Despite record-breaking crowds during the World Cup, host cities saw less financial return than expected as FIFA captured the biggest profits and local businesses faced mixed results.
When Kansas City's tourism agency pulled back the curtain on the numbers for the biggest event the city has ever hosted, it revealed a surprising twist. Per Visit KC, about 680,000 fans flooded the city for the World Cup, cruising right past the original projections by an extra 30,000 people. Direct spending reached a record $570 million across the nine-county region, but the forecast called for $653 million.
So visitor count beat expectations by 30,000, but spending still fell about $83 million short. You’d think more bodies in the city would automatically mean a bigger payday, but Kansas City just proved that the math isn’t always that simple.
The tournament drew a record 6,810,966 spectators across 104 matches, nearly double the 1994 total, although the match schedule also doubled. To figure out why the cash fell short, you have to look closer at who actually showed up, how long they stuck around, and who controlled the money.
The Visitors Came but Moved On
It turns out the vast majority of those visitors, roughly 83%, were domestic travelers, leaving international fans to make up just a 17% slice of the pie. In April, Kathy Nelson, who leads Visit KC and the Kansas City Sports Commission, told a KC Studio podcast that research with FIFA suggested a crowd that was “about 52% international."
Think about it this way: a drive-in fan from the next state over can easily catch a match and head home that night. An overseas traveler, on the other hand, is locked into buying hotel rooms and restaurant meals for days on end.
KCUR reported international travel headwinds, including potential entry bonds of up to $15,000 for some nationalities, immigration concerns and weaker Canadian travel. The reporting does not establish how many fans each factor deterred.
Length of stay widened the gap. Nelson said planners followed guidance from FIFA and others suggesting nine or 10 nights. Instead, international guests "came in for two, maybe three nights” before moving on. Because these international trips were cut short, local businesses had a much smaller window to actually get people to open up their wallets.
In other words, bringing people through the door was only part of the job. The spending forecast also depended on keeping them in town between matches.
There’s also a catch with the official headcount: Visit KC tracks individual trips rather than unique faces, meaning a single die-hard fan returning for multiple matches gets counted over and over.
Hotels still captured more room revenue as rates climbed, collecting over $119 million. Consultancy HVS estimated that revenue per available room finished 43.1% above its modeled baseline without the tournament, the strongest percentage gain among U.S. hosts. Revenue, however, does not establish profit after expenses.
How Soccer Crowds Pushed Out Seattle’s Regular Visitors
Seattle's economic targets were a moving target from the jump. Visit Seattle started out expecting a massive $929 million payout, but quietly dialed that back to $846 million just a few months later as expectations for international arrivals and capital spending weakened.
Its September report landed at $889 million, including $109 million in state and local taxes. In the end, Seattle couldn't quite live up to its original, lofty expectations, even if it managed to clear the lower bar it set for itself later on.
But soccer fans also replaced other customers. Visit Seattle said hotel occupancy fell against the same period in 2025 as the tournament displaced cruise passengers and convention attendees, although higher rates lifted revenue. HVS put occupancy 6.3 percentage points below its no-tournament baseline, the deepest drop among 11 U.S. host markets.
HVS linked Seattle's result partly to its stadium's proximity to convention hotels, where tournament prices discouraged meeting business. It’s a classic case of what economists call 'crowding out ' (the phenomenon where a massive influx of sports fans inadvertently scares off the regular business a city relies on anyway).
For a hotel owner, higher prices can offset empty rooms. For a neighborhood restaurant, losing its regular convention customers may produce a different result, even while the city reports an overall spending gain.
The figures themselves need unpacking, too. The trick is that we aren't comparing apples to apples here. While Kansas City’s $570 million figure strictly tracks cash spent directly at the register, Seattle’s $889 million total factors in the broader 'ripple effects' of that money moving through the local economy, including businesses buying supplies and workers spending their wages. Different categories and modeling assumptions make a simple city ranking misleading, and neither figure represents municipal profit.
Kansas City was still calculating its tax take in late October. Meanwhile, KUOW tallied about $120 million spent by Washington public entities, much of it on transport and lasting capital work. Assessing taxpayer returns also means looking at which commercial revenues hosts could actually collect.
FIFA Kept the Biggest Paydays for Itself
FIFA ran the tournament through its own subsidiaries. Its revised budget pinned 2026 revenue at a staggering $8.911 billion. The lion's share of that came from a $3.925 billion broadcasting haul and another $3.017 billion in ticket sales and hospitality rights, with marketing deals padding the total by another $1.786 billion.
Keep in mind, these are just budget projections rather than take-home profit. FIFA had to earmark $3.756 billion just to run the tournament, meaning their massive control over commercial revenue came with a massive operational price tag.
The harsh reality for host cities is that they were locked out of the most lucrative game-day paydays. Investigations into the original host agreements show that local organizers were completely blocked from ticket, concession, merchandise, and parking revenue while assigning substantial security and delivery obligations to local organizers.
“Everybody signed an agreement that was very, very one-sided," said Alan Rothenberg, a Los Angeles host committee member who led U.S. Soccer during the 1994 tournament. Back then, he said, some cities shared concession revenue, and U.S. Soccer paid for security.
Michael Edwards, a North Carolina State University sports management professor, told Forbes: "FIFA's model is FIFA gets the revenue, and host cities bear the costs and the risks.”
In Kansas City, a detailed KSHB tally put public funding at about $248 million across federal, Missouri, Kansas and city contributions. It included stadium and infrastructure work, plus Missouri allocations that might not all be spent. Kansas City's own contribution was $15 million. Dumping the whole regional bill onto City Hall doesn't give a fair picture of who actually footed the bill. It's also lazy math to simply divide total visitor spending by the public funding amount and market the result as a win for the average taxpayer. A restaurant's sales reach the treasury only partly through taxes, while some public investments continue serving residents after the final whistle.
Hosting's defenders also count future tourism. Visit Seattle's Kelly Saling said, “the benefit goes beyond these immediate figures,” pointing to global exposure. Such gains take time to establish, while public agencies and local organizers must cover substantial delivery costs.
Why Marco success left a mixed bag on the ground
The view improves from 30,000 feet. Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan told CBS’s “Face the Nation" that bank research estimated $40 billion in tournament-related activity, roughly $20 billion in the United States. It’s worth noting, too, that the bank was a major sponsor of the tournament (meaning they had plenty of skin in the game when they graded its success).
The bank's credit card data gave a clearer picture of how people opened their wallets: overall spending in host cities climbed about 5% compared to the previous year, while out-of-towners drove a massive 17% spike, with Kansas City leading the charge at a 7% jump.
But the economists described a more modest national effect, partly because spending likely shifted from other cities. Because of that, you shouldn't look at that $20 billion figure as pure, brand-new profit injected directly into the economy.
Some hosts beat their forecasts. New York and New Jersey reported $3.5 billion against $3.3 billion projected. The Bay Area's $850 million exceeded its $480 million to $630 million range, helped by higher daily visitor spending. Analysts pointed out that everything from hotel logistics to where stadiums were actually built shook up the numbers. In Kansas City's case, having a great central location simply wasn't enough to bring in the high-spending international crowds local planners were betting on.
Kansas City Lines Up Its Next Bids
Kansas City is one of seven finalists for a men's Final Four between 2032 and 2036. Its bid centers on the Chiefs’ planned domed stadium in Kansas City, Kansas, expected to open in 2031. But there's a catch: Nelson noted that the NCAA wants a venue up and running for at least two full years before handing over a Final Four, meaning 2033 is the absolute soonest the city could play host. We'll find out if they get the nod in July 2027.
The city is also throwing its hat in the ring for the 2031 Men's Rugby World Cup, with final proposals due this January and a definitive answer coming by February 2027.
As these new bids move forward, local planners are using lessons from the soccer World Cup as a reality check, helping them model for shorter tourist stays and pick apart fine-print revenue deals long before they promise a single dollar of taxpayer money.
Mayor Quinton Lucas wants future visitors to stay longer and hopes to preserve some tournament transit improvements. While he still considers the World Cup an overall win, he told KCUR that the real challenge moving forward is figuring out how to actually keep that revenue stream alive.