FIFA blames empty World Cup seats on fans in stadium concourses

Television pictures from Levi's Stadium showed thousands of empty seats during the Bay Area’s World Cup opener, a sharp contrast to the kind of sellout image FIFA wants for its U.S. tournament. The sight raised a basic accountability question: if the tickets were sold, why were so many prime seats still open, and what does that say about FIFA’s attendance model in a market built around premium pricing and spectacle?

FIFA answered a similar criticism in Guadalajara on Friday, blaming vacant-looking sections during the South Korea-Czech Republic match on ticketed fans who were standing in stadium concourses instead of sitting in assigned seats. FIFA said its official attendance figure counts tickets scanned and spectators inside the stadium footprint, not whether every seat is visibly occupied. At Guadalajara Stadium, which lists a capacity of 45,664, the announced crowd was 44,985, a figure that also included FIFA President Gianni Infantino.

The same optics followed the tournament to Santa Clara, where Levi's Stadium is one of 16 North American World Cup venues. The Bay Area will host six matches there from June 13 to July 1, including five group-stage games and one knockout match. The venue normally seats 68,500 for NFL games and can be expanded to more than 70,000 for soccer, a scale that had already been tested when Brazil and Colombia drew 70,971 there at Copa America in 2024.

Yet the World Cup opener in the Bay Area still showed visible gaps, especially on the east side of the stadium, during an unseasonably warm afternoon with kickoff temperatures around 82 degrees Fahrenheit, or 28 degrees Celsius. The same building had staged Super Bowl LX on February 8, 2026, meaning Levi's Stadium moved from the NFL’s championship game to World Cup soccer in less than four months.

The crowd pattern also reflected how FIFA events differ from NFL Sundays. Tailgating is not allowed for World Cup matches, which changes when fans arrive and can shift activity into concourses rather than seats. Bay Area Host Committee president Zaileen Janmohamed pushed back on skepticism before the tournament, but the empty-seat imagery now underscores a broader issue for FIFA in the United States: the event can be officially full on paper while still looking visibly unfinished on television.