Sergio Enrique Alvarado Montalvo had planned the perfect Father’s Day gift: flying his parents from Mexico to Dallas to watch Lionel Messi play Argentina against Austria in the World Cup. He paid $1,700 on StubHub for the tickets and spent nearly $6,000 on travel and hotels. But one day before the match, StubHub told him the seller could not deliver the tickets and refused to provide comparable replacements because prices had soared.
Montalvo, 45, and his family turned up at the stadium anyway, hoping to get in, with Montalvo on the phone to StubHub up until an hour before kick-off. “I was so sad and so frustrated, and so filled with rage, anger,” he told the BBC. “It was a mix of feelings that is hard to explain.” They ended up watching the match from a local fan festival instead. “It was a super sad weekend,” Montalvo added.
“Hundreds of World Cup fans had tickets cancelled at the last minute by resale site StubHub, leaving them stranded.”
His nightmare is part of what industry insiders are calling one of the largest ticketing collapses in history. As the 2026 World Cup sweeps across 16 cities in the US, Canada and Mexico, many fans have found their bucket lists ruined by last-minute cancellations on secondary marketplaces. The primary culprit is believed to be “speculative ticketing”, where unverified sellers list tickets they do not yet own, hoping to source them cheaper closer to the event. When prices soar, the sellers back out to sell for higher profit, leaving buyers with refunds that do not cover their travel costs.
Eben Pingree, 44, from Boston, faced the same scenario after his wife Caitlin paid $2,800 on StubHub for tickets to Scotland v Haiti to surprise their 11-year-old son Cole. They had coordinated an extensive trip with another father-son duo, only for the tickets to vanish on match day. “They basically had to just leave us there, and so my son was just devastated,” Pingree told the BBC.
Separately, two World Cup fans have filed a lawsuit against StubHub in a proposed class action on Tuesday, accusing the resale platform of failing to deliver tickets they had paid for. Julie Reeker Moghal and Reuben Renteria said in a court filing that they were acting on behalf of themselves and all others in a similar situation. The pair said they had paid StubHub at least $1,900 each for tickets that were never delivered.