StubHub canceled World Cup ticket orders hours before matches, leaving buyers scrambling, stranded and now part of a potential class-action suit filed Tuesday in Manhattan federal court. The case centers on two fans who say they paid thousands for tickets that vanished at the worst possible moment.
Reuben Renteria said he paid $2,294 for two tickets to a June 18 match in Mexico, then arrived only to find StubHub had canceled the order. He later got his money back, but not before losing travel costs and time. His complaint, joined by Julia Reeker Moghal’s, is that the damage did not stop at the price of admission.
Moghal’s experience is what pushes the dispute beyond a routine refund fight. She bought three tickets for $1,905 to a Switzerland matchup on June 18 and went to SoFi Stadium in the City of Angels, where she could not get in. After the cancellation notice, she spent hours on the phone with StubHub. The company first told her the tickets were null, then said it would deliver them an hour before the match. She says that never happened, and she still has not received a refund.
StubHub says its FanProtect Guarantee provides replacement tickets or a full refund if anything goes wrong, and the company says the World Cup problems are largely tied to problems with the event organizer’s own ticketing infrastructure. But that explanation does not answer the narrow question at the heart of this case: who decides which tickets are valid once a sale has been unwound, the marketplace that sold them or the event system that later rejects them.
That gap is why the suit matters now. Renteria and Moghal also reported the incidents to the Federal Trade Commission, and the Attorney General in British Columbia has announced an investigation into the debacle. Many fans have reported World Cup tickets being canceled days and hours before matches, a pattern that has left people paying for travel, time off and seats they never reached. The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages, and for Moghal the immediate issue remains unresolved: the tickets were canceled, the match passed and the refund has still not shown up.
