The World Cup's Two Futures
The 2026 tournament is a case study in cost shifting. The 2030 bid is the first real alternative.
In April, Mikie Sherrill did something that, in the history of World Cup hosting, no major politician had done before. She published a set of numbers on social media that told an uncomfortable story about who the tournament actually benefits. The numbers were devastating in their specificity: NJ Transit, the state’s public transportation authority, was looking at a $48 million loss from the eight matches at MetLife Stadium. Eight matches. Forty-eight million dollars. The state’s solution had been to charge fans $150 for a round-trip train from Manhattan to East Rutherford, a 20-minute journey that ordinarily costs $13. (The price later dropped to $105, but only after what she described as “some corporate donors” stepped in. NJ Transit still loses money.)
“When FIFA is positioned to make $11 billion during the World Cup,” Sherrill wrote, “we will not be subsidizing World Cup ticket holders on the backs of New Jerseyans who rely on NJ Transit every day.”
This is the part of the sentence that matters. Eleven billion dollars. FIFA expects to generate $9 billion from this tournament alone, part of a four-year cycle that will bring in $13 billion total. The organization sits on $2.8 billion in cash reserves. Its annual report describes its financial position as “unprecedented.” And here is the New Jersey governor, on X, explaining that her state cannot afford to run trains for the people coming to watch.
She was right to say it. But the question nobody asked, in the noise that followed, is this: why is that $48 million the state’s problem at all? Why is it always the host’s problem?
The answer takes you into the strange economics of FIFA’s business model, which is a business model built on a single, elegant principle: concentrate the revenue, disperse the cost.
Consider the numbers that Sherrill put on the table. The $48 million transit deficit is one piece of a much larger puzzle. Toronto says it will spend $380 million Canadian. Vancouver is at $624 million. Most US cities budgeted around $200 million and are now well past it. The federal government in Canada committed an additional $145 million specifically for security. In Boston, Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, had to personally front $8 million for a SWAT truck and security measures before the town of Foxborough would issue FIFA’s permit. Parking at some venues costs $175 a game. That revenue goes to FIFA, not the cities.
There is no tax exemption this time. Previous World Cups had them. The US government, unlike the autocratic regimes that hosted the previous two tournaments, cannot simply decree that FIFA’s partners pay nothing. The absence of that exemption means national associations from Europe are now realizing they could lose money unless they reach the semi-finals. The English FA, among others, petitioned FIFA to increase the prize money. FIFA agreed, bumping the total from $727 million to $871 million, but the math still does not work for anyone outside the last four. The winner gets $50 million. The group-stage team gets $12.5 million. The costs of operating in the United States, where tax rates vary from 0% in Florida to 13.3% in California, eat deep into those numbers.
Now here is the pattern. In Russia and Qatar, where FIFA could order up stadiums in autocratic silence, the tournament delivered what the governing body wanted. In the US, Canada, and Mexico, the host cities have to answer to voters. They have to explain why their transit systems are losing money. They have to explain why fans are paying $175 for parking. And they have to do it while FIFA pockets the ticket revenue, the sponsorship money, the broadcast fees.
"FIFA's contracts," as the Atlantic described them, leave hosts with "no plausible way to recoup expenses." The $100-plus train tickets were a desperate attempt to stop a money pit from going deeper.
There is a second dimension to this story, and it involves the world's two largest media markets. The situation there tells you something about FIFA's negotiating leverage that the $48 million transit deficit cannot.
India, with 1.4 billion people, has no broadcast deal for the 2026 World Cup. The tournament starts in less than a month. The reasons are structural, not negotiable. Indian broadcasters build their business around advertising, not subscriptions. Football does not break every three or four minutes the way cricket does, which means the commercial breaks that sustain the Indian sports advertising market simply do not exist. The time zones are catastrophic: most games kick off when India is asleep. And FIFA is not even competing for the top spot. The Indian Premier League and the ICC rights are the two most valuable sports properties in the country. The World Cup is not in the top two.
Nandan Kamath, one of India's leading sports lawyers, put it this way: "The Indian market is a sort of a brute force market. It's the numbers rather than the willingness." There are only two bidders for the rights, JioStar and Sony, and neither is desperate. "Normally these rights are sold where there's highly competitive people dealing with FOMO, and that isn't here right now."
China's story is even more revealing, because it ended with a deal, but on terms that should embarrass FIFA. The initial asking price was around $300 million for the Chinese market. After months of standoff, China Media Group closed the deal for something close to $60 million. That is an 80% reduction. The governing body of world football walked into the biggest media market in Asia, asked for what it thought the product was worth, and was told to wait. Then it waited. Then it took what it could get.
Xu Guoqi, a professor at the University of Hong Kong who has written extensively about China and global sport, has a theory about why this happened. "I think FIFA got greedy," he told DW. "It's a business deal, right? For FIFA, if Chinese men don't watch the game that's a big loss to them." He referenced a historical pattern: in 1999, when NATO bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, the Chinese government tried to cancel the broadcast of NBA games. Young people protested outside the US embassy during the day and denounced CCTV at night for complying with the blackout. "We hate American imperialism," they said, "but we love the NBA." The lesson, Guoqi argued, is that global sport occupies a space in Chinese culture that the government cannot control. FIFA assumed that urgency translated into willingness to pay. It does not.
FIFA priced its product as if the market had no alternatives. The market responded by walking away. China waited FIFA out and got the tournament for pennies. India is still waiting.
Which brings you back to the central question of 2026: what happens when you build a system that concentrates reward and disperses cost, and then try to sell that system in markets that do not need you?
Now consider the alternative. Because there is one. And it is coming in 2030.
Morocco, Spain, and Portugal will co-host the next World Cup. And Morocco’s role in that partnership is structurally the opposite of the 2026 model. Where 2026 spreads its matches across three countries separated by thousands of kilometers, 2030 concentrates its geography: Morocco sits 14 kilometers from Spain at the Strait of Gibraltar. A fan in Lisbon can be in Tangier before lunch. The tournament creates a single accessible corridor across two continents, the kind of layout that was possible in 1998 and 2006 and that has been impossible since.
The MIPA Institute studied the economic implications of this bid. Their findings are instructive, because they confirm what economists have suspected since Brazil in 2014: the World Cup does not generate the kind of windfall that politicians promise, but it does deliver real, measurable effects when the conditions are right. The tourism boost for World Cup hosts averages 12%, though the MIPA study notes that most of that effect arrives before the tournament, as an “anticipation effect.” Domestic league attendance in host countries increases 15 to 25 percent after the tournament, an effect driven by media coverage, improved stadiums, and the long tail of a national team’s performance.
Morocco’s $5 to 6 billion investment, part of a joint $15 to 20 billion budget shared with Spain and Portugal, is structured differently from the 2026 model. Twenty-five billion dirhams comes directly from the public budget for stadiums and training centers. Seventeen billion dirhams from state-owned companies, earmarked for infrastructure and transport. Ten billion dirhams from foreign loans and donations. The IMF estimates Morocco’s infrastructure spending will reach 11.9 percent of GDP by 2030, concentrated in rail (6.0%), airports (2.4%), roads (0.9%), stadiums (2.2%), and urban tourism (0.5%). That spending is expected to lift GDP by roughly 2 percent above the baseline. The country plans to add 100,000 hotel beds in host cities and projects tourism revenues of 120 billion dirhams in 2030.
The difference is structural. Morocco is not carrying the weight alone. Spain and Portugal absorb the majority of the logistical burden. Morocco gets the spotlight, the infrastructure, and the tourism upside, without having to build everything from scratch. It is a tri-host arrangement that distributes cost and benefit, which is precisely what the tri-host arrangement for 2026 was supposed to do but has not.
And the geography matters in a way that has not been true for any World Cup since 2006. The tournament runs in European summer, when the domestic leagues are closed. The three countries share time zones. They share cultural ties. They share football seasons. For the fan who wants to watch matches in multiple venues, which is to say, for the fan the World Cup is supposed to serve, this is the most accessible structure in decades.
The 10,000 Hour fallacy applies to hosting too. The question is whether you are building in the right place, in the right configuration, with the right partners.
None of this means Morocco 2030 is unproblematic. The same questions that dogged Qatar will follow the bid. Labour rights. Press freedom. Whether the tourism promises will materialise, or whether the white elephant problem will resurface. The MIPA analysis itself warns that host cities in developing economies often see unemployment rise after the tournament, because the temporary construction workforce does not disappear when the stadium is finished; it stays in the labor pool, looking for work that no longer exists.
But the structural logic is better. The geography is better. The distribution of cost and benefit is closer to fair. And that is the standard the 2026 World Cup has set.
Mikie Sherrill’s question, the one she posted on X in April, was a simple one. Why should New Jersey subsidize FIFA’s profits? It was a question that no host in the authoritarian model had the standing to ask, and that no host in the democratic model had the nerve to ask, until now.
The World Cup generates enormous wealth. The question is who gets to keep it. And if you watch where the hosting model is heading, from the $48 million deficit in New Jersey to the 14 kilometers between Morocco and Spain, the direction is clear. The next World Cup, the one after this one, will look very different from this one. Because the markets and the cities and the fans started saying no.
Sources: DW, Guardian, Atlantic, MIPA Institute, Chosun, Reuters, Economic Times, FIFA Annual Report 2025, IMF, CBC, City of Toronto budget documents