Is the World Cup Worth It?
The 2026 tournament will mean big money—but for whom?
This article is from Dollars & Sense: Real World Economics, available at http://www.dollarsandsense.org
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In big bold letters, a Fox News headline read, “World Cup 2026 expected to bring economic boost to American host cities.” Another headline on NewJersey.com estimated a “$2B impact for NJ.” Still another published by Atlanta News First said “2026 World Cup expected to bring multimillion-dollar boost to Atlanta.”
In June and July of 2026, the United States, Canada, and Mexico will jointly host the prestigious FIFA Men’s World Cup tournament, drawing eyes—and tourists—from across the world.
Almost 3.5 million people attended the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. An estimated 200 million viewers tuned into each game for the 2018 World Cup in Russia, according to research by sports economist Victor A. Matheson, who has studied the tournament in great detail.
In 2026, there will likely be even more viewers given the increase in the number of matches; in a newly expanded tournament, 48 national teams will now compete for world soccer’s ultimate prize (in 2022, just 32 teams participated).
All this attention and travel means big money. But who will get it? And just how much money is there to go around? A 2018 Boston Consulting Group (BCG) study estimated that the total net economic benefit could be as much as $5 billion, with each of the 16 host cities—11 in the United States—receiving $90 million to $480 million.
While a spokesperson for BCG said in an email that the report could not be shared because “unfortunately it is no longer available online,” Matheson, who specializes in the economic impact of sports, believes the consulting group’s numbers are moderately inflated.
“I can definitely believe in amounts in the very low tens of millions per game, [putting] numbers in the hundred million [range] per city,” Matheson said in an interview. Calculating from this, the total figures for the tournament for the 16 host cities would come in at less than $2 billion.
One way to assess the competing claims about the FIFA Men’s World Cup is to look at the Olympics, a similar sports mega-event, albeit one that is focused on one city, not spread out across 16 cities in three countries. “Generally the promises of a big boost to tourism and putting the city on the world map fail to materialize,” said Helen Jefferson Lenskyj, author of multiple books on the Olympics and a retired professor at the University of Toronto.
Civic educator and public defender Tom Tresser helped stop the 2016 Summer Olympics from coming to his home city of Chicago alongside a grassroots group called No Games Chicago. He went even further with regard to sports mega-events: “[The promises made] are complete fiction. And it’s well documented.”
Tresser said that for Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics, the organizing committee commissioned two academics “who no one ever heard of who [said the] games would bring in 300,000 jobs and $20 billion of economic impact.” Meanwhile, Tresser said, an independent study found that the real number would be closer to $4.5 billion, which would have been significantly less than the cost of hosting the games.
Money In and Money Out
How does the FIFA Men’s World Cup work and where does the money come from? FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) is the international governing body for soccer.
The net revenues are calculated by estimating the total revenues minus the costs. “FIFA’s keeping the revenue from the tournament and cities are keeping the revenues from the tourism,” Matheson said.
The former includes media and television rights, marketing rights, ticketing, hospitality revenue, and licensing. In 2018 in Russia, these revenues totaled $6.8 billion, according to Matheson’s research.
The costs, meanwhile, largely include providing stadiums and organizing the fans to get to them. “In a place like the United States, this is a pretty small inconsequential set of costs,” Matheson said, because the stadiums and tourist infrastructure are already in place. He put the price tag at about $1 billion in total.
In contrast, the 2022 World Cup in Qatar required an estimated cost of $300 billion according to Bloomberg, with concomitant labor abuses to boot.
Notably, the costs for FIFA are, relatively speaking, very low. As a result, according to Jennifer Li, a co-coordinator of Dignity 2026, a U.S.-based, national human rights and labor rights coalition organized around the U.S.-Canada-Mexico tournament, FIFA is expecting to generate $11 billion in profits in 2026.
Why the Numbers Don’t Add Up
Matheson says there are three main reasons why the BCG numbers on the economic impact on cities are likely to be inflated: they don’t account for the substitution effect, crowding out, or leakages.
The substitution effect means that money that would otherwise be spent on, say, a night out to the theater, is instead spent on attending a World Cup match. For the local economy, the impact is roughly the same, but by not looking at the lost income from the theater, the World Cup match has a surface-level appearance of boosting economic activity in numbers like those produced by BCG.
Crowding out means that the activities associated with the World Cup displace other economically beneficial activities. Matheson, in an academic paper, draws attention to the 1994 World Cup hosted in the United States, where matches in Orlando may have displaced hotel visitors who would have gone to Disney World instead.
Finally, Matheson points to leakages—where the money that is spent locally doesn’t stay there. The revenue that FIFA takes out of the World Cup (ranging in the billions of dollars) is the biggest source, but there are others, too. Matheson points to the example of hotel companies that charge three times the rate but don’t pass on the additional income to their employees and instead take it as profits for chains that are not locally rooted.
Other Costs
But money isn’t the only thing at play here. People’s rights—and in some cases, lives—are at stake. While no one expects a repeat of the deadly debacle in Qatar 2022, where as many as several thousand workers died, there are issues of human and workers’ rights in holding such events in Mexico, the United States, and Canada, too.
As Lenskyj, the retired professor at the University of Toronto, puts it, “It’s not just places like Qatar that exploit migrant laborers.” Everything from how the unhoused populations of host cities experience increased police brutality to worker abuses is at play in holding a mega-event like the FIFA 2026 Men’s World Cup. And the effects can be long-lasting.
For example, “There was a detention center built in...the lead up to the Olympic Games in Atlanta in the 1990s and they housed a lot of the unhoused individuals there. And that [policy decision]...really set the tone for criminal justice policy in that city for the next 20 years,” said Li, who is also director of the O’Neill Institute’s Center for Community Health Innovation at Georgetown Law.
The coalition she works with, Dignity 2026, is trying to do something about human rights issues at the FIFA Men’s World Cup in 2026. Comprised of groups ranging from the AFL-CIO to Human Rights Watch, and the NAACP to the LGBTQI+ advocacy organization Athlete Ally, the coalition has consulted with FIFA behind the scenes for a robust human rights framework, among other issues.
But the framework that FIFA recently produced in July, said Li, is watered down from what the coalition and other expert groups recommended. Moreover, Li said, FIFA has refused to pay the costs of implementing the framework’s human rights provisions, putting it, too, on the shoulders of the host cities.
World Cup, or No?
Given all this, with FIFA anticipating $14 billion from the 2026 Men’s World Cup and the 16 host cities coming in at less than $2 billion in economic impact in total, is it even worth it to host a World Cup? This is a particularly important question, since, according to Matheson, the coming World Cup is likely a best-case scenario for this genre of sporting. “No one likes FIFA because FIFA is wildly corrupt... [but] there’s not a lot of public taxpayer money going into this.”
But as with so many other areas in sports economics, it’s not localities that fundamentally benefit from holding these events, and disempowered majorities in host cities even less. It’s fat cats at institutions like FIFA.
FIFA did not respond to a request for comment.
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