Ticket touts in Qatar are charging England fans £4,000 to watch the Three Lions’ next games

After their storming start, England’s next matches have become the hottest ticket in town – with touts demanding £4,000 for seats.

Fans desperate to watch the Three Lions face having to pay up to 50 times face value.

Harry Kane and his squad play the United States on Friday and face Wales in a ‘derby’ clash on Tuesday next week.

The scramble for tickets began after the side’s thrilling opening match saw them thrash Iran 6-2 and make heroes out of goalscoring young guns, including 19-year-old Jude Bellingham.

All the games in the group stage of the tournament sold out months ago on the official website, with fans complaining they waited for six hours only to find none left. Governing body Fifa claimed it had 23million applications worldwide for three million seats.

When the final batch of tickets went on sale on September 27, the cheapest category 3 seats for any fans without Qatari residency cost £58. The most expensive category 1 seats were priced at £185.

Thousands of tickets have since reappeared on resale sites at vastly inflated prices. The Mail found category 1 tickets for England vs Wales on November 29 being sold on Ticombo for £3,995 each, including a whopping £709 booking fee.

For England’s match against the US on Friday, category 2 and 3 tickets were available priced from £249 to £1,288. Ticombo claimed to have 344 tickets for that game and 254 for the England-Wales fixture.

There is no guarantee that fans who buy tickets from touts will be allowed entry into Qatar.

Supporters going to the tournament are supposed to apply for a permit to enter the country, known as a Haaya Card, and to do so, they need to show a ‘ticket application number’ which is provided when they buy seats through Fifa.

It is unclear whether fans can get the code if they buy tickets from online touts.

Around 3,000 to 5,000 England supporters are believed to have travelled to Qatar for the group stages, with numbers set to increase if the Three Lions reach the knockout stages.

Between 2,000 and 3,000 Wales fans have also travelled and both sides could see their numbers boosted by expats in the region.

When the final batch of 500,000 tickets went on sale at 10am on September 27 some fans claimed they were going backwards in the queue, with the progress bar moving from 10 per cent to 3 per cent.

Many gave up, and others ended up with the message: ‘Currently unavailable.’

Fifa said the biggest number of tickets for games at the tournament had been bought by fans from England, Wales, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Australia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Yet there have been large numbers of empty seats at matches, with Qatar’s World Cup organisers coming under criticism for announcing highly dubious attendance figures that are higher than stadium capacities.

Fifa boss Gianni Infantino said: ‘If you look at the figures for the World Cup, it is astonishing. We will have three million people coming to Qatar for the World Cup and we actually had 23million ticket requests.

‘It was first come first served. We have sold more than three million tickets, and five billion people – well over half the world’s population – will watch the World Cup, uniting the world around the ball, which is magic.’