Why the US Is Hosting a World Cup It Will Mostly Pay For

The 2026 World Cup kicked off this month, the largest in the tournament's history. Forty-eight teams, 104 matches, 16 host cities spread across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, running from June 11 to July 19. The US carries the bulk of it, eleven host cities and every match from the quarterfinals onward, including the final at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. The headline that came with it was a big, round, encouraging number: a 17 billion dollar boost to American gross domestic product, plus 185,000 jobs, according to FIFA's own economic impact study.

That number is doing a lot of work, and it deserves a closer look. Because once you trace who collects the revenue and who pays the costs, the World Cup starts to look less like an economic windfall for the cities hosting it and more like a transfer, from municipal budgets and taxpayers to a single organization in Zurich.

Who actually collects the money

FIFA, the global governing body of soccer, controls the parts of the World Cup that generate the real money. It owns the broadcast rights and sells them to networks worldwide. It locks in the global sponsorship deals. It keeps the lion's share of ticket revenue and hospitality packages. Recent estimates put FIFA's total take from this tournament between 11 and 13 billion dollars, with roughly 8.9 billion coming directly from the event itself.

What FIFA does not do is pay to host. That falls to the cities. And the division is not subtle. A review of host-city contracts by ProPublica and the Houston Chronicle found that almost all of the organizing costs land on the cities, while their ability to collect revenue is sharply limited. The cities do not get a slice of game-day ticket sales, concessions, or merchandise. Those flow up to FIFA.

Andrew Zimbalist, a professor emeritus of economics at Smith College who has studied the finances of mega-events for decades, put it about as plainly as an economist can. The host cities, he said, do not benefit economically because they do not get the revenue, but they do get the costs, which can run well over 100 million dollars each.

They do not get the revenue. They get the costs.

What the cities actually pay

The cost side is concrete and large. Each US host city is expected to shoulder between 100 and 200 million dollars in expenses tied to security, transportation, stadium modifications, and the logistics of running fan festivals alongside the matches. Even when the stadium already exists, which most do since they are existing National Football League venues, FIFA's requirements force expensive changes: natural grass installed over artificial turf, field dimensions adjusted, and the venue stripped of competing signage to meet FIFA's "clean site" commercial standards.

The federal government stepped in with a 625 million dollar security grant program, administered through the Federal Emergency Management Agency and spread across the eleven US host cities. Houston's share alone was about 65 million dollars. That is money from the national taxpayer, covering a private organization's event. And even with that federal help, cities are coming up short and leaning on state programs and local budgets to close the gap.

There is a quieter cost too, and it is the one most people never see. FIFA required host cities to exempt World Cup tickets from sales tax as a condition of hosting. Georgia expects to lose up to 25 million dollars in state and local sales tax revenue on the Atlanta matches. Florida loses around 7.4 million on the Miami games. Multiply that across every host city and the foregone tax revenue, money that would otherwise fund schools, hospitals, and public services, runs well into the tens of millions before a single security officer is paid.

The number that gets quoted versus the number that holds up

So what about the 17 billion dollar GDP boost? It comes from a study FIFA commissioned, and the methodology matters. Economic impact figures produced for the organization staging an event tend to capture the gross activity, every hotel night, every restaurant meal, every rideshare, and count it all as new money flowing into the economy.

Independent economists are far more cautious, for a specific reason called the substitution effect. Much of the spending around a World Cup is not new money. It is money that residents and even some visitors would have spent locally anyway, just redirected toward soccer instead of restaurants, movies, or other entertainment. A tourist filling a hotel room during the tournament often displaces a tourist who would have come otherwise, or who stays away precisely because of the crowds and inflated prices. When researchers measure actual economic activity after these events rather than projections made before them, the measurable boost tends to shrink toward zero, or in some studies, turns slightly negative once the public costs are netted out.

This is not a fringe view. It is close to the consensus among economists who study mega-events, and it has held across World Cups and Olympics for decades. The pattern is consistent enough that the burden of proof has flipped: the question is no longer whether a host city profits, but how much it loses, and whether the intangible benefits are worth the price.

So why does any city say yes

If the math is this lopsided, the obvious question is why cities compete so hard to host. The honest answer is a mix of things that are real but hard to put on a balance sheet, and things that are closer to wishful accounting.

The genuine part is exposure and identity. Hosting World Cup matches puts a city on a global stage for a month, in front of billions of viewers. Officials argue this builds the kind of reputation that attracts future tourism, business investment, and talent, benefits that are real but notoriously difficult to measure and easy to overstate. There is also straightforward civic pride and political appeal. A mayor who lands the World Cup gets a ribbon-cutting and a packed stadium. The bill arrives later, often after the next election.

The wishful part is the projection itself. The 17 billion dollar figure gives elected officials a number to point to, a justification that sounds rigorous because it carries a decimal point and a logo. Whether it materializes is a question that gets answered long after the decision to host has been made, and as ProPublica noted, many host-city contracts are kept confidential as "commercially sensitive," which means taxpayers often cannot even see the full terms of the deal made on their behalf.

The convergence angle

There is one detail in this tournament that sits squarely in One Digiverse territory and signals where this is all heading. FIFA named a crypto exchange as its official exchange partner for 2026, and the partnership is built to include prediction markets and token-based fan engagement features that have never appeared at a previous World Cup. So at the same moment host cities are negotiating with the federal government over security grants that do not fully cover their costs, FIFA is opening entirely new digital revenue streams that flow, as always, upward to FIFA.

That juxtaposition is the whole story in miniature. The organization that collects the money is innovating on new ways to collect more of it. The cities that pay the costs are still arguing over who covers the train fares. The financial structure of the World Cup has not changed because of crypto. Crypto has just given the entity at the top one more channel to monetize an event that everyone else subsidizes.

What this tells you

None of this is an argument that the World Cup should not happen, or that fans will not have an extraordinary month of soccer. It will be a genuine spectacle, and for the people in the stands it will be worth every bit of the experience. This is a piece about money, not about the game.

What the money says is straightforward. The entity that controls the revenue, FIFA, collects up to 13 billion dollars and bears almost none of the operating risk. The cities that stage the event front 100 to 200 million dollars each, collect no share of the gate, forgo tens of millions in tax revenue, and rely on 625 million dollars of federal taxpayer money to make it work. The 17 billion dollar boost they were promised rests on a methodology that independent economists have spent decades poking holes in. When you ask why the US is hosting a World Cup it will mostly pay for, the answer is the same answer that explains most lopsided deals: the people who decided to host are not the same people who pay for it, and the bill arrives after the cameras leave.

Follow the money. It does not stay in your city. It rarely ever does.

T. Patrick McCruitin
Editor, One Digiverse