FIFA will collect an estimated $8.9 billion from the 2026 World Cup while the 11 U.S. cities hosting it could face a collective shortfall of upwards of $250 million. And that’s thanks to FIFA’s restructuring of how it runs the World Cup.
For most of the tournament’s history, a World Cup was run by a local organizing committee that absorbed the costs and shared in the upside. For the first time in World Cup history, that’s not the case. In the 2026 edition, FIFA is operating the tournament itself, dealing directly with host cities rather than through national federations. Under that arrangement, it controls essentially all of the revenue, from media rights and sponsorship to ticketing, hospitality and merchandise. The cities and states whose names are on the marquee control the costs. In effect, it becomes a franchise model in which the franchisees pay to operate the business and the franchisor keeps the receipts.
The pricing reflects a simple incentive, says Victor Matheson, a sports economist at the College of the Holy Cross who has studied mega-events for nearly three decades. Unlike a local team that needs its fans back next season, FIFA has no repeat business to protect. “FIFA is not coming back to the United States for another 30 or 40 years,” he told Fortune, “which means that you can afford to make that ticket buyer angry today, and squeeze all of the money out of them you can.” A local franchise might leave money on the table to keep season-ticket holders happy, but for FIFA, arriving once a generation, it has no such reason to.
Matheson said foreign visitors are the entire engine of a host country’s economic gain—a New Yorker who buys a ticket is just moving money around the city—and the Trump administration, he said, is “doing his best to reduce the economic impact of this event by making the United States an unfriendly and an unwelcome place for foreign tourists to come.” A would-be visitor from Oslo or Munich, he added, “might just say, look, I just don’t like the way this country is acting, and I’ll save my money, and I’ll go in four years when the tournament is in Spain.”
The third reason is the one that indicts FIFA’s model directly—what economists call leakage. When a fan spends money at a locally owned restaurant, it recirculates through the local economy several times over. A World Cup ticket does the opposite. “When I spend $400 on a World Cup ticket, that money all goes to FIFA,” Matheson said. “So not only is it not going to any local person in the first place, they’re not taking that money and then respending it in the local economy either.”
“That $400 would have been much better for the local economy had I spent basically anything but a FIFA ticket.” The same logic applies to the inflated hotel bill, he noted—the surcharge flows to corporate headquarters, not to the desk clerks and housekeepers. “Most economists suggest that economic impact is lower than typically advertised by people like FIFA and boosters.”
To Matheson, that distributional question is the heart of the matter. The premium-experience model that drives stadium economics—fewer, pricier seats sold to the wealthy rather than cheap ones sold to the many—becomes indefensible, he argues, once public money is involved. Asking taxpayers to subsidize a profit-maximizing event, he said, “when you’re simultaneously asking for handouts from regular taxpayers, is appalling,” and forcing “blue-collar workers to pay higher taxes so the wealthy and the upper middle class can go see games in shiny new stadiums is absolutely one of the worst pieces of public policy out there.”
