perimeters. Some could be used for hospitality, sponsor activations or other operations. That will be the case at most, if not all, 2026 World Cup venues — there are 16 in total across the U.S., Mexico and Canada.
“The stadium footprint is going to look a lot different,” Lindsey Douglas, the chief operating officer of Kansas City’s World Cup host committee, said last month.
Parking spaces, therefore, will be relatively scarce. At Kansas City Chiefs NFL games, by comparison, there are typically around 20,000 spaces surrounding Arrowhead Stadium and the neighboring baseball stadium. But for Kansas City’s World Cup games, only 4,000 spaces will be “available for sale for ticket holders,” Douglas said.
FIFA is essentially capitalizing on that scarcity, not unlike NFL teams and other U.S. sports franchises do weekly, but to a different degree.
The Los Angeles parking passes are now the costliest, but prices in other cities also shocked fans when revealed in November. Passes have now been made available at seven of the 11 U.S. stadiums. The minimum price — for group-stage matches at Arrowhead in Kansas City, AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, and Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta — is $75. That’s more than the cost of a Category 3 group-stage ticket at the last men’s World Cup, held in Qatar in 2022.
In Miami, the minimum parking price was also $75 in November, but FIFA has since raised it to $100 — for group games involving Uruguay, Saudi Arabia and Cape Verde.
For Colombia vs. Portugal and Scotland vs. Brazil in Miami — and for some games in other cities, including all seven at Gillette Stadium near Boston — the parking passes are listed as “sold out,” but the FIFA spokesperson said: “As planning continues and details are finalized, additional inventory is expected to be made available. As a result, listings currently marked as ‘sold out’ do not necessarily reflect final availability.”
Lots to consider
Miami is one of several host cities where transportation to and from World Cup games could be a logistical nightmare. It was harrowing for some fans at Hard Rock Stadium and other venues during last summer’s Club World Cup.
That, in part, is because many U.S. metropolitan areas lack the public transit infrastructure that sports fans in Europe and elsewhere typically use. Some stadiums are also inconveniently located. Americans, therefore, have grown accustomed to driving to games. Some buy passes in advance, but many drive to stadiums and pay at the entrance to lots on the day of a game.
At the World Cup, though, that won’t be easy. A World Cup “customer guide” published by JustPark, FIFA’s partner for the sale and management of parking, says that “all parking must be purchased in advance.” The FIFA spokesperson clarified that “in advance” means “no later than 24 hours before kickoff,” and “strongly encouraged” fans to “finalize their transportation plans in advance and, where available, consider mass transit options to help ensure a smooth arrival.”
Lots outside FIFA’s purview — such as those run by local establishments or residents — could offer day-of parking, but they are generally far from stadiums, and could be expensive, per basic principles of supply and demand.
Even the passes that FIFA is selling will be for lots outside security perimeters, the FIFA spokesman confirmed.
In addition to public transit, which varies from city to city, local World Cup host committees will offer other services. Kansas City’s, for example, will rent more than 200 buses and run shuttles from several locations around the region to Arrowhead Stadium on matchdays. They, too, will charge fans a fee for parking spots at these “park-and-ride” locations. (The fee will also cover shuttle service.) It’s unclear if other cities — many of which are struggling to balance budgets while FIFA monopolizes the World Cup’s revenue — will provide similar services, whether free or paid.
In Qatar, where the government was willing to spend billions of dollars to stage the 2022 World Cup, fans could ride Doha’s metro and buses free.
In North America, hardly anything will be free. Longtime fans have told The Athletic that 2026 will be “by far” the most expensive World Cup ever, “in every sense.” And FIFA will profit. FIFA president Gianni Infantino said last week that the tournament will yield $11 billion.
In 2022, there were plenty of spirited subway scenes, like these involving Ghana fans, as ticket holders could use free public transportation at the World Cup. (Natalia Kolesnikova / AFP / Getty Images)
There’s a secondary market for parking, too
Parking will be a relatively small piece of the large financial pie, but it will contribute to the overall cost of attendance.
In Philadelphia, group-stage parking costs $115. For knockout matches, prices rise, up to $200 or $225 at Atlanta’s semifinal — for parking in lots near Centennial Olympic Park, roughly half a mile from the stadium.
FIFA has consistently justified its prices — for tickets and other things — by noting that it reinvests much of the money in soccer development globally.
In the ongoing debate over ticket prices, it has also pointed to the secondary market, where fans are reselling tickets at significantly higher prices than FIFA’s.
That is the case for parking passes, too. On StubHub, as of last Thursday, the cheapest parking pass for Portugal vs. Colombia was $220. For Morocco vs. Brazil, it was $232 — even though FIFA isn’t yet selling parking at that game’s venue, MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. (The “New York New Jersey” page on FIFA’s JustPark site, along with pages for Houston, Seattle and the San Francisco Bay Area, say that parking availability is “coming soon” or remains “to be determined.”)
It’s unclear whether, or how, FIFA has attempted to restrict the resale of parking passes or prevent scalpers from buying passes.
The website includes a note: “IMPORTANT: Only match ticket holders are eligible to purchase parking passes, and you must use the same email address that was used to purchase your match tickets. Parking passes may be cancelled if the email address used to buy parking does not match your ticket purchase email. Only 1 parking pass per customer per match is permitted.”
But it’s not clear when or how that restriction would be applied, especially in cases where scalpers also buy and resell tickets; cases where the ticket holder bought their ticket on a third-party site; or cases where a fan attends a match as the guest of a primary ticket buyer.
In response to this concern, the FIFA spokesperson wrote: “Parking passes may only be purchased using the email address associated with a ticket purchase made through www.fifa.com/tickets, including the FIFA Resale Platform. Each ticket holder may purchase one parking pass per match. On match day, fans will be required to present both their valid match ticket and parking pass to access parking areas.”
It’s also unclear how many passes will be available at each stadium, and where many of these $75-plus parking spots will be. Los Angeles and Atlanta show specific locations, but other listings mark the stadium and say that the parking space is “0 miles” away. A JustPark customer support representative told The Athletic via email in November that the “0 miles” is “just a placeholder. Parking lots and spaces will be allocated closer to the event date.”
The FIFA spokesperson, beyond confirming that spots will be outside security perimeters, noted that plans were still “evolving,” and wrote: “Additional details, including parking maps and operational layouts, will be shared in due course.”
