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BySRSam Reyes·CMCal Morrow·EQEliza Quinn·DPDana Park
BREAKINGMay 1, 2026

FIFA Could Make Billions From the World Cup. Host Cities Will Get Little in Return.

A ProPublica investigation published in late April 2026 reveals that eleven U.S. host cities for the 2026 FIFA World Cup are shouldering hundreds of millions of dollars in costs while FIFA is projected to earn approximately $11 billion in profits from the tournament. Host cities are contractually barred from receiving revenue from ticket sales, concessions, merchandise, or parking, and were restricted from selling corporate sponsorship suites. Many of the host city contracts remain secret, and cities had to agree to FIFA's terms before the joint U.S.-Mexico-Canada bid was even formally submitted in 2017.

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⚡Both sides have significant internal splits on this story. Arguments below represent the dominant positions — see The Divide below for the full picture.

FIFA pockets most World Cup profits while host cities shoulder infrastructure costs and debt — is that a sustainable deal for countries desperate to host, or a lesson in how global sporting bodies exploit local ambition?

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1994 model was deliberately dismantled
Liberal
In 1994, U.S. host cities received game-day revenue shares, had security costs covered, and several came out ahead. FIFA then spent three decades systematically dismantling that model — not because it failed, but because it worked too well for cities. What you're watching in 2026 isn't a market outcome or an evolution. It was engineered.
Conservative
You're right that the 1994 model was better for cities, but 'engineered' implies a conspiracy where ordinary institutional drift explains just as much. FIFA got bigger, commercial rights became more valuable, and every subsequent host government handed FIFA more leverage by competing harder for the privilege. The model changed because cities kept bidding on worse and worse terms — that's not engineering, that's a buyer's market for prestige.
Liberal
A buyer's market doesn't explain why FIFA contractually prohibits cities from receiving ticket, concession, or parking revenue — that's not drift, that's a specific clause someone wrote and someone else signed away. When you enumerate what cities are banned from collecting, it stops looking like leverage and starts looking like a template.
Conservative
The template exists because previous hosts accepted it. FIFA didn't invent coercive contracts — they just kept offering them until no one said no, which brings us straight back to the officials who stopped saying no.
Consent was coerced, not voluntary
Liberal
Host city contracts were locked in before the U.S.-Mexico-Canada bid was even formally submitted in 2017, meaning local governments were handed terms as a fait accompli by their own federal soccer federation, with no meaningful negotiation window and no public disclosure. 'You should have read the contract' is not a defense of a process where the contract was secret and the deadline was yesterday.
Conservative
Chicago read it and left. That's not a minor asterisk — it demolishes the claim that rejection was practically impossible. If one city identified the problem, weighed the political cost, and walked away, then the other eleven had the same information and made a different choice. The deadline pressure was real, but it wasn't a gun.
Liberal
One exit out of twelve is evidence the system is hard enough to escape that it functionally operates as coercion — not evidence it's fair. You wouldn't call a contract voluntary just because one of twelve signatories managed to refuse.
Conservative
That framing only works if all twelve cities faced identical pressure, and they didn't — Chicago had no NFL stadium gap to fill, no legacy project calculus pushing the other way. The variance matters.
Economic impact projections are political cover
Liberal
Victor Matheson — who has spent his career on exactly this — called the $47 billion figure 'insanity,' because it requires each game to generate $400 million, or $5,000 to $7,000 per fan in attendance. Hotel prices in host cities are already falling ahead of the tournament. These aren't optimistic forecasts. They're numbers manufactured to make a structurally indefensible arrangement look like a public benefit.
Conservative
Matheson's critique is valid and the $47 billion number is almost certainly inflated. But you're treating a bad projection as proof of bad faith, and those aren't the same thing. Boosters have been producing overcooked economic impact studies for every stadium, every convention center, every Olympics for fifty years — it's a bipartisan problem of how public investment gets sold, not a FIFA-specific conspiracy.
Liberal
The bipartisan history of stadium boosterism is exactly the problem — it means these projections reliably mislead, reliably go unchallenged, and reliably serve the same function every time. Calling it a pattern doesn't exonerate it; it indicts it.
Conservative
Agreed — which is why the remedy is better public scrutiny and disclosure requirements, not treating inflated projections as evidence of uniquely corrupt intent.
Who bears costs versus who collects profit
Liberal
FIFA is projected to collect $11 billion in profit from the 2026 World Cup. The people paying the security costs, infrastructure upgrades, and opportunity costs of forgone municipal spending are working-class residents who can't afford tickets to the games being played in their cities. That's not an abstract fiscal concern — it's a specific, traceable transfer of public money into private hands.
Conservative
The transfer is real, but it's enabled by city officials choosing to make it. You're describing a structural injustice that is actually a series of individual decisions by elected governments to prioritize a ribbon-cutting over their constituents' balance sheets. Holding FIFA responsible for accepting what cities freely offer doesn't fix the mechanism — it just relocates the blame.
Liberal
Responsibility isn't a fixed quantity where holding FIFA accountable lets city officials off the hook. Both things are true: officials made bad decisions and FIFA built a contract regime designed to maximize extraction from public budgets. Focusing only on local failure is a way of never asking why the federal soccer federation handed cities a take-it-or-leave-it deal in secret.
Conservative
That's fair — and the secrecy point is where I'll concede the most ground. Non-disclosure provisions in contracts involving public money are indefensible regardless of who inserted them.
Legislative approval and transparency as minimum reform
Liberal
The minimum reform is straightforward: any future hosting agreement with an international sports body must be publicly disclosed, subjected to legislative approval, and structured so cities share in the revenue their infrastructure makes possible. The 1994 model proved it's achievable. FIFA chose to stop doing it, and that choice should not be cost-free.
Conservative
Public disclosure and legislative sign-off — yes, obviously. But 'structured so cities share revenue' requires either federal negotiating leverage that doesn't currently exist or cities willing to collectively refuse FIFA's terms, and we've just established that collective action among eleven city governments is apparently beyond reach. The reform you want is correct in principle and has no obvious enforcement mechanism.
Liberal
The enforcement mechanism is Congress conditioning any federal security funding — which is the largest public subsidy in these deals — on disclosure and revenue-sharing requirements. That's leverage that exists right now and has never been used.
Conservative
That's actually the strongest version of this argument, and it's a conservative-compatible lever: no federal subsidy without public accountability. If that condition had been attached in 2017, the negotiation would have looked very different.
Conservative's hardest question
The argument that cities could simply 'walk away' is weakened by the timeline: host cities were required to agree to FIFA's terms before the joint bid was formally submitted in 2017, meaning the political and reputational pressure to stay in was enormous and the window for meaningful renegotiation was effectively closed before it opened. Chicago's exit is the exception that proves how hard it was, not easy evidence that every city had a clean off-ramp.
Liberal's hardest question
The strongest challenge to this argument is Chicago: if one city successfully walked away by citing the lopsided terms, it is genuinely difficult to claim the remaining eleven had no agency, and it opens the argument to the charge that local officials who stayed in simply chose prestige over fiscal prudence. That is uncomfortable because it is partially true — and it complicates any narrative that frames cities purely as victims rather than as actors who made bad decisions under structural pressure.
The Divide
*Both left and right are split between protecting taxpayers from FIFA's demands and chasing the prestige and profits of hosting the World Cup.*
FISCAL CONSERVATIVES
Public funds should never subsidize private international sports organizations; cities that backed FIFA wasted taxpayer money.
PRO-BUSINESS RIGHT
Hosting the World Cup delivers net economic and diplomatic gains; tourism and prestige justify the public investment.
PROGRESSIVE LEFT
FIFA contracts are corporate capture of public goods; contracts must be renegotiated and future sports subsidies banned.
MODERATE DEMOCRATS
The World Cup offers real diplomatic and economic opportunity; focus on making future contracts more equitable.
The Verdict
Both sides agree
Both sides agree that FIFA's 2026 contract terms are dramatically more favorable to FIFA than the 1994 model, which allowed U.S. host cities to receive game-day revenue shares and ended with some cities in the black—the disagreement is entirely about who bears responsibility for accepting the worse terms.
The real conflict
FACTUAL DISAGREEMENT ABOUT AGENCY: Conservative position holds that eleven mayors made a choice despite having a viable exit (Chicago proved it), access to historical data, and the ability to negotiate harder; liberal position holds that the coercive timeline and lock-in before the bid was submitted made the choice illusory for all but the city with enough political capital to exit entirely—the underlying question is whether structural pressure extinguishes volition.
What nobody has answered
If the $47 billion projection fails to materialize and host cities end up in the red, what specific mechanism or institution is responsible for making FIFA whole the difference, and does FIFA have any contractual obligation to adjust payment terms downward if actual economic impact falls below a certain threshold—or are the losses entirely on cities?
Sources

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