FIFA Makes $11 Billion From This World Cup. Host Cities Lose Money.

FIFA expects to make $11 billion from the 2026 World Cup. The host cities paying for it expect to lose money.

That is not a contradiction. It is how the modern World Cup is built. Ticket sales go to FIFA. Broadcast rights, projected above $4 billion, go to FIFA. Sponsorship and advertising revenue goes to FIFA. Host cities get the crowds, the bill, and a thin slice of local spending.

Andrew Zimbalist, an economist at Smith College who has studied World Cup hosting for decades, put it plainly: FIFA gets the revenue, cities get the costs, and those costs run well over $100 million per city. The US allocated $625 million in federal security funding to its 11 host cities. Toronto's bill rose from tens of millions to roughly $380 million. None of that money came back to either city — it was the price of admission.

There is real spending happening too. Atlanta expects over $1 billion in economic activity from its eight matches. Hotel rates across host cities are running 200 to 300% above normal. But economists draw a hard line between gross activity and net benefit. Set against the spending are the security costs cities are legally required to cover, the regular tourists who skip host cities to avoid the crowds, and the infrastructure upgrades FIFA's "clean site" rules require — most of which the host never gets to keep using afterward.

Even the national-level number, once you place it next to the size of the US economy, looks smaller than the headline suggests. FIFA projects a $17 billion boost to US GDP. Against an economy of roughly $29 trillion, that is under 0.1% — a rounding error wearing a press release. Hotel bookings across several host cities are already running below forecast, with visa friction and ticket prices cited as the reason.

Compare this to 1994, the last time the US hosted. That tournament generated over $1 billion for three cities and helped launch Major League Soccer two years later — a legacy that has compounded for three decades. Promoters lean on that kind of legacy argument heavily — increased visibility, future tourism, future investment — but independent economists who study mega-events without a stake in the outcome have generally found those longer-term payoffs are real in theory and unreliable in practice, since there is no clean way to prove a city's later growth came from World Cup exposure rather than everything else happening at the same time. The 2026 hosts are spending a fraction of what Qatar spent in 2022 building from scratch, which limits the downside even if the upside stays modest.

The World Cup is not a financial trap for the country. It is a financial trap for the city signing the contract. FIFA built a model where the revenue centralizes and the costs do not.