The Invoice Arrives in 2027: Who Pays for the Party

The confetti has settled. The trophy has flown back to Zurich. The last private jet has cleared Teterboro, and the American cities that hosted the 2026 World Cup are left standing in parking lots full of crushed beer cups and memories. Somewhere in a municipal office in Los Angeles, an accountant is opening a spreadsheet. In Atlanta, a mayor is staring at a stadium debt that outlives their term. In Dallas, they are still wondering what one point three billion dollars actually bought them.

This is the part of the World Cup that does not make the highlight reels. This is the invoice.

FIFA will announce that the 2026 tournament generated eleven billion dollars in revenue. The number will sound like triumph. But follow that money. Trace it from the ticket scanners in Seattle to the broadcast satellites to the corporate suites in New York, and watch where it pools. By the time the accounting is done, roughly seven billion of those dollars will have settled in Swiss bank accounts, distributed to member associations in developing nations that will never see a World Cup in their lifetimes, and paid out in bonuses to executives who did not kick a single ball.

The cities that built the stage get something else. They get the bill.

In 1994, the United States hosted the World Cup and promised the participating cities that the tournament would pay for itself. It did not. Chicago lost sixty million dollars. Detroit lost nearly forty. The infrastructure improvements that were supposed to revitalize neighborhoods instead revitalized contractors and consultants who disappeared the moment the final whistle blew. The pattern repeats every four years. The host nation provides the labor, the land, the police overtime, the street closures, the security cordons, the temporary bleachers, and the deferred maintenance that accumulates like interest on a loan no one agreed to take.

For 2026, the scale is unprecedented. Three nations. Sixteen cities. Forty-eight teams. Eighty matches. The largest single-event security operation in North American history. The cost estimates drift between fifteen and twenty billion dollars depending on who is counting and what they choose to include. The new stadiums in Kansas City and Nashville. The rail extensions in Los Angeles that must be finished before the opening ceremony. The hotel rooms block-booked at rates that make the tourism board wince. The tax breaks for FIFA, who pays no federal income tax on its American revenue because of a 1966 exemption written when the organization was a modest coordinating body and not a global enterprise.

The cities sign the contracts anyway.

There is a psychology to this. A mayor standing beside a FIFA official at a press conference, smiling for cameras, knows the numbers do not work. But the alternative is to watch a rival city get the nod. To see your skyline on every broadcast in every nation while you explain to voters why you said no. The World Cup is not a rational investment. It is a civic compulsion, a collective bet that the intangible benefits — the exposure, the prestige, the feeling of being chosen — will somehow translate into prosperity that the spreadsheets cannot predict.

Sometimes they do. Sometimes a stadium anchors a neighborhood that gentrifies into prosperity. Sometimes the tourism spike lasts beyond the final. Sometimes the infrastructure improvements were necessary anyway and the World Cup simply accelerates them. But these are exceptions. The rule is that the host pays and FIFA collects.

Consider the worker. In Qatar, the last World Cup cost seven thousand lives to construct. In North America, the labor is safer but no less invisible. The security guards working twelve-hour shifts in the Texas heat. The hospitality staff cleaning hotel rooms at two in the morning. The delivery drivers navigating closed streets for weeks. These are the people who make the spectacle possible, and they will not be in the photographs. Their wages will not be in the revenue announcements. Their overtime will be disputed in labor courts long after FIFA has moved on to 2030.

Consider the resident. The homeowner whose street becomes a security checkpoint. The small business owner whose regular customers flee the traffic. The tenant whose rent doubles because landlords know tourists will pay. The displacement is not malicious. It is simply arithmetic. A World Cup creates demand that prices out the people who lived there before the world arrived.

The 2026 tournament will be called a success. The television ratings will justify the advertising rates. The social media impressions will be measured in trillions. The highlight packages will run for decades. And in 2027, when the accountants finish their work, the cities will confront a number that does not fit the narrative. A debt. A maintenance backlog. A stadium that sits half-empty, too expensive to demolish and too specialized for anything but the occasional concert.

FIFA will have already moved on. The 2030 tournament will be awarded to Morocco, Portugal, and Spain, and the cycle will begin again. New promises. New spreadsheets. New mayors smiling beside officials who answer to no electorate.

The beautiful game deserves beautiful stages. But someone should ask, while the confetti is still in the air, whether the stage is worth the price. Not the ticket price. The real price. The one that arrives later, in a municipal office, when the music has stopped and the bill has finally come due.