In partnership with

FIFA’s soccer World Cup promises to deliver $11.1 billion in spending and $30.5 billion economic impact for the U.S., but how much is it really helping the American economy? BBTW editor Peter Green spoke with Victor Matheson, a sports economist at College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, Mass., who has spent years studying the economics of mega-events, including the Olympics and World Cup. With the 2026 World Cup spread across the United States, Canada and Mexico, Matheson sees a tournament that may be cheaper to host than past editions — but it’s also still unlikely to deliver the vast local economic windfalls promised by FIFA and host committees. Instead, FIFA itself is expected to reap a profit of about $11 billion.

What makes this World Cup different economically from past tournaments? Qatar reportedly spent $200 billion to host the 2022 World Cup. 

Most estimates are between $50 and $100 million per city, and that's 11 cities in the United States. So, you're looking at maybe $1 billion of hosting costs, which we still shouldn't be thrilled with, because FIFA could have borne those costs themselves. That being said, it's still a tenth of what was spent in Brazil [$13.5 billion in 2014], and less than 1% of what was spent in Qatar.

It looks like the biggest change was that by spreading the games across three countries that already have full-sized stadiums, the cost came way down. 

That’s right. There was no new stadium construction, although we put some coats of paint on things. We had a couple of stadiums where we had to widen the field to be big enough for FIFA standards. And we did spend a bunch of money swapping out turf for real grass in stadiums. So, there's millions or tens of millions of dollars spent on stadiums, but not billions. And we spent a bunch of money and millions of dollars covering up advertisements in stadiums if they conflicted in any way with FIFA's advertising sponsors.

So what are the real direct costs?

Maybe you can go as high as $2 billion. This is the cost of security, additional transportation, sanitation, transporting players around, stadium controls, all these things. Although we don't have any uniform numbers across all the different cities, we know we're in the billion or low, low single digit sort of zone. It’s a fraction of what was spent in the past, because there really aren't any major construction projects that are part of this event.

FIFA and local boosters argue there will be huge knock-on effects. How seriously should we take those claims?

If FIFA is trying to justify subsidies directed towards FIFA because of all the great things FIFA is going to do for you, that should be something that raises gigantic red flags with anyone, right? There's no doubt that there's going to be some level of tourism impact here that's positive, but it is likely to be significantly less than FIFA advertises. A big factor is what's known as the substitution effect, where economic activity occurred one place in a local economy, rather than somewhere else. So for example, I am going on Friday here in Boston to see Scotland versus Morocco. Those are expensive tickets, $400 each. That's $400 that I don't have available to spend elsewhere in the local Boston economy this year. It's not like my entertainment budget all of a sudden magically grew by $400. That's not new money that's getting spent in Boston, that's just shifting around where in the greater Boston area that money's getting spent. That's a substitution effect to the extent locals are going to the World Cup. And a lot of the people are local. That means that's not new economic impact. It's just a substitution effect.

So FIFA may be taking money that would have gone to local businesses?

Right. If I'm the usual bar goer, and I spend my money this summer going to Boston Soccer Stadium, instead of my local bar. Yes, that's money that FIFA's getting instead of my local bar. So that's a substitution away from my local bar towards FIFA.

What about ‘crowding out’?

Crowding out is when the crowds and congestion associated with something keeps other sort of economic activities from happening. Hotels are pretty full and they are full of soccer fans. But those hotels would be full of other types of tourists instead because we're now hitting our summer stride here. So, Boston hotels are usually 80 percent full all through summer. So, we have crowded out the regular economic activity. Right. And so we need to make sure we account for that when we're talking about economic impact. In 2024 in Paris during the Olympics, all the hotels were full, but the hotels are always full in Paris in summer. And during the Olympics, attendance at the Louvre and at the Musée d'Orsay was down about 25 percent. So you displaced one kind of tourist with a different kind of tourist. Same thing happened in the Olympics in London as well in 2012. They actually shut down some of the West End shows that normally would be on, again, because of a lack of that kind of tourist.

And what about ‘leakage’?

Leakage happens when money gets spent locally but doesn't stick locally. So, for example, if I go down to that local brew pub, here in Worcester, the Greater Good Brewery, which is a locally owned brewery, I go and I get a beer and I tip my server. Well, that brewery owner and that server are going to take my money, then they're going to spend it elsewhere here in the local Boston or Worcester economy. They're going to buy a haircut and then that barber is going to spend money at the market. And of course, that money circulates through. But during mega events like this, you may have a lot more of that money leak out of the economy right away. So, for example, the money I spend on tickets, none of that ever finds their way into any local business, that immediately heads back to [FIFA in] Switzerland. So no one is actually made better off in Boston by spending that money.

So who benefits most from the World Cup?

FIFA, number one. FIFA is going to make somewhere between 10 and maybe 13 billion dollars on this event both from record large crowds, but also record expensive ticket sales. They're going to benefit from gigantic TV ratings. Oddly, despite high ticket prices, we're seeing some really good crowds, typically sell-outs.

But FIFA is promising $30 billion in economic impact to the U.S. What should we expect when economists look back after the tournament?

When we actually go back and look at the economies of host cities, we will not find that level of economic impact. I think we will find a level of economic impact that’s positive, but I don't think we're going to find anything close to what FIFA is claiming, roughly a billion dollars per city. I think that's unlikely.

What did economists find after the 1994 World Cup in the U.S.?

We looked at the results from the 1994 World Cup in the United States. In that event, FIFA estimated $4 billion of economic impact for each host city. When we actually looked back at the host cities that did host games, we compared them to cities that didn't host games. We found that the host cities actually did about $4 billion worse than you would normally have expected them to do. It wasn't statistically significantly different from zero, but certainly we didn't get any evidence that there was any sort of surge. The numbers are always below projections. On average, the effects are either small or not distinguishable from zero.

(This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity).

—Peter S. Green

Big Businesses mentioned this week

$YUM ( ▼ 1.29% )  $YUMC ( ▼ 0.59% )  $APO ( ▼ 0.45% )  $SPCX ( ▼ 3.56% )  $FOX ( ▲ 0.47% )  $ROKU ( ▲ 0.55% )  $AMZN ( ▲ 2.98% )  $NFLX ( ▲ 0.55% )  $AAPL ( ▲ 0.7% )  $PSKY ( ▼ 0.25% )  $WBD ( ▼ 0.15% )  $TSLA ( ▲ 1.04% )  $RIVN ( ▲ 1.6% )  $META ( ▲ 1.95% )  $ANTHZZX ( ▲ 0.06% )  $OPEAZZX ( ▲ 0.31% )  $SNAP ( ▼ 1.37% )  

This week, big business!

• War Story

• The Usual Suspects

• Tech talk

• Trumplandia

• Want more Cheddar?

War Story

• MOU-ving In The Right Direction? Whether it’s a Memorandum of Understanding or Misunderstanding, whatever comes out of the latest talks between the U.S. and Iran looks like it will reopen flows of oil from the Persian/Arabian Gulf. But it’s unlikely that’s going to happen fast enough for the global economy to swiftly rebound. In fact, the global economy may have been permanently altered as countries remember that energy autonomy is a national security issue, and start building stockpiles and switching away from oil they can’t drill themselves. Brent crude futures dropped to $78 a barrel this week, close to the $75 it was trading at just before the U.S./Israeli bombing campaign began. Still, it will take months before all the oil now trapped in the Gulf reaches refineries and consumers, and more months before those tankers fill up again and global oil traffic returns to normal. Meanwhile, inflation in the U.S. is over 4.2% and the new Fed chair is not cutting interest rates. Japan has hiked rates to 1% (yes, 1%) its highest rate in 31 years, to fight inflation. And with Iran expecting to resume oil exports without any sanctions, there could be a price war that would alter global capital flows. That’s all before the U.S. gives Iran $24 billion in frozen assets and starts to create a potential $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran. In other words? Nobody is out of the woods, just yet. Hillary Clinton wrote a surprising op-ed in the Financial Times praising the deal. “If even I, an implacable opponent of the president, can accept this as the best option, then surely others can too?” she wrote. Meanwhile Texas Senator Ted Cruz hasn’t exactly minced his words in opposition. “History teaches that giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us is not a good idea,” he said.

ADVERTISEMENT

Trade Real-World Events. Get $10 Free.

Start trading real-world events. With Kalshi, you can trade on things you already follow: inflation, elections, sports, and more. It’s simple: buy “Yes” or “No” shares on what you think will happen, and earn returns if you’re right.

To get you started, we’re giving you a free $10. Use it to explore the platform, test your instincts, and see how prediction markets work in real time.

Join thousands already trading the news and putting their knowledge to work.

Claim your $10 and start trading now.

Put $10 to Work

_{Trade responsibly.}

END OF ADVERTISEMENT

The Usual Suspects

• Sliced: Yum Brands $YUM ( ▼ 1.29% ) is selling off Pizza Hut. The operation is being sold in two slices: Yum China Holdings $YUMC ( ▼ 0.59% ) will buy the mainland China operations for $1.2 billion, while PE firm LongRange Capital is buying everything else for $1.5 billion. Growing competition and shrinking consumer cash has hit pizzerias hard. Coffee shops and Mexican restaurants are expanding, but the number of pizza shops has declined since 2018. In December, California Pizza Kitchen was sold to an investor group for $300 million, after going private in 2011 for $470 million. Apollo Global Management $APO ( ▼ 0.45% ) withdrew its $2.1 billion bid for Papa John’s last winter as consumer spending fell. Still, according to industry bible Pizza Today (is there a Deep Dish section?), there were still 75,736 pizzerias in the U.S. last year, though revenue fell 0.3%, to $49.5 billion in 2025. Yum brands shares climbed 3.44% on news of the sale, before giving back the gains by mid-week.

• We will, we will…Roku. Lachlan Murdoch’s doubling down on Fox’s $FOX ( ▲ 0.47% ) future as king of sports, live-TV content and ad-funded streaming, with a $22 billion agreement to buy cord-cutting device Roku $ROKU ( ▲ 0.55% ) , which has its own free, add-supported on-demand movie and streaming service that will add to Fox’s Tubi. The deal is a lifeline for Roku, which has struggled to make a profit, and will help the combined business compete with Amazon $AMZN ( ▲ 2.98% ) and Netflix $NFLX ( ▲ 0.55% ) for ad dollars. Ad-supported plans now make up nearly half of all streaming signups in the U.S., up from 39% in 2024. But it adds $12 billion in debt to Fox, and the cash and stock deal will dilute Fox’s existing shareholders, many of whom clearly saw the 34% premium Fox will pay as a deal too far. Shares in Fox plunged nearly 18% after the deal was announced Friday, and are now down 21%. Roku shares rose nearly 23% on the news and are still up more than 10%.

  

  (Google)

• Disembodying the Spirit: Even in death, Spirit Airlines can find no rest. As it begins selling off assets to pay off its $8 billion debt, Spirit has a dilemma — how to unload its 22 slots (11 sets of takeoffs and landings) at New York City’s LaGuardia airport, one of the most expensive airports in the U.S. The FAA wants a low-cost carrier to take the slots, which could be worth $87 million, the New York Times reports, and the airport’s owner the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, says whoever buys the slots has to take Spirit’s lease at the Art Deco Marine Air Terminal. But departure fees of $40 per passenger, among the steepest in the U.S., make those slots barely profitable. Meanwhile a Texas maker of recreational airplanes says it wants to buy all of Spirit’s planes, leases and other assets, and revive the airline. 

• Paramount deal gets Greenlighted: Paramount’s $PSKY ( ▼ 0.25% ) $81-billion deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery $WBD ( ▼ 0.15% ) got the approval of the Justice Dept after senior agency officials gave it the go-ahead, even as anti-trust attorneys in the same government agency had yet to decide whether they should sue to stop the deal. The department said the merger will “improve competition across the media and entertainment ecosystem, with benefits for American consumers and workers.” Top Justice Dept. officials fast-tracked the approval even though career lawyers analyzing the deal were leaning toward recommending that it be challenged, the Wall Street Journal reported. “This reeks of corruption,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat who is a staunch opponent of corporate consolidation, said on BlueSky. “The American people need to know if this merger was approved as a political favor.” Paramount shares are down 24.3% this year, dropping the company’s market cap to just over $11 billion. Next up, approval by the European Union, while several U.S. state attorneys general, including in California, ponder their own suits to stop the deal and preserve jobs in the entertainment industry.

• Rivian troubles: Tesla $TSLA ( ▲ 1.04% ) competitor Rivian $RIVN ( ▲ 1.6% ) is laying off hundreds of workers in its service and sales units, just as it is trying to win a bigger market share from Tesla and other EV makers with a new electric SUV, the R2. But with a sticker price of $58,000, some buyers say the car is too pricey, even in a leased version, whose monthly payments can top $800, the Wall Street Journal reports. Rivian had revenue of $5.4 billion  last year on sales of 42,000 vehicles, but it has yet to turn a profit. Shares in Rivian are down 16% this year, but up 26% from a late May low. 

Tech talk

• The X factor: There’s one number that may hold the key to understanding the SpaceX $SPCX ( ▼ 3.56% )  IPO: $1.08 billion. That’s how many shares changed hands in the three trading days since Elon Musk’s rocket company went to market. That’s 1.7 times the 639 million shares floated in the IPO. And that’s before individual investors reach the end of their 15-day lock up period. In other words, for many investors, SpaceX was a just a game of the “the bigger fool”: Find someone who’s willing to pay even more for the shares than you did. Now those arguable fools are hurting, as the laws of gravity take hold. After rocketing up from $150 to over $219, SpaceX shares have since fallen to $187, wiping out more than a hundred billion dollars in market cap, a largely notional value at this point.
  Among the fools, count the founders of Cursor, the AI vibe-coding tool, which Musk agreed to buy with about $60 billion in SpaceX stock. That deal will go through, as will the cashing out by SpaceX’s initial investors who may see payouts of more than 20x their initial investment. The week’s high briefly made SpaceX more valuable than Microsoft $MSFT ( ▼ 0.29% ) , before dropping half a trillion dollars in value. But it oculd easily drop further. Morningstar analyst Nicolas Owens values the company at $63 a share, about 53% below the IPO price and third of what it was trading for on Thursday. He says there is too much uncertainty about its two biggest programs, reusable rockets and space-based data centers. “Max Q, the moment of greatest atmospheric pressure on a launch vehicle, will come for SpaceX’s stock in the months following the IPO, when successive tranches of stock held by private investors and employees are slated to become available for sale into the public market,” Owens wrote. “We think long-term investors eager to participate in SpaceX’s future will have opportunities to do so with a greater margin of safety than the initial offering is likely to provide.”

• Meta’s AI-yai-yai problem: Fearful of being an also-ran in the AI race, Meta’s $META ( ▲ 1.95% )  cagefighter-in-chief, Mark Zuckerberg, spent $14 billion to hire one man, Alexandr Wang, along with his firm, Scale AI, and a group of its engineers. In April, Wang delivered the Muse Spark AI model, Meta’s first proprietary AI engine, but two months later, an eternity in AI time, it’s not showing any sign of helping Meta’s bottom line. “Meta needs to provide more proof points of both adoption and commercialization,” William Blair analyst Ralph Schackart, told CNBC. “Investors are looking for Meta to monetize a new AI-first product.” Despite Q1 revenue up 33%, Meta shares are down about 18% in the past year. And on Wednesday, Meta said the executive leading its internal AI transformation, Emily Dalton Smith, was stepping down, which doesn’t exactly bode well.

• Too smart to start? Anthropic $ANTHZZX ( ▲ 0.06% ) says it's been holding talks with the Trump Administration on restoring public access to its Fable and Mythos 5 models, which the company said have guardrails to prevent them from overwhelming internet security systems or teaching users how to make bombs and start pandemics. Last week, just hours after Anthropic said the limited models would be available, Amazon $AMZN ( ▲ 2.98% ) CEO Andy Jassy told Trump Administration officials his engineers had found a way to “jailbreak” the model and get past the guardrails, and the federal government ordered the Anthropic models shut. Similar models from OpenAI $OPEAZZX ( ▲ 0.31% ) do not appear to have been throttled, and the move comes just months after Anthropic refused to let the Department of Defense use its AI models for autonomous “killing machines.” (OpenAI offered to let the DoD use its models presumably for killing machines, instead). But now, Anthropic has announced it will go public, and is currently valued at $965 billion. A failed IPO could hurt the stock market. That’s created pressure on both sides to reach a quick solution.

• Apple takes a (price) hike: Apple $AAPL ( ▲ 0.7% ) CEO Tim Cook says the company will be raising prices amid surging costs of memory and storage chips. "We've been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable,” Cook told the Wall Street Journal. Price hikes might come at Apple’s next big launch event in September. Research firm TechInsights says that to maintain the profit margins that keep Apple's share price high, Cook would have to boost the price of an iPhone by a cool $275. 

• Snap back? Remember those video-recording Snapchat $SNAP ( ▼ 1.37% ) glasses back in 2016 or so, that you could (theoretically) buy from a  vending machine for $99, and use to turn your daily life into a series of Snaps? Um, they’re back. But this time they cost more than $2,000 ($2,190 to be precise) and they’re supposed to…do more. Given the 90% decline in the firm’s share price since then amid a steep fall in advertising, they may be the future of Snap. At least, that’s the plan of Evan Spiegel, co-founder and CEO and a man anxious to succeed. The main question is whether he has enough runway. Snapchat had about $2.8 billion in cash on hand at the end of March, which may not be enough to sustain the $500 million-a-year project. Twitter reactions to the new glasses have been very amusing over the last few days.

  

  (X.com)

Trumplandia

• Warsh Going On? At his first meeting of the Fed’s rate-setting Open Market Committee, newly installed Fed Chair Kevin Warsh threw down the gauntlet: He’ll be a hawk on rates for now, despite pleas by President Trump, who appointed him, to lower interest rates ahead of the November elections. The Fed held its benchmark rate at 3.5% to 3.75%, in a unanimous vote. But quarterly economic projections by the other 11 voting members of the panel indicate there could be at least one interest rate hike this year, instead of a cut. After the meeting, Warsh said cutting inflation, which reached a 4.2% annual rate last month, was job one: “We have the capability and commitment to deliver on our price stability objective,” Warsh said. “That’s exactly what we’re going to do.” AI spending and the war-fueled energy price spike have sent prices rising and consumers complaining. With unemployment steady around 4%, Warsh apparently sees little he can do to improve the job situation without first cutting prices. The Fed’s Summary of Economic Projections massively upgraded expected inflation for the year to 3.3% from 2.7% last month, and said GDP was likely to grow by only 2.2%, down from 2.4%. Warsh quickly made clear there’d be no more lengthy jawboning about what the Fed might or might not do. Instead, he wants the Fed to say less, and let it react more to markets. “Warsh seems ready to buck the Fed market feedback loop, where the market digests Fed communications. Instead, he wants more price discovery from the markets, and for the Fed to to digest the markets’ interpretation of economic developments,” Chris Hodge, chief U.S. economist at Natixis wrote in a note. The only problem with that? Everyone is looking after their own short-term gain, and no one is taking the big-picture view. Still, retail sales rose 0.9% in May in a sign that the great American consumer is shaking off gas price shocks, and average U.S. gas prices fell below $4 a gallon for the first time in months this week. So, the picture is nuanced.

Want more Cheddar?

You’re clearly into smart people talking about even smarter things. Lucky for you, that's literally our whole deal at Cheddar. We interview the brightest minds in business, finance, and tech. If you'd like more in-depth analysis from interesting people, lcheck out our where to watch page and turn us on 24/7! Your wallet will thank you and so, more importantly, will your mind. But also your wallet. Remember that. 

Peter S. Green is a veteran reporter and editor who has spent more than two decades covering business and finance from Eastern Europe to New York City, and has worked for Bloomberg News, The New York Post, The New York Times and The Messenger. He lives in New York City and is always looking for the next big story. Email him here.