Going to North America '26: tickets, accommodations, etc. (non-politics)

Put in an application for each of the 5 people in my household. Used separate legitimate emails for each, the same residential address for all 5 and 2 different Visa debit cards. Ticked Australia fan for everyone and various stages of the tournament and various cities for each (don't really think this matters much though, probably to just gauge interest). All applications went through smoothly. Now the wait. Good luck to everyone.

 

Yes, one of my card is having the Issue. The bank verified that something is wrong in their end, and will let me know. Waiting for the call back. Check with your bank

Update: 30 min later bank called back, and they have cleared the issue. So do check with your bank

 

Name of the applicant: Patrick
Name on the Card: Diego

would that be a problem? what's done is done. we'll wait, hoping that OzRed wins the lottery and prove everyone wrong!!!

 

I'm goin' with Donald J. Trump for my entry...

 

Ah, the good old days of WC2006 in Germany when thanks to @Sleeper and his scanner, I managed to get tickets to 5 games, giving my CC number to people all over the world (including a member in Argentina and another in the Netherlands) crossing my fingers that it would go through in time... Yep, 20 years later, I'm baaaack!

 

Trump: “We’re Gonna Win so Much, You May Get Tired of Winning!”

*This group when our 400+ applications come through at the same time with the exact same timeslot....*

 

I was thinking more like Lionel Messi... I really want him to go to WC2026, hopefully as a player.

 

My first impressions for this "Visa Presale Draw" entry application... it was easy, maybe too easy! If it's easy for us, think about the touts who have the right tools and processing power to create zillions of FIFA IDs. Basically the only unique criteria right now is the FIFA ID, i.e. an email address. The rest of the form can be the same... same name, same credit card. Doesn't matter, there's no cross-referencing. I did my first two applications around 10am PST (19h CET), i.e 2 hours after the site opened. My wait time was 58mn for both though one of them skipped 6mn and finished early. The nice thing is that you can step away from the counter, the computer or phone can sleep, nothing changes the countdown. The only thing that reset the whole thing was to change the time on my computer... yes, I was trying to speed up the timer The strange thing is that for the first application, I did a logout and then it put me straight into the login page for another application without the wait. I think it was a glitch on their part, it didn't happen again. I now have received email confirmation for all my applications but they show up randomly within a few minutes to half-a-day, so please be patient. You can also check the status by logging into the FIFA web site with the FIFA ID you used for the application.
Just a few reminders taken from the Official Rules for the Visa Presale Draw:
- eligibility: 18 years and above
- no charges will be made to your card
- indicating preferences will not increase your chances of winning nor will they limit which tickets you may purchase
- each person may enter the Presale Draw only one (1) time and entries are limited to only one (1) entry per household
- each Prize will be an opportunity for the winner to purchase available Tickets during a pre-assigned window of time (Time Slot)
- individuals drawn as winners earlier in the Draw Period will be assigned earlier Time Slots and those drawn later will be assigned later Time Slots
- starting no earlier than Sep 29, 2025, persons who have been selected as winners through the drawing will be notified by email
- ticket purchases are subject to availability and managed on a first-come, first-served basis (ndlr: during your time slot)
- all purchases must be made with a Qualifying Visa® Card, but it needs not be the same card used when entering the Draw

 

May have been already posted, but here's the WC2026 match schedule

 

just submitted my entry! was blocked from accessing the entry page at my work laptop for some reason but no issues on my personal one, strange..

 

Just my opinion but I don't think fifa really cares too much if people like myself put in applications for 5 family members living in the same household using a couple of different Visa cards. 3 of us have had fifa accounts for years. They'd be more worried about more suspicious looking industrial scale 'tout' applications and would assume they'll go after them. FIFA generally lists a set of so called ticket rules but everyone seems to get around them and/or ignore them. They rarely follow through in any case. Whatever happens in this visa phase there's gonna be plenty of opportunities to purchase tickets over the next 9 months in any case so won't panic if I miss out this time.

 

if it is according to the number assigned, number of applications is immense and rapidly growing, right now it is about two million higher than yesterday at start.

 

I just get a blank box where I’m supposed to input the card details. As I’m traveling with limited I’ll just have to try agin later.

 

It is interesting to me that nowhere in the rules (outside of the generic stuff about tampering with the system etc) does it say anything about only being able to use each credit card once. Seems to me that as long as you have a different address in your FIFA ID you can use whatever Visa card you want as many times as possible.

 

Remember our conversation on page one?

 

It was 23 million apps for Qatar fyi...

If 3 million apps is true... and it probably is we can calculate the odds of getting a winning time slot. I will spell it out and you can believe my numbers or adjust how you see fit.

1,000,000 tickets this window. If the average 'winning' time slot buys 10 tickets (remember touts are way more likely to buy the full 40, but also are going to go for the highest value tickets) that is 100,000 time slots.

That means we are already at 3.33% chance of an app getting a winning time slot... and we still have 9 days of applications to go.

 

Where are you getting these stats?

 

my guess is the customer contact number under the profile tab, it keeps going up slowly. its at about 2,500,000

 

well, this is one of the things we will never know .... unless we manage to sneak someone into the FIFA ticketing department

 

Missing the old days when we entered lotteries for specific matches. By comparison, this was an incredibly dry experience.

No queue today, which will be a stark contrast to the first-come, first-serve phase coming up. That's going to be about as fun as finding a parking spot at Trader Joe's.

 

People worked themselves up with expectations without reading the documentation. This is a VISA pre-sale. visa paid a good fortune for this. New card signups and the first batch of tickets to be processed exclusively on their network. That's the goal here. We'll see what the general public sale in mid October brings.

 

So, how's everyone planning getting on? I know we don't have much info but be great to share what games we are looking at as a group, maybe see if we are eyeing up the same fixtures, particularly in the knockouts

The R16 M89/91 Double header looks very appetising, until you see Amtrak has put their prices from $20 to $180 for the train journey lol

 

Yeah, I used the same Visa CC on my three applications: 3 IDs, 2 addresses, 1 CC. All through, so far...