By Andy Serwer
Money makes the World Cup go round.
Just ask the group of 100 or so Columbia Business School students, chit-chatting excitedly, who are filing into the Leon G. Cooperman '67 Commons auditorium in David Geffen Hall on the university's campus in Upper Manhattan.
They're here to attend the Columbia Global Football Forum: Impact of the FIFA World Cup 2026, eager to hear from notables like the CEO of the New York City Football Club, the head of Apollo Global Management's sports practice, and Tammy Murphy, board chair of the New York-New Jersey 2026 FIFA World Cup Host Committee (and wife of former New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy).
"We've got this extraordinary opportunity in front of us," Sunil Gulati, senior lecturer in the economics department at Columbia, tells the students. Gulati, former president of the U.S. Soccer Federation, helped bring the thing to the U.S. "It's a huge tournament," he continues. "But scale is not legacy."
Perhaps. But don't tell that to FIFA -- the Fédération Internationale de Football Association -- the global governing body for soccer, which runs the World Cup. Set to kick off Thursday, June 11, it's the world's most popular sporting event, the pinnacle of o jogo bonito, or "the beautiful game," as Pelé liked to call it, watched by billions of people.
The final match of the 2022 Cup in Qatar, a high-drama showdown featuring superstars Argentina's Lionel Messi and France's Kylian Mbappé, with the former's team winning on penalty kicks, was as beautiful as it gets. FIFA is hoping lightning -- or Messi or Mbappé, for that matter -- strikes twice.
While this Cup will be unmatched in terms of scale and scope, a multibillion-dollar event any way you slice it (TV rights, sponsorship, eyeballs), it can bend toward hyperbole and hype -- such as when Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, described the 2026 World Cup as "the greatest event that humanity has ever seen." In fact, sometimes it seems as if FIFA is intent on making the World Cup the greatest moneymaking event that humanity has ever seen.
The sums are pretty staggering. FIFA is looking for revenue growth at this World Cup of more than 70% over the $7.57 billion it took in from the 2022 tournament to a projected $13 billion, an estimate it raised from $11 billion last year.
How is FIFA growing so much? For starters, it helps to be leveraging the U.S. market, the most lucrative in the world. And FIFA has expanded the tournament to teams from 48 countries, up from 32, so there will be 40 more matches, for a total of 104 games, driving up projected global TV revenue to $4.3 billion from $3.4 billion in 2022.
The games will be played in 16 cities -- 11 in the U.S., three in Mexico, and two in Canada -- all in existing stadiums (so no construction costs), many of them massive NFL venues like AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, outside Dallas, and MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. FIFA's Infantino has described this year's World Cup as "104 Super Bowls in a month." (It's actually 39 days.) No wonder ticket revenue is expected to more than triple to $3 billion from 2022.
As for war in the Middle East, worrisome oil prices, and inflation, plus a host country that isn't winning global popularity contests -- none of that seems to be reflected in the robust demand by corporate sponsors to get in on the action. In fact, the World Cup's great attraction may be a respite from all that. "This is already the most successful commercial program in FIFA's history," said FIFA Chief Business Officer Romy Gai, speaking at the Business of Soccer Conference in Atlanta. "We have seen unprecedented interest from brands across the globe."
FIFA has three tiers of sponsorship: multiyear global, global for 2026 only, and regional. U.S. companies representing the pantheon of marketing are prominently represented, including Visa, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Bank of America, and Home Depot. Here, too, FIFA is raking it in, with sponsorship dollars expected to grow more than 55%, from $1.8 billion in 2022 to $2.8 billion for this year's Cup.
"We're excited as a company," says Frank Cooper, chief marketing officer of Visa, one of eight top-tier sponsors. "You have the greatest concentration of global attention, which is a marketer's dream. It's incredibly rare today to find a scaled audience that's watching something simultaneously."
Manuel "Manolo" Arroyo, chief marketing officer at Coca-Cola, another top sponsor, says the World Cup is "our most important marketing program in 2026. There is a marriage of interest, where the audience FIFA is going after is the same audience we're trying to go after to grow our consumer base."
How much are Coke and Visa paying? Neither would say, but reportedly these multiyear deals cost well in excess of $100 million. (Coke spends some $5 billion annually on marketing, while Visa spends about $1.5 billion.)
Fees paid to FIFA are just the tip of the iceberg for these companies, though, because CMOs need to spend more on media to "activate" or advertise their relationship with the World Cup. For every dollar paid to FIFA for the rights to be an official sponsor, companies spend many times more than that in signage, special products, and TV ads. Arroyo says his company will spend anywhere "from two all the way to five times" the cost of the FIFA rights to bring Coke's World Cup campaigns to life.
Does all that spending work? "Is everyone familiar with the silver bullet that is sponsorship measurement?" John Shea, CEO of Octagon, a sports and entertainment marketing agency that represents a number of World Cup sponsors, including Home Depot and Aramco, asks the Columbia students. "No, it doesn't exist." Both Coke and Visa, for their part, are putting out measurable elements, such as collectible stickers on certain beverages and a "tap in" prize campaign for Visa.
Airbnb is touting its FIFA partnership as a Tier 3 supporter and "official accommodation provider." The company reports the World Cup is "set to be the biggest hosting event in Airbnb's history" and says some 400,000 World Cup fans are staying at its properties. "We are integrated into the ticket purchasing flow on the FIFA app," says Juan David Borrero, Airbnb's global head of partnerships and business development. "When you look for places to stay, that's powered by Airbnb." For what it's worth, 80% of hotels surveyed say that World Cup bookings are running below expectations, according to the American Hotel & Lodging Association.
U.S. soccer, too, stands to garner increased exposure from the World Cup, as Major League Soccer was effectively birthed at the last World Cup here in 1994. U.S. soccer has grown, boosted by immigrants and a younger audience, and now rivals baseball by some measures, but still trails basketball and the NFL in popularity.
The Fédération is within its rights to try to make the World Cup a mega-money winner. What irks some is that the great bulk of that money flows only to FIFA, a Swiss-based (opaque by definition) nonprofit that's not exactly like the Girl Scouts. FIFA is, in fact, a scandal-tarnished organization that has taken the World Cup tournament from Russia (2018) to Qatar (2022) and now the U.S. (but not before Infantino presented President Donald Trump with the inaugural FIFA peace prize), in search of the almighty dollar. Any trickle-down is just a trickle.
"Let's just say that I talk differently about economic impact if I'm in front of economics students or economic faculty than I do if we're trying to convince a mayor of a city this would be really good for them, " says Columbia's Gulati. FIFA predicts the World Cup will add $17.2 billion to U.S. gross domestic product and generate 185,000 jobs in the U.S. But leaders in some host cities and municipalities like northern New Jersey, Boston, and Kansas City, Mo., are crying foul about FIFA not sharing in ticket revenue and having to spend tens of millions of dollars for security, infrastructure, and transportation.
FIFA declined to comment for this article.
Even if you aren't a soccer fan, you've probably heard about dynamic pricing models and the vexing seating process for World Cup tickets. Some ticket prices are so exorbitant -- $10,000 for the final as of now -- that Trump, the nation's bargain-hunter-in-chief, said, "I wouldn't pay it." New York and New Jersey attorneys general recently issued subpoenas to FIFA to answer questions about its ticket sales practices.
"The whole thing is a mess," says Dan Roberts, editor in chief of Front Office Sports, which covers the business of sport. "There's the ticket prices, friction with travel to the U.S., and stadiums thousands of miles apart.
"But for all the hue and cry publicly, I don't think FIFA cares," Roberts says. "FIFA sees this as this is probably the last time for many decades that the World Cup will be in the U.S. And because it's the U.S., there's huge money to be made." In other words, negative headlines, teeth gnashing, even millions spent on litigation is simply the cost of doing business in the biggest market in the world. That, and when the games begin, much of the agita will likely be forgotten.
To a degree, Infantino and FIFA are using the World Cup as a wealth-redistribution platform. The organization says it plans to "reinvest" $11.7 billion to world soccer development. (The winning teams also get a payout. In 2022, Argentina received $42 million from a $440 million pool. This year's prizes will be much bigger.) How many dollars actually flow to poor, soccer-playing boys and girls in Third World countries is unclear, but some of that money also goes to local FIFA officials, who will be voting next year on whether or not to re-elect Infantino for a fourth four-year term.
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June 05, 2026 01:00 ET (05:00 GMT)
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