There are a lot of things people would do for World Cup tickets. One Seattle-area couple decided to put their plans to move on pause to catch most of the matches in the city.
Peter Hundrieser and Jill Landauer are big soccer fans. They live on Mercer Island and had planned to sell their house this spring and move to Massachusetts to be closer to Landauer’s family.
But they changed their minds after learning that the World Cup would be in Seattle.
“This is exciting. This is our first World Cup match,” Hundrieser told KNKX outside Seattle Stadium ahead of the match between Belgium and Egypt. “We’ve been Sounders fans for years. We love soccer.”
The couple said they bought tickets to almost all the matches in Seattle (skipping only the July 6 game). They are most excited about Friday’s match between the U.S. and Australia.
“Cristian Roldan, you are my favorite player,” Landauer said of Sounders' captain who is on the U.S. men's national soccer team.
World Cup tickets are going for hundreds to thousands of dollars each. Hundrieser and Landauer are Sounders FC season ticket holders, so they were able to buy the tickets six months ago at face value. They are counting the World Cup as their vacation for this year.
The couple had been talking about moving out of Seattle for a while. They have both recently retired and don’t have strong connections to the city anymore. Landauer is from the Boston area, so the plan was to move closer to her family.
“But when we found out that FIFA was going to be here, we’re like, ‘No. Why don’t we just stay through 2026 before we go back east?” she said. “It’s like once in a lifetime. We went from our house to the light rail to here. You don’t have to pay for hotels or planes or anything.”
That light rail ride was filled with people from all over the world.
“It was such a great world feeling,” Landauer said. “Look at all these people coming in and feeling really happy, really happy together. It was really nice.”
