Every four years, a handful of countries line up to spend money most of their citizens will never fully understand. Billions of dollars, years of construction, entire cities overhauled, and all for a tournament that lasts about five weeks. If you ask any government official why their country is hosting the FIFA World Cup, you will hear the same answer, Tourism, economic growth, global visibility. Those answers are not wrong. They are just not the whole story.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup, hosted across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, is already showing us exactly why countries keep bidding, and why the real motivations run much deeper than a projected GDP number. If you want to understand why hosting the World Cup is about politics as much as it is about football, keep reading.
The Official Economic Case and Why It Rarely Holds Up
Every host government produces an economic impact report before the tournament. The numbers are usually impressive. For the 2026 World Cup, a joint FIFA and World Trade Organisation study projected the tournament would generate $80 billion in gross economic impact, with around $30.5 billion landing in the United States alone.
Those figures sound transformative, BUT sports economists are less convinced.
Victor Matheson, a professor of sports economics at the College of the Holy Cross, told Newsweek that the actual economic impact for the US “is likely to be a fraction of what is being advertised.” 1 Andrew Zimbalist, a professor of economics at Smith College, was more direct, noting that “there is a substantial scholarly literature that finds hosting mega sporting events is not an economic plus.”
The historical record backs that view. Brazil spent around $15 billion to host the 2014 World Cup, with much of it going to stadiums and infrastructure. The promised 5x return never arrived, and the country’s economic difficulties worsened through the rest of the decade.2 Russia spent an estimated $11.6 billion to host in 2018. Qatar took it further than anyone, spending an estimated $220 billion on the 2022 tournament, a figure that was 15 times more than any previous host. Qatar received approximately $1.56 billion in tournament revenue against that outlay.
FIFA, by contrast, is projected to generate $11 to $14 billion in revenue from the 2026 edition alone. The host cities keep very little of that. A report by ProPublica found that the 11 US host cities collectively face a shortfall of at least $250 million from their hosting commitments, largely because FIFA’s commercial contracts restrict what cities can sell to local sponsors, while FIFA retains virtually all of the commercial upside.3
So if the economics rarely work out for host countries, why do governments keep bidding?
The Real Reason
The answer sits in a concept that governments rarely explain plainly to their citizens, soft power. Soft power is the ability to shape how the rest of the world perceives you, not through military force or economic pressure, but through culture, values, and influence. Hosting the FIFA World Cup is one of the most effective soft power tools available to any government.
For Qatar, the 2022 World Cup was a deliberate strategy to reposition a small Gulf state as a major player in global geopolitics. The country had never qualified for a World Cup before winning the hosting bid. What it was buying an audience of five billion people, the chance to shift international conversation away from human rights scrutiny, and a seat at the table with the world’s most powerful nations. Research published after the tournament found that Qatar saw a 30% increase in foreign direct investment following the event, and tourism to the country grew significantly into 2023.
South Africa made a similar calculation in 2010. Hosting the first World Cup on African soil was about proving that the continent could stage the world’s biggest event, a statement about capacity, ambition, and belonging on the global stage.
For the United States, Canada, and Mexico, the 2026 World Cup carries its own political weight. The three-country joint bid signals North American cooperation at a time when that relationship is complicated. For individual host cities, the tournament represents a chance to build infrastructure that local politicians could not otherwise justify, to appear on a global broadcast footprint, and to attract investment on the back of that visibility.
What Host Cities Actually Get
Strip away the politics and the soft power theory, and what does a host city actually receive? The answer is more nuanced than the critics or the promoters suggest.
The most durable benefit is infrastructure. World Cup hosting forces governments to build or upgrade airports, transit systems, roads, and public spaces on a timeline that domestic politics rarely produces. Canada’s two host cities, Toronto and Vancouver, are staging their first-ever World Cup matches. The investment in their stadiums and surrounding infrastructure creates assets that outlast the tournament.
FIFA’s own assessment estimated the 2026 World Cup would contribute up to $3.8 billion in positive economic output for Canada, with GDP contributions of around $2 billion, labour income of $1.3 billion, and the creation or preservation of approximately 24,100 jobs across the country between 2023 and 2026.4
For US host cities, projections vary widely. Los Angeles County alone was projected to see $594 million in economic impact from eight matches.5 Four US markets, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio, were expected to collectively generate $3 to $4 billion in combined economic benefit from matches and training camps.
The caveat is that these projections were built on assumptions that do not always survive contact with reality. Hotel rates in several US host cities dropped by around a third in the lead-up to the tournament, and ticket sales moved slower than expected. The so-called “Trump slump,” referring to reduced international tourist appetite linked to the broader geopolitical climate, became a genuine concern for some host cities.
The Gap Between FIFA’s Earnings and What Stays in the City
This is the part that most coverage glosses over. FIFA is structured to extract maximum value from the tournament while transferring the operational risk and cost to host cities and national associations.
For the 2026 cycle, FIFA approved a total prize pool of $727 million for participating teams, with $655 million paid directly in prize money, a 50% increase on the 2022 edition.¹¹ The winning nation will take home $50 million.¹² Each of the 48 participating teams is guaranteed at least $10.5 million.6
Against that, FIFA’s total revenue from the 2026 World Cup is projected at $11 to $14 billion.⁵ FIFA’s operating costs for the tournament, including logistics, security, and infrastructure across all three countries, are estimated at around $3.8 billion for the current cycle.¹³ What remains flows back to FIFA’s reserves and member federations through development funds, not to the cities that built the stadiums and organised the logistics.
Independent reporting by ProPublica found that FIFA’s commercial contracts include clauses preventing cities from doing deals even with local businesses if their category overlaps with a FIFA primary partner. One source described some cities as being reduced to pitching “local dry cleaners and mechanics” for sponsorship because global brands in food, hospitality, and beverages were already locked up by FIFA’s partners.⁶
Why Countries Keep Bidding Anyway
Understanding all of this, the question becomes: why do countries keep putting their hand up?
The answer is that the calculus is not purely financial. For most bidding nations, the World Cup represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to compress decades of infrastructure development into five years, to place their cities on the global broadcast map, and to use sport as a vehicle for political ambitions that no other platform provides.
Qatar understood this better than anyone, Russia leveraged it in 2018. South Africa capitalized on it in 2010, and the United States, Canada, and Mexico are also utilizing it now.
The official economic projections will almost certainly be revised downward by the time the final whistle blows in New Jersey on July 19, 2026. But by then, the stadiums will be standing, the metro lines will be running, and billions of people will have watched the host cities for five weeks straight.
That, not the GDP report, is what governments are actually buying.
If you want to understand how the business of football really works, from the commercial frameworks that govern transfers to the regulations every licensed agent must navigate, The Ball Business blog covers it all.
Start with our post on What Financial Fair Play Actually Means and Why Clubs Keep Breaking It or explore how Stadium Naming Rights work in Football.
- https://www.newsweek.com/why-world-cup-may-not-bring-big-boost-us-economy-12015826 ↩︎
- https://www.snoqap.com/posts/2024/4/2/a-look-into-the-economic-impact-of-hosting-the-world-cup ↩︎
- https://www.propublica.org/article/world-cup-2026-host-cities-revenue-houston
↩︎ - https://www.cbc.ca/lite/story/1.7406435 ↩︎
- https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/04/fifa-world-cup-sports-economy-growth/
↩︎ - https://inside.fifa.com/media-releases/council-approves-record-breaking-world-cup-2026-financial-contribution ↩︎