World Cup Aluminum Beer Cups Resell on eBay

The cups aren’t some random giveaway. They’re officially licensed Michelob Ultra drinkware, produced by Top Cup, a Rome, Georgia manufacturer that scaled up hard for this tournament. General Manager Zach Dixon told CBS News Atlanta that Top Cup produced 10 million cups across 70 different graphics for the World Cup, with the Rome plant capable of turning out up to 750,000 cups a day.

Michelob Ultra’s marketing team designed the run to include venue-specific, match-specific, and Finals-specific versions, plus separate red, white, and blue designs for bars and restaurants stateside. That level of granularity is exactly why collectors care. A cup from the opening match in one city is a different item than the one handed out during the semifinal in another, and once a stadium’s run of games wraps, that specific design stops getting made.

This isn’t the first time a stadium cup has turned into an accidental collectible. Resellers pulled the same move on the Honey Deuce cups at the U.S. Open, digging discarded plastic tumblers out of trash cans at Arthur Ashe Stadium once the drink went viral online. The World Cup version just swaps plastic for aluminum and swaps one tournament’s worth of cups for 104 games spread across three countries.

Individual cups are changing hands for $5 to $10 online, with some resellers walking out of a single game holding as many as 200 empties collected from seats and trash cans around the stadium.

Even on the low end, that’s potentially $1,000 in sales volume for cups that are collected completely free of charge. Considering that most of these cups were likely headed for a landfill, this is an environmental win too.

It’s a low-effort, low-capital flip in the same spirit as the match day scarves resellers have been working all tournament. No upfront cost, no risk of getting stuck with dead inventory since the cups are free to collect, and demand driven entirely by the fact that each one is a snapshot of a specific game that will never happen again.

With the final set for July 19 at MetLife Stadium between Spain and Argentina, there are only two games left to source new cup designs from. Ticket prices for that match have climbed steep, with the cheapest secondary market seats currently running $8,000 to $9,775 and the average resale price tracking closer to $11,000. Most people walking into that stadium didn’t pay that kind of money to think about beer cups on the way out, but for the ones who do grab a couple extra, it’s a way to claw back a small piece of an expensive night.

Once the tournament ends, the supply of new cups stops entirely. Whatever demand exists for these as keepsakes will have to be met by whatever collectors already picked up, which could support prices for the rarer stadium-specific designs longer term. It’s a modest flip, not a life-changing one, but for something that costs nothing to acquire, it’s hard to complain about the margins.