16. June 2026

FIFA July match STR strategy

FIFA officially kicked off in Miami yesterday, with the first match being played at the Miami stadium, where Saudi Arabia met Uruguay. If you haven’t considered your FIFA strategy at all, it’s high time you did - although you’re probably a little late to be booked for the June games.

Before we dive into this, a huge shout-out to Airbnb, which invited us, along with some Homes and Experiences hosts, to the Saudi Arabia vs Uruguay match. We had a blast experiencing FIFA first-hand.

Since April, we’ve been saying there are two distinct patterns in the World Cup for Miami: the matches played in June and those scheduled for July. Fans have known since early this year which teams will be playing in the tournament's group stage, and bookings across the board have not been what they were hyped up to be. On the contrary, we see a decline in occupancy, especially for the first two games: yesterday’s matchup between Saudi Arabia and Uruguay and next week's matchup between Uruguay and Cabo Verde showed lower bookings than in June 2025.

People have been talking about FIFA’s ticket prices being too high, and I agree they are not cheap. They’ve been saying this will result in empty stadiums, but the facts on the ground look very different. Yesterday’s match was 96.1% sold out, with 62,764 fans in attendance.

The third and fourth games are more promising, especially in terms of the rates fans are willing to pay. As Miami’s booking window has continued to shrink over the last year, we are now well inside the 9.8 booking window for the June matches, and if you’re not booked by now, it’s pretty late in the game, but you still have a chance if you implement a strategy today.

If you’re not booked for the July games, don’t worry.

However, all hope is not lost: the July games are a wild card for fans, since no one yet knows who’s playing whom. We recommended a data-driven booking strategy for June, which we adjusted as we saw the demand and the facts on the ground change. It was a fairly slow process, but in the end, it’s paid off - I can only speak to our experience, but compared to last year's rates, we are booked for the June matches at double our ADR from 2025, and our nightly rates are beating the rates that our local competition in the Miami market is charging this year, by over 40%.

Get ready for July’s lightning round.

July is going to be very different. When we talk to hosts about Miami’s single-digit booking window, many say they don’t have the stomach for the uncertainty it brings. If you feel the same way, I’m sorry to say I have bad news for you: the booking windows for the July games are shorter and require a faster pivot from hosts.

These games will have booking windows ranging from 7 to 3 days. And that has nothing to do with Miami and everything to do with how the FIFA tournament schedule works.

Look at the first game in July.

We won’t know for sure which two teams will play each other until June 27th. And who’s playing will make a difference in your FIFA strategy. What we know for certain is that the match on July 3rd will be between the Group J winners and the Group H runners-up.

The current fan favorite in Group J is Argentina, and Spain, the reigning European champion, is most likely going to win Group H. At least that’s what the pundits thought before the games yesterday. Spain, coming into their first match with a 30-game winning streak, couldn’t score against Cape Verde, in the little nation's first World Cup appearance.

Yesterday’s upset proves anything can happen …

Before yesterday’s matches, I would have said that the July 3rd game would be Argentina vs Uruguay, but now I’m not so sure, especially after the 1-1 tie that Saudi Arabia pulled on against Uruguay.

Argentina will probably still be the team to beat in our first July game, but as we saw yesterday, anything is possible in this FIFA tournament. So now you’ll have to ask yourself what the matchup would mean for your listing. Argentina has the largest soccer fan base in the US in Florida, and with Messi playing for Inter Miami, there will be massive local support for that team.

Uruguay is a South American soccer powerhouse as well, with 15 Copa América titles. (Argentina holds the all-time record with 16 continental titles). The Copa América is the oldest international continental soccer tournament in the world. We saw Uruguay play yesterday, and were surprised that they didn’t pull off a win against the Saudi team.

If Spain can’t win against newcomer Cape Verde, I’m not so sure they’ll win their group, and a second-place finish in Group H would mean that the first knockout match in Miami is Argentina vs Spain. And when the South American champion is matched up against the European champion, now that’s a game that will be interesting.

The second July match in Miami is the quarter-final, and with ticket prices for that game already among the most expensive in the whole tournament, we’ll see how FIFA adjusts its pricing depending on who ends up playing.

Your booking strategy for July

Here’s where we are as of today: not one of our July match nights has been booked - yet. But we were expecting that. And we will adapt our strategy as the tournament progresses.

All we know for certain right now is that July is not a set-it-and-forget-it kind of month, but will require hosts to make fast, accurate decisions, with the shortest booking windows we’ve ever seen.