Theoretically, World Cup soccer is supposed to be more than the sum of its parts, an event that makes hearts around the world grow three sizes and constructs larger-than-life legends out of 5-foot-7 individuals. But in practice, it all ultimately shakes out to a zero-sum game. For every instance of someone rising to the occasion (Lionel Messi’s first career World Cup hat trick, Michael Olise reading Kylian Mbappe’s mind), there’s someone else who gets sent home with slumping shoulders. (Like the Iranian team, eliminated by a few millimeters, plus one Austria-Algeria farce.) Even Messi himself isn’t immune: You show the world a magisterial statue of the Argentinian soccer god, and the world will show you a shittier angle.
Away from the pitch, too, it took practically no time at all for a star to rise and fall, as an unexpected civilian delight—Freddy, a curious-cat German tourist who reveled in fast food and river tubes and pop country tunes—was either too pure or too compromised for this world and wound up deleting his account. Various World Cup–adjacent corporations have fallen into this pattern as well. For example, Levi’s cleverly leveraged the constraints of the tournament to score some points with a good-natured, good-clean-fun marketing play. But that suggested that somewhere else, a different big ol’ business was balancing it all out by crashing and burning under the glare of the global soccer spotlight.
Which brings us to the story of StubHub.
The stories of StubHub, I should say, because for the past few weeks I’ve encountered one bummer narrative after another about the company’s World Cup ticketing woes. Tolstoy may have famously observed that unhappy families are all unhappy in their own way, but when it comes to StubHub, each story sounds quite similar.
They seemingly all revolve around a protagonist crafting a World Cup trip of a lifetime, saving up for and securing tickets for themselves and a loved one (or several). They sing of travel itineraries and hotel reservations and PTO days, a whole odyssey of best-laid plans to sail smoothly through the FanProtect Guarantee™ sea. That’s when things go dark—with tickets never arriving or, worse, maybe never existing. And, most chillingly of all, they detail the StubHub customer service agents who completely understand their concern and vow to contact the Trusted Seller and get this all sorted out and then, poof, dissipate into ghosts as soon as game day grows nigh.
Most of these tales conclude with a monetary refund that feels more like a curse, accompanied as it is by the sickening realization that obtaining new tickets at the eleventh hour would cost, like, three times as much. A few of the testimonies also center on frustrated ticket sellers whose transactions have been canceled and/or gummed up by scammers and who are now trapped in a digital Backrooms-ish liminal space with neither tickets nor money in hand. Some of these stories even involve kids, man.
Whatever side of the ledger they’re on, though, all of these boondoggles share that same searching desperation you feel from a soccer squad that’s trailing in stoppage time. All anyone wants is to just get in the game. All everyone seeks is to somehow make something happen, here in this dwindling time between right now and whenever that whistle blows.
As a wise man—that man being Coach Finstock from the feature film Teen Wolf—once said, there are three rules to live life by: “Never get less than 12 hours’ sleep, never play cards with a guy who’s got the same first name as a city, and never go near a lady who's got a tattoo of a dagger on her body. Now you stick with that, everything else is cream cheese.”
After all I’ve read about StubHub of late, I’d add a fourth rule of thumb to that helping hand: Never enter into a transactional contract with a business whose IPO prospectus reads, “We were incorporated as Pugnacious Endeavors, Inc.”
But let’s back up for a moment, all the way back to 1999, when a man named Eric Baker wanted to take a gal to see The Lion King on Broadway and wasn’t sure how best to cop such a hot ticket. One thing led to another, and a few years later, Baker had an MBA from Stanford and a secondary ticketing market startup called StubHub with a classmate named Jeff Fluhr.
Differences in strategic vision between Baker and Fluhr came to a head by 2004, the year Baker was ousted from the company and also the year he incorporated the spite shell company called Pugnacious Endeavors. And the two jostled for position in the resale market from there: In 2006, Baker created the company viagogo—essentially a European StubHub. In 2007, Fluhr sold StubHub to eBay for $310 million. In 2009, Baker raised a round of viagogo funding from a consortium that included Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf, luxury-brand doyen Bernard Arnault, and banking scion Lord Jacob Rothschild.
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Later, according to a 2020 Forbes piece, Baker would joke about the supermajority voting shares he’d structured for himself at viagogo, which made him unoustable: “I modeled it after Putin and the Politburo,” he reportedly said.
Around Thanksgiving of 2019, Baker bought back his old shop, acquiring StubHub from eBay for $4.1 billion and combining his ticket exchanges old and new. One of the key investors in that deal was the firm Madrone Capital Partners, cofounded by Greg Penner, who would later become the co-owner and CEO of the Denver Broncos—and who is to Walmart what Succession’s Tom Wambsgans was to Waystar Royco. (I only wish Wambsgans’s parents were Christian sex therapists in Pasadena!) That Forbes article, six months later, called the transaction—which closed on February 13, 2020, juuuust before the COVID-19 pandemic put the kibosh on live events for the better part of two years, whoops!—the “Worst. Deal. Ever.”
Over the years, others have built and scaled competing ticketing businesses backed by influential investors. SeatGeek has raised capital from people ranging from Ashton Kutcher in 2011 to Utah Jazz and Mammoth owner Ryan Smith in 2022. Another enterprise, Vivid Seats, emerged in 2001 and went public in 2021, aided by Chelsea chairman and Los Angeles Dodgers, Lakers, and Sparks part owner Todd Boehly. And in 2013, an article about two buddies from Lehigh, Pennsylvania, who founded the business TickPick began: “Like the teen who goes goth and starts smoking pot to spite her suburban parents, ticket resale site TickPick was formed entirely in reaction to StubHub.” (In 2024, that company announced that Rory McIlroy’s Symphony Ventures was part of a broader $250 million fundraise.)
“People have been trading tickets since the days of the gladiators,” StubHub’s Baker told The Telegraph in 2008. And nearly two decades later, StubHub remains a looming presence in the cutthroat ticket resale arena, having battled through that “worst deal ever” gauntlet to regain a significant market share. But victory can spoil. And StubHub’s notoriety means that whenever things go wrong, there are a lot of eyes on the carnage.
In a 2004 interview with Stanford’s alumni magazine, StubHub cofounder Fluhr painted a glum hypothetical image that his company sought to eliminate: a fan marooned outside a stadium after having been had by “some guy in a trench coat who steals their money and runs away.” But after reading about the experiences some people have had with StubHub recently, that scenario doesn’t sound so bad. At least that guy in the trench coat makes it snappy!
In recent weeks, people’s far more drawn-out misadventures have been passed around on social media, the way the most unenviable anecdotes are, supplemented by screenshots of broken promises and endless runarounds and so, so many breadcrumbs. They’ve been rehashed and amplified in places like the Ticket Talk podcast, whose host, ticketing industry veteran Scott Friedman, recently predicted that “StubHub is in for a rude awakening.” At least one wronged World Cup fan went on a local TV news segment entitled 2 Helps You. “She greeted me with a hug, watery eyes and a heart full of gratitude,” recalled the self-described “journalistic bulldog” from KPRC Houston who successfully pestered StubHub to get a nice lady some replacement tickets for a Cape Verde game.
In Canada, an attorney general recently promised to investigate StubHub’s practices to see whether they violated consumer protection policies. In California, attorney Bradford Clements wrote that he’s received World Cup ticketing-related inquiries from more than 100 people. (Clements has been on the StubHub beat for some time now.) Last week, a pair of frustrated fans filed a lawsuit over the matter in New York. This week, the Texas attorney general launched an inquiry into the business. And in an email interview with The Ringer, James Vlahakis, a Chicago-based lawyer and soccer fanatic, told me that he’d also been doing his best to assist high-and-dry StubHub customers in achieving their no. 1 objective: to get the seats they thought they’d already had, not the money back. “I enjoyed receiving a photo from one couple who ended up getting seats,” he said. “The smiles on their faces were ‘priceless.’”
I asked Vlahakis why I kept hearing so much about StubHub’s snafus in particular, and less about its various competitors. (You can find isolated complaints out there about issues with World Cup tickets purchased through the Vivid Seats and SeatGeeks of the world, but it’s nowhere near StubHub’s critical mass.) His answer was that both the size and the structure of the company were contributing to its unfolding situation. “I believe that this is a function of market share/volume, where StubHub is the largest reseller app,” he wrote back. “And because of the nature of StubHub’s business practices.”
Sometimes practice makes perfect in the World Cup, but sometimes it ruins everything. This isn’t the first time the ticketing platform (and, to a far lesser extent, its smaller industry peers) has fouled up someone’s plans, and it won’t be the last; that’s the cost of doing business. But as Vlahakis pointed out, the sheer scale of the World Cup tournament, with 104 matches spread across 16 cities, “necessarily multiplies the chances of errors with ticket sales and listings and the transfer of legitimate tickets which may get ‘lost in the system,’” he wrote.
The system, in this case, encompasses not just StubHub but also FIFA’s ticketing platform, the layer through which every primary or secondary ticket sale must first flow. There’s also the involvement of the larger-scale brokers and resellers that have long commandeered online ticketing. And more so than usual, the system also includes all the amateur hustlers out there: or, in the more measured words of Vlahakis, all the “first-time sellers who might be using the popularity of the World Cup to engage in speculative sales/listings.” In the ticket resale world, a speculative sale is when you post seats you don’t actually have on you—some refer to them as “ghost tickets”—with the intention of acquiring and delivering the goods sometime before showtime. This isn’t allowed on StubHub, where the terms and conditions call for sellers to have tickets “in hand” and where “dropped sales” can incur large penalties and lead to a ban. Still, those ghosts haunt the site all the same.
Back in 2015, ahead of the Patriots-Seahawks Super Bowl, the NFL caused a downstream ripple effect when the league took several days longer than usual to issue players, sponsors, and friends of the program their customary Super Bowl ticket allocations. Not only did this interrupt some players’ golf plans, but it also screwed up the established, expected flow of tickets across the desks of professional brokers and into various resale sites’ inventories. “They are sellers that we have a history with,’’ one StubHub spokesman told The Seattle Times when many of these sellers failed to cough up the tickets they’d promised. “For whatever reason this year, some of the larger sellers that list on our site did not come through with their obligations. We’re not entirely sure why. But it’s an across-the-market thing.’’
The 2015 article noted that StubHub had shelled out $5 million on Super Bowl tickets “to avoid defaulting on orders,” because “StubHub policy guarantees that fans will get a ticket to the game if a seller can’t provide a ticket.” Here in 2026, however, that’s no longer the case.
“Our FanProtect program guarantees all purchases on our marketplace so buyers have peace of mind knowing their ticket is authentic,” reads a bullet point called “Security and Trust” in a section outlining “Our Value Proposition to Buyers” in the S-1 memo that StubHub filed to the SEC last year in advance of its September 2025 IPO. “We believe that live events represent once-in-a-lifetime experiences,” it continues; “therefore, should any issue with the ticket arise, we have support teams that play a critical role in helping find substitute tickets to ensure a buyer can attend the event.”
But what StubHub’s program actually guarantees is that “we will find you comparable or better tickets to the event, or offer you a refund of what you paid.” And a lot hinges on how one interprets the word comparable. To many fans, it suggests that if a comparable seat is available, StubHub ought to get it for them, at whatever the cost. To StubHub, however, the rubric seems to be closer to: If there isn’t a similar ticket to be found at a comparable price, all that’s owed to the customer is the money, honey.
In a statement to the Vancouver Sun last week, a StubHub spokesperson explained that “the issues fans have experienced at this World Cup are largely transfer problems, not ticket problems” and noted, of FIFA, that “the event organizer’s own ticketing infrastructure, including a new app launched right before the tournament began, has had significant performance issues that have affected transfers across all resale platforms.”
While this comes across as StubHub passing the buck—and while any customer just trying to see the soccer game they already paid for surely has zero fucks to give about the difference between a transfer problem and a ticket problem—Vlahakis noted in his email to me that the explanation does have some validity. “In a way, what we are seeing is a collision of several related issues and business practices, compounded by the high demand for tickets,” he wrote, all of it exacerbated “by the fact that FIFA’s app is involved, where it is not a tried and tested app such as Ticketmaster.” (One major snag early on: In many cases, the QR codes for even normal, legit tickets purchased directly from FIFA weren’t uploaded to the FIFA app until only a few hours before game time.) Whoever is to blame, though, the recurring outcome is that no one can quite get their foot on the ball.
From what I’ve seen, the general public’s reaction to those who have StubHubbed their toes en route to the World Cup runs the gamut from “Well, this oughta be a slam-dunk class-action lawsuit!” to “Uhh, you obviously should have known better.” Vlahakis told me that in his opinion, StubHub’s services and conditions all but eliminate the potential for a successful class action. “But it might be possible,” he added, “to seek injunctive relief in state or federal court—depending on the circumstances—where injunctive relief may involve causing a court to order StubHub to fulfill an order, or change its practices.”
Of course, that’s a lot to ask of someone who is just trying to get to a knockout-round World Cup match with their dad or their bros or their children in the next couple of weeks. StubHub has, to be fair, swooped in to make things right for a number of the squeakiest wheels out there, granting some of them actual replacement tickets to games and inviting others to attend semifinal contests in hospitality suites. (Imagine the small talk!)
But lots of transactions remain in limbo, and lots of anguish persists, and lots of people like Friedman, Clements, and Vlahakis continue to do whatever they can to advocate for spurned consumers: compiling spreadsheets, sending strongly worded letters, dispensing hard-won advice. The Greek national soccer team may not have qualified for the 2026 World Cup, but Vlahakis quips that his father instilled in him “a Greek work ethic, which generally involves me helping people get what they deserve.”
Which brings up a question: What do these customers deserve? With everything going on in the world, feeling bad for folks who are spending thousands of dollars on soccer isn’t always front of mind. And let’s be honest: Using ticket resale sites has always carried some level of risk that you’ll be left high and dry outside the gates. FIFA’s own website warns that buying tickets from anywhere other than the soccer federation itself exposes fans to potentially fraudulent, duplicated, or overpriced tickets.
But FIFA also isn’t exactly innocent here, and the institution’s shenanigans over the years, in the realm of ticketing and beyond, may have made matters more chaotic. “A lot of fans don’t like FIFA’s profit model, and they don’t want to buy tickets on FIFA’s ticketing website,” Vlahakis told me. “Yes, I know that FIFA is an official not-for-profit entity,” he added, “but the perception is out there that FIFA is ‘gouging’ fans. And this leads StubHub to be seen as the better marketplace.” Which has, in turn, led a lot of fans into this mess.
While these past weeks have been rough for the ticket resale industry, and StubHub in particular, it’s hard to know whether this will have lasting or quantifiable ramifications, or whether consumers will hand wave it away as just one more bit of World Cup weirdness the next time they’re in the market for a good deal on Sphere tickets. (I did personally muster a grim chuckle when I found myself thinking about how, in the future, I should maybe stick to Verified Resale–type stuff posted on that bastion of trustworthiness … Ticketmaster.) Vlahakis told me that there were several reasons he’d decided not to attend the tournament, one being that he “did not want to be disappointed by one of the many third-party sellers.”
Last fall, I’d excitedly signed up for some official FIFA-sanctioned Visa cardholder ticket presale draw, naively believing I’d take my husband and sons to a game or two on American soil, hooray! How pretty that was to think. First, I lost every round of those lotteries, obviously. Then, I heard tell of available nosebleed seats for round-robin games—listed at thousands of dollars a pop. Having lost hope by that point, I decided it was best to lose all interest as well.
Later, I’ll admit I felt mildly vindicated—in a toxic, sour-grapes kinda way—when I learned that many people who had gotten lucky in those early FIFA-led lottos had still, in many cases, been undermined by the governing body’s shady ways. The federation reshuffled seat locations, recategorized pricing tiers, released and/or retracted new (and/or supposedly sold-out) seats at random—and then retreated behind legalese.
But more recently, as I’ve seen so many stories of people’s stymied World Cup ticket purchases on StubHub, I just keep coming back to the truth that it easily could have been me among them, trudging a mile in those cleats. Had I been a smidge more stubborn, a skosh more YOLO, a teensy bit more determined to be in the building—maybe I would have checked out StubHub, just to see. Maybe I would have clicked on the site’s FAQs and seen the Q that asks, “Is it safe to buy World Cup tickets on StubHub?” and the A that assures: “Yes!” and probably I would have figured that they wouldn’t put that in writing if it weren’t on the up-and-up. Had I felt just a little more flush, maybe I would have clicked “buy,” and the rest would have been either happy or horrible history.
In World Cup soccer, sometimes you do in fact win the big game. Other times, though, the main thing people remember is that time you totally whiffed on the goal.
