World Cup Cities Were Wrong to Ever Expect a Big Payoff

Hotel bookings in most soccer World Cup host cities in the US are running well below expectations, the American Hotel and Lodging Association reported last week, with 65% to 70% of the hoteliers responding to its survey pointing to “visa barriers and broader geopolitical concerns” as the main cause. There’s surely something to that — travel to the US is down since President Donald Trump began his immigration crackdown and ally-alienation campaign last spring, and the energy crisis brought on by the US-Israeli war on Iran has started to depress travel to everywhere. The much-criticized (even by President Trump) ticket-pricing policies of World Cup organizer FIFA (short for Fédération Internationale de Football Association) may also be keeping fans away.

But when I hear people complaining that the economic payoff from hosting World Cup games might be less than expected, I can’t help but wonder what they expected. The best available analysis of the regional economic impact of the last World Cup in the US, in 1994, concluded that it probably reduced economic activity in the nine host cities by more than $5.5 billion. This wasn’t because the 1994 World Cup was a bust — it was a huge success, filling large stadiums in a soccer-backward country that many thought would never turn out so many fans and permanently entwining the world’s most lucrative sports market with its most popular sport. But the logistics of hosting World Cup games, especially in a country as sprawling as the US, means the direct economic impact on the host cities is mixed at best.