The World Cup Is Coming to America.

Let me tell you about the name on the front of Gillette Stadium right now.

There is not one. Gillette, the razor company, paid for the naming rights to that stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts. Has for years. That deal exists and is worth money. But for the duration of the 2026 World Cup, the name comes down. The stadium becomes Boston Stadium, which is already strange because it is not in Boston, but that is a separate issue. The point is that FIFA showed up and said cover your sponsor's name, we have our own sponsors, and the Kraft family said yes because that was the deal they agreed to years before the tournament started.

That is the whole story in one image. Gillette Stadium, branded as Boston Stadium, hosting World Cup matches worth hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue that flow directly to FIFA while the venue operator covers its own operating costs out of pocket and hopes the economic spillover is enough to make it worthwhile.

The 2026 World Cup starts June 11. It runs through July 19. Forty-eight countries. One hundred and four matches across sixteen cities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The United States hosts seventy-eight of those matches, including every game from the quarterfinals forward. The final is at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, which will be called New York New Jersey Stadium for the tournament because that is apparently better than just calling it New Jersey Stadium.

It is going to be incredible. I genuinely believe that. Soccer in America has been building to something for thirty years and this is it. And also the financial structure of how it is organized is one of the more brazen things I have ever looked at closely, and I have spent a lot of time looking at stadium deals.

How big the money actually is

FIFA is projected to generate somewhere between $11 billion and $14 billion from the 2026 World Cup. The last tournament, Qatar 2022, generated about $7.5 billion. The 2026 figure represents roughly a 47 percent increase, driven by three things: the expanded 48-team format which means 60 percent more matches, the three-country hosting arrangement which means broader time zones for television, and the fact that North America has the most developed commercial sports infrastructure on the planet.

Where does that money come from? Broadcast rights account for roughly 44 percent, about $3.9 billion, paid by networks around the world for the right to show games. Ticketing and hospitality is about 34 percent, roughly $3 billion, coming from ticket sales, corporate suites, and hospitality packages. Sponsorship and marketing is another 20 percent, about $1.8 billion, from companies like Adidas, Coca-Cola, and McDonald's who pay FIFA directly for the right to associate their brands with the tournament. The rest comes from licensed merchandise.

Notice what is not in those revenue streams. The host cities. The stadiums. The local governments that spent years competing to get selected and then spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars preparing. They do not get a slice of broadcast rights. They do not get a share of ticket revenue. They do not get a cut of the sponsorship money. FIFA retains virtually all of it.

What the host cities actually agreed to

Here is something important to understand about how the 2026 World Cup deal came together. The United States, Mexico, and Canada submitted their joint bid to host in 2018. Before that bid was even submitted, the host cities had to agree to FIFA's terms. Not negotiate them. Agree to them. The contracts were set. Cities that did not like what they saw dropped out, and several did. Chicago pulled out in 2018, citing FIFA's inflexibility and what the city called taxpayer risk. Minneapolis withdrew for similar reasons. Both cities explicitly said FIFA's demands were not acceptable.

The cities that stayed in got selected. The ones that stayed in are now realizing what they agreed to. An analysis by ProPublica found that the eleven US host cities are facing a collective shortfall of at least $250 million. Some cities are reportedly so desperate for local revenue that they are pitching sponsorships to, and I am not making this up, local dry cleaners and mechanics, because FIFA's contracts with its official partners restrict cities from doing deals with any competing businesses in the same categories.

You want to sell beer at the fan fest? That beer needs to be one of FIFA's approved brands. You want to do a deal with a local restaurant chain? If it competes with one of FIFA's food partners, that deal is off limits. The host cities signed away their ability to monetize their own event in their own cities in exchange for the privilege of hosting matches.

The clean stadium policy deserves its own paragraph

FIFA's clean site policy requires that every venue be stripped of its existing corporate branding before World Cup matches. This means AT&T Stadium in Arlington is called Dallas Stadium. SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles is called Los Angeles Stadium. Arrowhead in Kansas City, which is not even named for a corporate sponsor but for the Chiefs themselves, becomes Kansas City Stadium.

The stadiums spent money on these conversions. Several of them, including venues in Los Angeles and Kansas City, spent additional millions removing concrete, field suites, and lower-bowl seating to widen the playing surface to FIFA specifications. Domed stadiums in Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and Los Angeles installed LED lighting systems to grow natural grass indoors. All of that cost money that the venues paid. None of it generated revenue for the venues because FIFA retains the broadcast and sponsorship revenue those stadiums are now helping to produce.

There is also an exclusive use clause. FIFA has the right to exclusive use of all sixteen venues for the duration of the tournament. The stadiums cannot host other events for roughly six weeks. The NFL does not play games in June but other revenue-generating events do happen in these buildings and that revenue is simply gone during the World Cup window.

The economic impact projections versus the reality

You will hear a lot of numbers about how much money the World Cup is going to generate for host cities. The New York region has been projected to gain $3.3 billion in economic activity. Dallas up to $2.1 billion. Boston over $1 billion. FIFA itself projects $40.9 billion in GDP impact across North America over the course of the tournament.

I want to be careful here because I think the economic impact question is genuinely complicated and I do not want to be reflexively dismissive of numbers just because they are large. Some of this will be real. Hotel revenue is going to spike significantly. New Jersey Transit is already charging $98 for a round-trip ticket to MetLife Stadium for World Cup matches versus the usual $13 fare. Tourism spending will be real. Local restaurants and bars near stadiums will have good months.

But a peer-reviewed study published in 2022 that looked at 14 World Cups held between 1966 and 2018 found that 11 of those 14 recorded fiscal deficits for the host countries. One, Russia in 2018, achieved a profit. The primary reason is the same reason the 2026 cities are finding themselves short: the primary revenue streams from the tournament flow to FIFA, not to the host. The economic activity that does flow locally tends to substitute for other spending rather than creating genuinely new activity.

The person who comes to New York for the World Cup final and spends $500 on a hotel room and $200 at restaurants is generating real local economic activity. That is true. But New York would have had tourists that weekend anyway. The incremental economic impact of the World Cup is the difference between what those tourists spent and what other tourists who did not come because of the crowd would have spent. That math is a lot less dramatic than the headline numbers suggest.

The security cost nobody is talking about loudly enough

The federal government awarded $625 million in security funding to the eleven US host cities. That sounds like a lot until you consider what the security operation for a six-week, sixteen-city global event actually costs. Economists who study mega-events have been quoted saying the federal grants are not nearly enough to deal with the potential security requirements. Cities will cover the gap from their own budgets or through private funding, neither of which shows up in FIFA's revenue projections because it is not FIFA's money being spent.

This is the hidden cost of hosting that the economic impact studies consistently undercount. The visible stuff, the stadiums and the fan fests and the tourism, gets projected and publicized. The security costs, the transit costs, the municipal service costs, the opportunity costs from the exclusive use periods, tend to get buried or left out of the projections entirely. When you add them back in the math changes substantially.

What this has to do with the sport itself

I said at the start that the 2026 World Cup is going to be incredible. I meant that. The soccer is going to be extraordinary. The atmosphere in American stadiums when the US team plays is going to be unlike anything this country has seen for this sport since 1994. The global attention on the game will be massive and genuine and it will matter for the long-term growth of soccer in the United States in ways that are real even if they are hard to quantify.

But FIFA is an organization that has spent decades under corruption investigations and reform pledges that have resulted in roughly the same structure persisting in slightly different form. The commercial model they have built extracts maximum revenue from the cities and countries that host their tournament while leaving those hosts to absorb the costs. Chicago saw this clearly enough in 2018 to walk away. The cities that stayed are now finding out what Chicago figured out six years earlier.

The sport deserves better stewardship than it gets. World Cup soccer is genuinely the most watched sporting event on earth. Five billion people watched the 2022 final. The product is extraordinary. The organization that controls it is structured to extract from that product rather than invest in it at the local level where fans actually live.

Every host city deal I have covered on this site follows some version of this pattern. The NFL teams use relocation threats to get public stadium money. FIFA uses the prestige of the World Cup to get cities to compete against each other for the right to host a loss. The mechanisms are different. The underlying dynamic is identical. An organization with leverage extracts value from parties without it and calls the whole thing a partnership.

Enjoy the tournament. The games are going to be great. The Gillette sign is coming back up in July and the Kraft family will count their losses and move on and FIFA will deposit eleven billion dollars into their accounts and start preparing for the next one.

That is how this works. It has always been how this works. The only thing unusual about 2026 is that it is happening here, so Americans who have never paid close attention to how FIFA operates get to see it up close for the first time.

Welcome to the show.