New Jersey is up.
Gov. Mikie Sherrill and the New York New Jersey World Cup will give out 770 free passes to matches at MetLife Stadium, they announced Tuesday.
The tickets will be distributed across five group stage matches and two knockout round matches hosted at the Meadowlands venue, which is temporarily called the New York New Jersey Stadium for the tournament. They’ll be distributed among New Jersey communities, nurses and pediatric patients, and customers of small businesses that participate in the Welcome World Rewards Program.
A pool of 500 from the total will go to groups including youth soccer players from underserved communities, families of New Jersey National Guard service members deployed overseas, Hackensack Meridian Health patients currently in the Make-A-Wish program, and Bergen County first responders helping support World Cup operations.
“We want the experience, first and foremost, to be accessible and affordable for as many New Jerseyans as possible,” Sherrill said in a statement.
New Jersey has had a rocky relationship with FIFA over the Cup, with Sherrill having unsuccessfully petitioned FIFA to shoulder costs for transportation to matches, and attorneys general in New York and New Jersey investigating ticket prices.
But the Garden State has a friend in high places: The World Cup host committee is headed by Tammy Murphy, New Jersey's former first lady. And with ticket prices now reaching into the thousands of dollars, New Jersey’s free ticket giveaway is an even better bargain than the $50 ticket lottery Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced for 1,000 lucky New York City residents. It was a popular initiative in the city, with New Yorkers maxing out its 50,000-person daily limit on its first day.
The opener at MetLife, which holds 82,500 fans, is this Saturday's match between Brazil and Morocco. The stadium will be hosting eight matches throughout the tournament. That means even combined, the low-cost and free tickets intended to give locals accessible entry to the matches make up less than .3% of tickets.
A limited number of round-trip New Jersey Transit tickets to the matches will cost $98.
Correction: This post has been updated to correctly describe the proportion of tickets being distributed for free or at low cost.
