Editor’s note: This story is updated from the print edition with a written statement from FIFA.
As one of the 16 host markets for the FIFA World Cup 2026, the San Francisco Bay Area will host more than 30 watch parties and fan zones during the six-week tournament. Farther up the coast, Seattle will stage four celebrations within its metro area, with 10 more local events spread across Washington state.
Fans visiting FIFA’s website, however, won’t find information about any of them.
That’s because neither region is staging an official FIFA Fan Festival, the designation given to the large public viewing events sanctioned by the tournament organizer and used by official sponsors as a space for on-the-ground activations.
The lack of official Fan Festivals in those markets is a departure from FIFA’s initial vision.
Host city agreements signed before the tournament was awarded to North America in June 2018 called for FIFA Fan Festivals in every market, running each day of the competition, free to attendees and serving as the only public viewing event endorsed by the host city. The contracts also required each host city authority do so “at its own costs.”
Public viewing events are the most visible example of how the World Cup will differ across the 16 host markets in the U.S., Mexico and Canada, but not the only one. The cost of transit, the role of local companies and the level of available funding also vary widely.
A newly expanded World Cup being held across three countries for the first time was naturally going to feel different — and more unwieldy — than prior editions, particularly compared with the single-city World Cup 2022 in Doha, Qatar.
But the level of variation from market to market in 2026 is also a downstream effect of a new operating model spearheaded by FIFA President Gianni Infantino a decade ago that has centralized the World Cup’s most valuable revenue streams with FIFA. Meanwhile, host markets — each with its own geographic, governance and funding considerations — have been responsible for developing the local fan experience and covering roughly $100 million to $200 million in associated costs.
The model has helped position FIFA to generate $13 billion during its 2023-26 financial cycle, a four-year period anchored by this summer’s tournament, and to minimize its own costs.
“The documents that stadiums and cities had to sign were pretty onerous with a lot of responsibilities,” said former U.S. Soccer President Sunil Gulati.
As financial pressure on cities built, FIFA loosened some requirements, local organizers pushed the boundaries of the model and, in some cases, local politicians threw their weight around. The result is a mega event that will look different in every market.
Infantino’s vision
After being elected president of FIFA in 2016 following the organization’s corruption scandal, Infantino released a road map for the organization called “FIFA 2.0: The Vision for the Future.” The document laid out a new strategic direction, including how to improve the profitability and efficiency of its crown jewel event, the FIFA World Cup.
Infantino took aim at the long-standing Local Organizing Committee (LOC) model, under which FIFA partnered with an entity based in the host country that carried substantial responsibility for planning and delivering the tournament.
The last time the U.S. hosted the World Cup in 1994, a Los Angeles-based group led by then-U.S. Soccer President Alan Rothenberg successfully oversaw virtually all elements of the competition, from ticketing and domestic sponsorship sales to coordination with the nine host cities. That edition remains the most-attended World Cup to date.
But Infantino envisioned FIFA taking greater control of its most important event, previous editions of which have generated more than 80% of the organization’s total revenue for a four-year cycle. The document raised the possibility of adopting a more centralized model, including the creation of a FIFA-controlled subsidiary, or “NewCo,” to take greater control of event delivery, a concept embedded the following year in the bidding guidelines for 2026.
‘Not much of a negotiation’
Heading into 2018, the national governing bodies for soccer in the U.S., Canada and Mexico joined forces to bid against Morocco to host the 2026 World Cup. Leaders of the tri-national United Bid were aware of — if not enthusiastic about — FIFA’s plan to centralize the operation of the competition. But because it was a new model, many of the details were unknown.
One thing that was clear based on the bid and hosting documents, however, was that public support would be critical to staging the event.
The agreements saddled host cities and stadium authorities with major obligations, including safety and security, Fan Festival operations, transport and mobility planning, and FIFA-required stadium modifications.
“These are one-sided agreements when there’s multiple bidders, and if you don’t sign, you don’t host the World Cup,” said Gulati, who served as president of U.S. Soccer during most of the bid process. “I’m sure there were things, if I look back, that we would’ve signed or negotiated differently, but it’s not much of a negotiation.”
John Kristick, who served as executive director of the United Bid Committee, said that while the agreements were one-sided and there were unknowns about the operating model, the bid team believed the model could be adapted for North America in the eight years following FIFA’s vote.
“There was, if not contractual, a tacit understanding [with FIFA] that if the U.S., Canada and Mexico won, that there would be a very open discussion about how the model could be sized for this market,” Kristick said.
At least two cities, Chicago and Vancouver, balked at FIFA’s terms, though Vancouver eventually re-entered the process after the tournament was awarded. But 23 other cities signed the standard host city agreements to be included in the bid. In 2022, FIFA whittled that down to 16 host cities — 11 American, three Mexican and two Canadian.
Monica Paul, executive director for the Dallas Sports Commission, said that, while she is happy with how things have worked out for her city, having more clarity on obligations from the start would have been beneficial.
The scope of the event also changed after the bid was awarded. In 2023, the FIFA Council voted to adjust the group-stage format of the first 48-team World Cup, moving from 16 groups of three teams to 12 groups of four. The switch increased the total number of matches from 64 to 104, with all the added games in the opening phase of competition. As a result, cities would host more matches than initially anticipated and need to adjust their budgets accordingly.
No central advocacy
While bid and city leaders expected U.S. Soccer to serve as an active liaison between the American host cities and FIFA, the federation has played a marginal role in the delivery of the event.
“That removed the central advocacy that the cities could have benefited from,” said Kristick, who has served as an adviser to several host cities in his role as co-head of Playfly Sports Consulting. “I’m sure FIFA and U.S. Soccer will say there were perfectly legitimate reasons why they chose that, but I think from the city side, that left them a little bit more isolated.”
U.S. Soccer CEO JT Batson, who joined the federation in 2022, said FIFA taking control of event delivery has allowed the federation to focus on building a competitive national team, putting on its own local community events and growing the popularity of the sport. While U.S. Soccer worked with the 11 American host cities to lobby the federal government for $625 million in funding for safety and security, it didn’t play such a role in pushing FIFA to provide cities with greater financial support.
FIFA established an office in Miami to house its main World Cup operations, along with smaller outposts in Toronto and Mexico City. Led by former U.S. Soccer executive Amy Hopfinger, the Miami office has been the primary link between the 11 U.S.-based host cities and FIFA’s top brass in Zurich.
“If we’re not the ones being the cheerleader and the liaison on behalf of the host cities to the rest of this country, then their voice is never going to be heard,” said Aubrey Walton, executive director of host cities, commercial and strategic management for the 2026 World Cup.
FIFA said in a written statement that it is “investing a significant amount of money” in hosting the World Cup, citing the $3.8 billion it forecasts to spend on the event. The governing body also pointed out that the 2026 World Cup requires far less infrastructure investment than prior editions due to the lack of purpose-built stadiums.
The Host City Supporter Program
When cities joined the United Bid in 2017, there was a broad understanding that they would have opportunities to generate revenue to offset their costs. Addendums signed in 2022 before FIFA made its final host city selections provided greater detail.
FIFA outlined a local rights package that would allow each city to grant 10 companies, dubbed Host City Supporters, the right to use city-specific marks within their local market. It also gave host cities the right to purchase tickets (up to 1.5% of stadium capacity per match) and access to limited VIP hospitality and Fan Festival activation opportunities.
But the package was also heavily conditioned. Each Host City Supporter had to be approved by FIFA and could not come from the same commercial category as any of the governing body’s own global or regional sponsors for the tournament. The most valuable assets, including tickets and hospitality, were framed as purchase access rather than free inventory.
Cities have used the program to raise tens of millions of dollars. For those with significant public support, like Houston, Dallas and Kansas City, that has been a valuable supplemental revenue stream, even if it hasn’t fully lived up to expectations.
For organizers in other cities, however, it has failed to deliver the level of revenue needed to cover initial plans due to category restrictions, a lack of valuable assets and the fact that any tickets or suites included in supporter packages had to first be purchased at face value.
“The biggest thing FIFA should have done that probably would’ve solved everything, was give everyone 10 to 15 free suites,” one host committee leader said. “I just needed some assets so that my margin on the sponsorship sale was bigger. That was it.”
Newfound flexibility
As it became clear many host cities were struggling to make their budgets pencil out, FIFA opted to scale back select obligations rather than provide direct financial support to fulfill its initial vision.
The original host city agreements called on host cities to provide ticket holders with free public transportation on match days and to operate official FIFA Fan Festivals each day of the competition. Both would have created a more uniform fan experience across the 16 host cities but were among the most expensive obligations.
As planning advanced, FIFA backed away from the free transit requirement, telling host cities in 2023 that they could provide matchday transportation “at cost.” In 2024, FIFA loosened its strict Fan Festival guidelines, telling local organizers they could determine the size and scope of their events, determine on which and how many days to operate them — or even eschew an official FIFA Fan Festival altogether.
“We looked at our budget and tried to understand what are the requirements that we really have to do to ensure a safe tournament, and then where do we have a little bit of flex,” said Zaileen Janmohamed, president and CEO of the Bay Area Host Committee. “We ended up having a little bit of flex from FIFA on fan fest, and it just alleviated a lot of financial pressure for us.”
A range of experiences across the U.S.
Across the U.S., host markets effectively fall into four camps based on how closely they have stuck to FIFA’s original template.
Template cities: In Dallas, Houston and Philadelphia, plans largely align with FIFA’s original vision. All three local host committees benefited from strong funding structures consisting of public support, private donations and the Host City Supporter program revenue. As a result, all three will hold large, centralized FIFA Fan Festivals operating on most or all of the tournament’s 39 days, and offer subsidized, free or low-cost transit options.
For the two Texas cities, being able to count on support from the state’s Major Events Reimbursement Program from the outset reduced funding pressure and allowed them to focus on private fundraising and operations.
“From a funding standpoint, knowing that there is a program already established in Texas for being able to offset some of the costs to be able to host an event, I think is very critical for us,” Paul said of Dallas. “It allows us to also be able to optimize, innovate [and] focus on the operational pieces and the bells and whistles and the experience piece.”
In Philadelphia, corporate fundraising began while the city was bidding to become one of the 16 host markets. Meg Kane, CEO of Philadelphia Soccer 2026, said her team secured $41 million in funding commitments from locally based companies and philanthropic organizations before being selected in June 2022.
“That allowed people to spread that pledge out over a five-year period, which I think was part of the success,” Kane said. “It gave people a chance to plan, but it also allowed for this ongoing engagement. So today, we continue to privately fundraise, but we didn’t turn our attention to public sector funding in any way until we had secured the bid itself.”
Philadelphia also found a sponsor, Airbnb, to underwrite SEPTA train rides leaving Lincoln Financial Field, meaning fans traveling by rail to matches will only need to spend $2.90 for their entire journey.
“Finding someone that was able to underwrite that freed up more than $600,000 for us to put toward our Fan Festival,” Kane said.
Those advantages allowed the three cities to preserve the kind of centralized, full-scale public celebration FIFA initially contemplated.
Scaled-Central Cities: Kansas City, Atlanta and Miami are also putting on large, centralized FIFA Fan Festivals, but each will operate for roughly half of the competition. All three have garnered some level of public support and raised private funds, including through the Host City Supporter program. Kansas City and Miami have also built out event-specific shuttle bus services, with Miami offering ticket holders free rides to Hard Rock Stadium and Kansas City charging $15 per match.
Dan Corso, president of the Atlanta Sports Council, said the city plans to keep its FIFA Fan Festival at Centennial Olympic Park open for 18 days, though that schedule could be expanded if the city brings on additional Host City Supporters in the final weeks before kickoff.
Budget-Constrained Official Model: In Boston, the city has done its best to stay true to FIFA’s initial concept despite running into budgetary challenges.
Boston host committee CEO Mike Loynd, who has publicly expressed concerns about fundraising over the past year, said the group has raised more than $20 million through the commercial program, including from three Host City Supporters. It has received roughly the same amount from local government, along with a $46 million federal grant, bringing its identified funding to less than $100 million — well short of the $170 million the committee had hoped to raise.
“We’ve been working hard to find the right fiscally responsible delivery,” Loynd said. “We’re not flush with cash.”
Despite the tight budget, civic leaders prioritized hosting an official FIFA Fan Festival. The city’s main event at Boston City Hall Plaza will run for 16 days from June 12 to June 27 and accommodate up to 5,000 fans at a time.
“I was very keen on the fact that FIFA will film our fan fest and show beauty shots of Boston across the globe as part of that deal,” said Martha Sheridan, president and CEO of Meet Boston. “And I just think it adds a little bit of cachet to it that it is an official FIFA Fan Festival. People that attend ours will feel like they’re in a place that’s got a lot of the IP, a lot of activity and a comprehensive match broadcast schedule.”
Fans attending matches will have several mass transit options from downtown Boston to Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, but the pricing reflects the budgetary strain of hosting. The MBTA is selling round-trip train tickets that would typically cost $20 for a Patriots game for $80 on World Cup match days. The host committee is also offering round-trip shuttle bus service for $95.
Distributed-Model Cities: Then, there are the markets that leaned into FIFA’s newfound flexibility to build less centralized fan-experience models tailored to their own geography, politics and budgets. That group includes the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Los Angeles and New York-New Jersey, the market hosting the World Cup final.
In Northern California, the Bay Area Host Committee eschewed the Host City Supporter program altogether. With the region also hosting the NBA All-Star Game in 2025 and Super Bowl LX earlier this year, it instead opted to create its own BAHC-specific IP that isn’t directly associated with any of the three events.
“Allowing a brand to buy assets for the NBA All-Star Game, the Super Bowl and the FIFA World Cup under IP that’s not necessarily governed by those three properties has allowed us to raise revenue for this tournament that maybe we wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise,” Janmohamed said.
Not using World Cup-related marks allowed the BAHC to work with companies that FIFA would have otherwise rejected due to competitive conflicts with its own sponsors. PNC Bank, for example, is a sponsor of the BAHC even though Bank of America is a global tournament sponsor. Video game developer EA Sports, a locally based company whose long-standing licensing relationship with FIFA ended in 2023, was allowed to support the event locally and promote its EA Sports FC title without directly associating with its former partner.
Financial pressures and the geographically disparate nature of the Bay Area also led the BAHC to put on a series of unofficial fan celebrations rather than an official FIFA Fan Festival. Janmohamed said this approach allowed the committee to avoid hefty broadcast and infrastructure costs associated with FIFA’s requirements, while also reaching more people across the region and incentivizing more municipalities and partners to chip in.
The most prominent fan celebration will be held for 39 days at San Jose’s San Pedro Square Market in conjunction with the Earthquakes of Major League Soccer.
“The city puts in a little bit of cost relief, the team puts in a little bit of cost relief and we put in a little bit,” Janmohamed said. “So, there’s a sharing in cost and the requirements go down and, all of a sudden, you get much more relief. And that’s the same model in a lot of our venues.”
The Seattle host committee, which added local tech giants Amazon and Microsoft as Host City Supporters last month, is taking a similar approach to public viewings. The city is promoting a wide-ranging slate of unofficial celebrations, including events put on by the Sounders, Reign and Mariners. Los Angeles has taken a hybrid approach, holding a four-day official FIFA Fan Festival at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum with a $10 admission fee, along with a series of free, days-long fan zones across Southern California.
The more dispersed event models on the West Coast, along with the late-developing nature of those plans, has led some of FIFA’s official tournament partners to focus their attention elsewhere in terms of on-the-ground activation.
“If some of the West Coast cities were doing bigger fan fests that were known earlier, we might’ve overweighted that, but we could kind of sense some of the complexity there,” one agency executive said.
Perhaps no U.S. host market’s plans have undergone as much evolution as those in New York-New Jersey, which FIFA selected in February 2024 to stage the July 19 World Cup final. But unlike the Bay Area or Seattle, where cost and commercial flexibility drove much of the departure from FIFA’s original template, New York-New Jersey’s approach has been shaped just as much by local political dynamics and regional complexity.
In early 2025, New York-New Jersey host committee Chair Tammy Murphy announced plans for a full-tournament FIFA Fan Festival at Liberty State Park in Jersey City, billed as the largest such event of the World Cup. The plan had the support of her husband, then-New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, whose term expired in January 2026. His successor, fellow Democrat Mikie Sherrill, pushed the state in a different direction.
Since taking office, Sherrill has moved to replace the Liberty State Park concept with a series of smaller community events across New Jersey supported by $5 million in state funding. She also backed an effort to recover New Jersey Transit’s World Cup-related costs by charging fans $98 for round-trip rail service from Manhattan to MetLife Stadium, down from an initially announced $150.
The host committee, meanwhile, has shifted toward a less centralized regional model featuring large-scale events across New York City and New Jersey, including fan zones in all five boroughs, a fan village at Rockefeller Center and a fan hub at Sports Illustrated Stadium in Harrison, N.J. The committee has also worked with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to provide $20 shuttle bus rides for fans looking for a cheaper way to travel to and from MetLife Stadium.
“We’ve created more diversity of experience,” said Alex Lasry, CEO of the New York-New Jersey host committee. “So, rather than just one thing where it’s the same thing over and over, we’re creating really a menu of fan experiences, which should keep fans more entertained, more excited, allow our commercial partners to get more creative in their offerings.”
While the operating model has been the subject of internal consternation and plenty of headlines heading into the tournament, host city leaders remain optimistic that 2026 will ultimately be a success for their markets.
“At the end of the day, the story that’s going to be written on July 20th is, ‘That was fun,’” Lasry said. “And that’s what matters.”
