StubHub made hundreds of millions of dollars last quarter, but it is having to give a lot of that money back after reselling FIFA World Cup tickets that had yet to be issued.
Facing lawsuits, the company is now reporting a net loss, and watching its shares drop dramatically.
“It certainly feels like schadenfreude,” Carmi Levy, a technology analyst, told Global News. “In a way they kind of got what they deserved and I’m sure there are a lot of people now who are not too upset.”
But it was upsetting for soccer fans who purchased tickets on the resale hub, only to find out the seats they paid for weren’t actually theirs.
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“I don’t want to overstate this, but it was probably the most frustrating experience I’ve had in the last 10 years,” Rodrigue Alexandre told Global News.
Alexandre, a Haitian-American, had bought tickets for his family to see Haiti play. But when they got to the Philadelphia stadium, they couldn’t get in.
“StubHub can sell you a ticket, but it’s not transferred to you until it’s officially done through FIFA,” he said.
StubHub had allowed third party sellers to list tickets before FIFA officially issued them. But StubHub CEO Eric Baker pointed the finger back at FIFA’s own ticketing infrastructure.
“It was a long process and it was convoluted at times. FIFA didn’t help itself either,” Vijay Setlur, a professor at York University’s Schulich School of Business said.
Bradford Clements, a California-based lawyer, has been representing clients who paid for tickets on StubHub, but never received their seats.
He said he has 275 cases against StubHub and has recovered $2.2 million to date.
“They’re looking for help because so many of them have been screwed over,” he said.
He said one of the issues was StubHub allowing fans to purchase tickets before FIFA even began issuing tickets. FIFA began selling tickets in September 2025.
“Before then, there was nothing. There were no tickets,” Clements said. “Everything was non-existent. Everything was just a dream.”
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