USMNT Defies Ticket Sales Concerns, Opens Its World Cup Campaign in Near-Full SoFi Stadium

The USMNT opened its World Cup campaign in front of a packed house at SoFi Stadium.

After months of concern about overpriced tickets and slow sales, SoFi Stadium was mostly full for the United States' World Cup opener vs. Paraguay on Friday.

The crowd, most of them U.S. fans, started filing in four hours before kickoff, and filled the building with noise.

When the game began, there was still a smattering of empty seats in some sections, but no big gaps in a stadium that will hold 70,492 people for World Cup matches.

The crowd was raucous, chanting 'U-S-A, U-S-A,' and erupted when the U.S. scored an early goal.

FIFA later announced an official attendance of 70,492, a sellout.

Although there were thousands of tickets still available in the weeks leading up to the match, tickets filtered to resale sites, where prices fell; many fans told The Athletic they bought their tickets at the last minute at prices that were significantly lower than FIFA's original prices.

FIFA, which runs the World Cup and its ticketing process, initially priced the match as the third-most expensive of the entire tournament, behind only the final and one semifinal.

Category 1 tickets, in the 100 and 200 levels, went on sale for $2,735. Category 2 seats, in the upper decks with decent views, were $1,940. Category 3 seats were $1,120.

At those prices, the tickets did not sell as well as expected.

Then, many of those tickets disappeared, and some appeared in bunches on resale sites at significantly lower prices.

By Friday morning, on FIFA's official resale platform, Category 1 tickets were selling for less than $1,150, more than twice as cheap as FIFA's original price and roughly the same as FIFA's upper-deck Category 3 price.

At times over the past week, the cheapest Category 2 tickets available on the resale marketplace dipped under $700, around 36 percent of FIFA's original price.

On Sunday, there were still listings of around 10,000 tickets to the match across various major resale sites, including FIFA's.

Over the four days that followed, many of those tickets went off the market.

By matchday morning, there were fewer than 1,300 tickets listed on FIFA's site.

Upon arrival at SoFi Stadium on Friday, The Athletic spoke with several fans who said they had bought their tickets less than a week before the match for less than half of FIFA's original price.

Giovanni De Anda, a lifelong soccer fan from nearby Monrovia, Calif., said he tracked prices for weeks, watched them fall, and bought a Category 1 ticket — in the 200 level behind one goal — for $1,026 last Saturday, six days before the match.