New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced on Tuesday that the city, in partnership with the NY/NJ Host Committee, has secured 1,000 World Cup tickets at $50 apiece for New York City residents — the cheapest tickets available anywhere in the 2026 tournament and the only government-negotiated affordable allocation across all 16 host cities. The deal was finalized after Mamdani personally pressed FIFA President Gianni Infantino at a March meeting at City Hall.
How the Lottery Works
NYC residents can enter the lottery once per day from May 25 through May 29, with each day's signups capped at 50,000 entries. Winning a $50 ticket also earns the right to purchase a second seat at the same price — so a winner can bring a friend without paying market rate. Tickets are non-transferable and non-resellable; winners pick them up in person at the bus terminal before the match. Free round-trip bus transportation to MetLife Stadium — renamed "New York New Jersey Stadium" for the tournament — is included in every winning entry.
The 1,000 tickets are distributed across the first seven matches at MetLife: five group-stage fixtures, one Round of 32 match, and one Round of 16 match. They do not include the July 19 Final.
The Price Context
For scale: the cheapest standard-allocation ticket currently listed on Ticketmaster for a MetLife group-stage match is $535 — Norway vs. Senegal on June 22. The Mamdani allocation runs at roughly a 91 percent discount, and the bundled bus replaces a typical $80 round-trip NJ Transit fare to East Rutherford. A New York couple winning the lottery walks into the stadium for $100 total; the equivalent unsubsidized day starts north of $1,000.
What Mamdani Said
"A World Cup is coming to our backyard, and we want to ensure working-class New Yorkers have the opportunity to be part of it," Mamdani said at the announcement. "We sat down with the Host Committee to make certain this tournament belongs to the people who make this city what it is. Today, 1,000 New Yorkers are going to get into those stands for $50 and a free bus ride." He framed FIFA's standard ticket process as one "that will price out so many New Yorkers" — a line that doubles as policy positioning for the rest of his first year.
The Jersey Side Isn't Happy
Every MetLife match is physically played in East Rutherford, New Jersey — a fact New Jersey officials raised within hours of the announcement. A spokesperson for Governor Mikie Sherrill, Stephen Sigmund, told ESPN that "FIFA not caring about costs for New Jersey residents isn't new," framing the NYC carve-out as evidence of asymmetric treatment. New Jersey Representatives Nellie Pou and Frank Pallone Jr. called it a "publicity stunt" that "does nothing to address the cost of tickets" for the host region as a whole, and renewed their congressional inquiry to FIFA over the broader pricing structure.
The political wrinkle: the host committee was negotiated under former NJ Governor Phil Murphy, whose wife Tammy Murphy chairs the board. Sherrill, who succeeded Murphy, has been a public critic of the deal she inherited. Mamdani — who took office in January after defeating Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams in last November's five-way general election — walked into a Murphy-era allocation and turned it into the first major sports-and-culture media moment of his administration.
The Bigger Read
This is the first concrete deliverable of Mamdani's tenure that does not involve rent, buses, or childcare — and it is the kind of constituent-service story that travels well past his progressive base. The throughline is the same as the rest of his platform: take a thing the global capital class has effectively closed off (a marquee event in your own city, where the cheapest seat costs more than a month's groceries) and reopen it, at scale, for ordinary residents. A thousand tickets out of roughly four million for the tournament is small in absolute terms. As a signal — what a working mayor can extract from inside a global rights-holder's pricing model — it is much larger. FIFA's pricing model has stayed a flashpoint since: Infantino's own plan to sell a stake in FIFA's commercial operations to private investors drew a rejection from Concacaf and a boycott threat from UEFA two months later.
Lottery entry opens Sunday, May 25. The tournament begins June 11.
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