FIFA · Go-to-market · Senior · 45 to 60 minutes

How should FIFA price World Cup tickets?

FIFA is the global governing body for international football and runs the FIFA World Cup. Answer this product management case and get it graded line by line against a weighted rubric.

pricing strategy
go to market
systems thinking
stakeholder judgment
metric design

The situation

You are a senior PM in FIFA's ticketing organization, preparing a recommendation for leadership before the next World Cup ticket sale phases open. Public interest is extremely high, inventory is limited, and every pricing move will be examined by fans, media, teams, sponsors, and regulators. Leadership is debating whether to keep mostly fixed prices, introduce more dynamic pricing, or use a hybrid approach across matches and seat categories. At the same time, fan complaints are rising about not understanding what seats are really available, how allocations work across sales phases, and why prices in secondary markets often look very different from prices on the primary channel. The hard part is that pricing, fairness, trust, and operational complexity are tightly linked, but not identical problems. Your recommendation needs to decide what FIFA should do in the upcoming sales windows, what customer facing transparency changes matter most, and how to account for resale behavior without assuming FIFA can fully control it. Assume you have access to prior tournament sales patterns, current demand signals, customer complaint themes, and limited snapshots of resale prices and fees.

What to produce

Write a 1 to 2 page decision memo for FIFA ticketing leadership.

Your answer must

Make a clear recommendation on the pricing approach for upcoming World Cup ticket sale phases, fixed, dynamic, or hybrid, and where it should or should not apply.
Separate the pricing decision from allocation and transparency issues, and explain which customer problems each one is meant to solve.
Propose a rollout and communication plan that includes what fans should be told about availability, seat quality visibility, and price changes.
Explain how resale market behavior and fees should influence the primary ticketing strategy, including limits on what FIFA can realistically control.
Define success metrics, guardrails, and leading indicators for fan trust, sell through, revenue quality, and operational risk.

Constraints

You cannot assume FIFA can rebuild its full ticketing platform before the next sale window.
You cannot assume FIFA can eliminate or fully control third party resale markets.
Any recommendation must work under intense public scrutiny and fairness concerns across a global fan base.
Do not rely on adding large new inventory or changing the tournament format.

Format

Use sections for recommendation, reasoning, rollout, metrics, and risks.

How FIFA actually played it

A case on dynamic ticket pricing for the World Cup, arguing that price changes reflected better information and demand, while the real problems were opaque allocation and misleading seat maps. It looks at resale prices and fees.

Separate price movement from allocation and transparency issues
Dynamic prices reflect information as well as demand
Resale markets limit what primary prices can do

Built from Case Study: In Defense of FIFA’s Dynamic Ticket Pricing for the World Cup by The Pricing Conundrum.