How FIFA restructured the World Cup into its biggest payday ever, as host cities face a budget shortfall

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.

When Gianni Infantino campaigned for the FIFA presidency in 2016, he promised to quadruple the organization’s income, and he’s on pace to realize that goal after 2026. That’s why, in addition to the other historic changes underway this World Cup, Infantino and FIFA are lauding the expanded, 48-team, 104-match tournament across three countries, with the FIFA president calling it the equivalent of “104 Super Bowls.”

Dynamic pricing for the world’s most equalizing sport

A large chunk of the revenue haul comes from a mechanism FIFA is deploying at a World Cup for the first time: dynamic pricing. Ticket prices float with demand, the way airline seats and concert tickets do, which means that face values that start at a federation-only $60 and climb to $7,875 for a Category 1 seat at the final. As a result, several matches are selling for many times what comparable seats cost at Qatar 2022. Industry trackers have already labeled it the most expensive World Cup in history—a designation FIFA has done nothing to dispute, and in fact, is what Infantino attributes to U.S. “market rates.”

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.

What the host cities get out of this is the privilege of paying for it. FIFA’s contracts assign security, transportation, stadium retrofits, administration, and public fan zones to the localities, while withholding access to the revenue streams like tickets, sponsorship and media, that might offset them. The result, as economist Andrew Zimbalist of Smith College put it, is a structurally losing proposition. “There are very, very significant costs to host cities, which host anywhere from........

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