Sophia HamiltonBelgium face Tunisia today, 6 June 2026, at the King Baudouin Stadium in Brussels — the Red Devils' final home fixture before flying to North America for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Under new manager Rudi Garcia, Belgium beat Croatia 2-0 in Zagreb only days ago and head into Group G alongside Egypt, Iran and New Zealand. Tunisia, drawn in Group F with Sweden, Japan and the Netherlands, are taking the same final-tune-up route.
For UK football supporters, today's friendly is mostly a TV event. But it has triggered something more consequential: a new wave of last-minute ticket-resale offers aimed at England fans planning to travel for the tournament itself — and a record-setting surge in football-related fraud reports through the spring.
A pre-World Cup fraud wave UK fans should know about
Action Fraud, the UK's national reporting centre for fraud and cybercrime, has warned for years that football ticket scams spike sharply in the months before a major international tournament. The pattern is consistent: fans search for sold-out matches, find a private seller through social media or a resale platform, and are pushed toward bank-transfer or cryptocurrency payment — outside the protections that come with a card payment.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup, hosted across the United States, Canada and Mexico, has produced a fresh wrinkle. Many UK fans have never bought tickets directly from FIFA or used the official resale platform, and a significant share of fraudulent listings circulating in 2026 advertise "friendly match" tickets — including for fixtures like Belgium-Tunisia — as a way to test buyer trust before pivoting to the much higher-value World Cup inventory.
The result is a textbook consumer-rights moment, and the rules that apply are different from a normal online purchase.
What your card payment actually protects
Two pieces of UK law do most of the heavy lifting when ticket purchases go wrong.
Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act 1974 makes the credit card provider jointly liable with the seller for purchases between £100 and £30,000. If the tickets are not delivered, are counterfeit, or the listing turns out to be fraudulent, the cardholder can claim directly against the issuer. The protection is statutory — the issuer cannot decline it simply because the merchant was overseas.
Chargeback is a card-scheme rule (Visa, Mastercard or Amex), not a law, and covers debit-card payments as well as credit-card payments below the Section 75 threshold. Time limits are short — typically 120 days from the date the service should have been provided — and the issuer's decision is final.
Bank transfers, money-app payments and cryptocurrency are outside both. The Authorised Push Payment (APP) reimbursement code introduced by the Payment Systems Regulator in October 2024 requires UK banks to reimburse victims of authorised push-payment fraud in most cases, with a £415,000 cap per claim. But the same rules expect customers to take reasonable care, and proving that becomes harder when the seller advertised openly and the buyer ignored a written warning from their bank.
The legal status of resale itself
A second misunderstanding worth correcting: in England and Wales, reselling football tickets above face value is a criminal offence under Section 166 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 unless the resale is authorised by the home club, the visiting club or the match organiser. The offence applies to anyone — not just commercial touts — and carries an unlimited fine.
The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act applies to "designated football matches", which includes most professional fixtures involving English and Welsh clubs. International friendlies played abroad are governed by the law of the host country, but UK buyers can still be charged on return if the resale itself originated in the UK.
For the 2026 World Cup, FIFA's official resale platform is the only route that protects the buyer's right to a refund if the match is cancelled, relocated or if their travel is disrupted by a force-majeure event. Tickets bought outside the official platform have routinely been voided at the gate at previous tournaments, with no compensation route open.
Travel insurance — read the football clause
A separate issue catches out UK supporters every year. Most standard travel insurance policies exclude attendance at organised sporting events from their cover, or treat ticket cost as a non-recoverable expense if the match is cancelled. A specialist sports-event extension is usually available for an additional premium, but only a minority of mainstream policies include it as standard.
Before booking flights for a Group G fixture in Atlanta or a Group F fixture in Vancouver, UK fans should check three points with their insurer: cover for ticket cost on event cancellation, cover for missed connection where the cause is a transport-network problem rather than personal delay, and the maximum claim per person for delayed baggage on multi-leg routes. The answers determine whether a £400 ticket is a recoverable cost or a sunk one.
When a solicitor is actually useful
Most ticket-fraud cases close at the card-issuer or APP-reimbursement stage. A consumer or contract solicitor adds real value in three narrower situations: when the loss exceeds Section 75's £30,000 ceiling because a group has paid jointly through one account; when the seller is identifiable and located in a jurisdiction with reciprocal small-claims enforcement, making private recovery realistic; and when a buyer faces a criminal charge under Section 166 because they re-listed a ticket on a friend's behalf.
The government-run Find a legal adviser service is the single official check for accredited consumer and contract specialists in England and Wales, and the search filters allow buyers to narrow by specialism, region and quality mark.
For most UK fans, the practical step today is administrative rather than legal: pay any World Cup or friendly ticket on a credit card, save the listing screenshot, and verify the resale platform against FIFA's official partner list before transferring any money. Belgium-Tunisia kicks off at 14:00 BST. The Group G fixtures begin on 13 June 2026. Between the two dates, several thousand UK households are likely to face a decision that will benefit from a thirty-second consumer-rights check rather than a hundred-pound transfer to a stranger.
