FIFA has published what it describes as a socioeconomic impact analysis for the 2026 World Cup, projecting $40.9 billion in additional global GDP, nearly 824,000 full-time-equivalent jobs and a Social Return on Investment ratio of 3.64. Total combined economic and social impact is put, by some readings of the underlying research, above $88 billion. The study was produced under the GoalEconomy banner by FIFA and the World Trade Organization’s research arm, working through consultancy OpenEconomics. The headline figures are large by design. The qualifications buried in the methodology deserve equal attention.
The 2026 tournament is a genuine structural shift in what a World Cup is. For the first time, 48 teams will compete rather than 32, spread across three host nations – the United States, Mexico and Canada – and sixteen cities ranging from Vancouver to Mexico City to Miami. Roughly 6.5 million attendees are expected, with total tournament-related expenditure put at $13.9 billion, of which $11.1 billion is projected to land in the United States. Whatever one makes of the multipliers applied to that spending, the commercial scale of a trinational, expanded-format tournament is a logistical fact before it is a modelling exercise.
The methodology is more transparent than most pre-event studies manage. The researchers built an inter-country Social Accounting Matrix covering 45 sectors and 76 countries and ran sensitivity tests: even with a 15 per cent attendance shortfall, total economic output is claimed to hold above $70 billion; even with tourist spending down 10 per cent, the projected GDP impact stays within a $38.5 to $43.2 billion band.
Read closely, however, the picture shifts. The United States is expected to see roughly $17.2 billion in additional GDP -set against an economy of nearly $28 trillion, that is well under a tenth of a per cent. This is consistent with independent academic work on mega-events going back decades, which routinely finds real-world GDP effects at a fraction of pre-event projections, partly because tournament spending displaces rather than creates economic activity. A dollar spent on a hotel room during the World Cup may simply be a dollar not spent somewhere else.
The employment figure requires similar qualification. Approximately 40 per cent of the workforce behind the 824,000-jobs headline is modelled as temporary, low-skilled labour paid below the national average wage. That detail sits in the methodology annex, not the executive summary.
The 3.64 SROI figure rests on assigning monetary proxy values to non-market goods – civic pride, volunteering, physical activity inspired by watching the tournament – using OECD-derived guidance. Each proxy may be individually defensible. Stacked into a single multiplier and interpreted by the commissioning institution, the result reads more as an advocacy figure than a neutral one.
The honest case for hosting the World Cup, the report’s own social-value framework quietly implies, was always less about GDP arithmetic than about infrastructure legacy, global visibility and civic experience. Those are real goods. They are simply not goods that sit comfortably alongside a headline number built for a press conference.
