Who Really Owns the World Cup? The Billion-Dollar Battle Over Football's Biggest Brand

The lede

The FIFA Men's World Cup 2026 concluded July 19 after five weeks, 104 matches, three host countries and 16 cities — the largest edition in the tournament's 96-year history. FIFA's commercial cycle for the tournament is projected to generate more than $13 billion, according to Financial Times reporting cited by researchers at Phenomenal World, roughly double what the federation earned from the Qatar 2022 cycle. FIFA president Gianni Infantino has cited even larger figures for the U.S. economy specifically, telling reporters alongside President Trump that the tournament would generate $30.5 billion and 200,000 permanent jobs.

The distribution of that money is where the dispute lives. FIFA — a nonprofit association under Swiss law that pays no tax on World Cup revenues — controls broadcasting rights, sponsorship, and ticketing centrally, while host cities are contractually obligated to cover costs including security, transport and stadium modification. A November 2023 Yahoo Sports investigation, describing tensions that simmered for years before this year's tournament, quoted a person close to Los Angeles's host committee summarizing the arrangement bluntly: FIFA "doesn't give them much to sell." Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke's holding company reportedly threatened to withdraw SoFi Stadium from the tournament altogether over the commercial terms, according to The Athletic's reporting at the time, before the standoff was resolved short of withdrawal.

The main report: a century-long architecture for capturing value

FIFA's current commercial model traces to a specific set of decisions in the 1970s, not to any inherent feature of international football. Historian and sponsorship pioneer Horst Dassler, the Adidas scion, is widely credited as the architect of modern sports sponsorship, having recognized that the greater commercial opportunity lay in controlling federations rather than selling equipment to athletes, according to Harvard Business School case-study material on his career. When Brazilian football administrator João Havelange sought the FIFA presidency in 1974 on a platform of expanding the World Cup and funneling development money to African and Asian federations, FIFA could not afford the promise on its own revenue — so Havelange turned to Dassler, whose connections brought in Adidas and Coca-Cola as anchor sponsors.

The commercial architecture that followed has defined the tournament since. At the 1978 World Cup in Argentina, FIFA introduced bundled category-exclusive sponsorship — selling a single brand exclusive advertising rights across an entire product category, such as sportswear or soft drinks — a structure durable enough that Adidas has designed every World Cup match ball for nearly five decades and Pepsi has not advertised at the tournament since 1978. Broadcasting rights followed a similar arc: FIFA had sold television rights to the European Broadcasting Union at prices treating the tournament as something close to a public good through the 1990s, netting a combined $310 million across three tournaments that decade, before FIFA's executive committee voted in 1996 to sell 2002 and 2006 rights as a single global package worth roughly 2.8 billion Swiss francs — nearly a tenfold increase.

The value of an exclusive sponsorship slot became legally contested when FIFA moved to switch payment-card sponsors in 2006, selling the position to Visa for a reported $180 million over eight years despite incumbent MasterCard holding a contractual right of first refusal. MasterCard sued in U.S. federal court, won an injunction, and was ultimately paid a reported £45 million in a 2007 settlement that let Visa keep the sponsorship — a dispute that illustrated, in dollar terms, exactly what a monopoly position before football's global audience was worth even in the mid-2000s.

Who profits, and who pays: the host-city math

For the 2026 tournament specifically, FIFA departed from its traditional model of establishing an independent local organizing committee, instead running the tournament through its own subsidiaries and coordinating directly with a White House Task Force on the FIFA World Cup 2026, established by a March 2025 executive order that Trump signed with Infantino present, chaired by Trump himself and vice-chaired by Vice President JD Vance. Under this arrangement, FIFA controlled media relations, sponsorship and ticketing revenue, while host cities carried costs for fan safety and security, according to Phenomenal World's analysis of the tournament's structure — an arrangement independently corroborated by multiple outlets covering the funding tensions, including Yahoo Sports and Fortune.

Each of the 11 U.S. host committees expected to spend somewhere around $100 million to fulfill its obligations, according to people familiar with the budgets cited by Yahoo Sports, funded largely through private fundraising since most cities avoided direct taxpayer exposure. In exchange, each host committee was permitted to sign only 10 companies to city-specific local sponsorship deals — a revenue-sharing structure host cities argued was too narrow, since FIFA restricted what intellectual property or branding those local deals could use in order to avoid infringing on its own global sponsorship contracts with companies like McDonald's and Coca-Cola.

Independent economic analysis of the finished tournament broadly supports the host cities' skepticism. Researchers at North Carolina State University reviewing the 2026 tournament's economic footprint concluded that FIFA captures most financial gains through media rights, sponsorships and ticketing, while host cities absorb major costs with limited direct revenue, and that whatever local economic gains materialize tend to be short-lived, concentrated in tourism and hospitality, and largely gone once the tournament ends. That pattern is not new: 12 of the last 14 World Cups have produced financial losses for their hosts since 1966, and the last three delivered an average return on investment of minus 31%, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy's analysis. Even the 1994 World Cup in the United States, widely remembered as a commercial triumph, fell between $5.5 billion and $9.3 billion short of its own economic projections.

FIFA's defense

FIFA and Infantino have not been silent in the face of this criticism. Speaking at Dubai's World Sports Summit in December 2025, as ticket-pricing complaints first intensified, Infantino stressed that all tournament revenues would be "pumped back into football around the world" and highlighted that FIFA had received a record 150 million ticket requests within two weeks of sales opening — evidence, in his framing, of enormous public demand rather than exploitative pricing. FIFA subsequently announced that a portion of tickets would be priced at $60 to address affordability concerns.

Infantino has also pointed to FIFA's redistribution mechanisms as evidence the federation's revenue serves football broadly rather than only its own institution: each of FIFA's 211 member associations now receives $1.5 million annually through the FIFA Forward development program. FIFA separately announced that host cities for the related Club World Cup tournament would each receive $1 million in "legacy contributions" for community soccer infrastructure. As recently as July 27, 2026 — eight days after the World Cup final — Infantino publicly pushed back against critics he said were spreading "hate and false rumors" about the tournament, according to Associated Press reporting, underscoring how contested the tournament's legacy remains even after the final whistle.

Independent economists remain skeptical of the larger economic-impact figures FIFA and host governments have promoted. Victor Matheson, a sports economist at the College of the Holy Cross who has studied mega-events for nearly three decades, told Fortune that FIFA's dynamic ticket-pricing strategy reflects a straightforward incentive difference from domestic sports leagues: unlike a local team that depends on the same fans returning next season, FIFA has no comparable repeat-business relationship with World Cup ticket buyers to protect.

Ticketing, taxes, and regulatory scrutiny

The 2026 tournament introduced dynamic, airline-style ticket pricing for the first time at a World Cup. The most expensive final tickets initially listed at $6,730 and had risen to $10,990 by spring sales windows, according to reporting cited by Phenomenal World, with resale-platform prices — on which FIFA takes a 15% cut from both buyer and seller — climbing into six and seven figures for some matches. By comparison, the top ticket price at the 2022 Qatar World Cup was roughly $1,600. The pricing drew formal scrutiny in May 2026, when the attorneys general of New York and New Jersey opened a joint investigation into FIFA's ticketing practices, saying prices had "far exceeded" those of any previous World Cup, according to Fortune's reporting on the inquiry.

Tax exemptions form another recurring feature of FIFA's host agreements. Ahead of 2026, FIFA's bidding requirements demanded a full exemption from income taxes, customs duties and sales taxes on ticket revenue; Missouri, Georgia and Florida each passed legislation exempting World Cup ticket sales from state and local sales tax as a condition of hosting. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimated the resulting public cost at up to $25 million in forgone revenue for Georgia, roughly $7.4 million for Florida's Miami-area matches, and about $1.9 million per game for Missouri's six Kansas City matches. Chicago, the third-largest U.S. city, declined to bid to host matches at all, citing taxpayer risk and what city officials described as FIFA's inflexibility in negotiations, according to reporting reviewed by Phenomenal World.

Legal and structural background: the Host City Agreement

Every World Cup host — city and country — signs a Host City Agreement with FIFA that extends well beyond match logistics. These agreements have historically included provisions on new legislation covering corporate and marketing rights, tax exemptions, and alignment of local policing with FIFA's operational requirements. Brazil's 2012 "General World Cup Law," signed by then-President Dilma Rousseff, granted FIFA and its commercial partners a sweeping package of tax breaks and commercial protections, and specifically overturned a national stadium alcohol ban that had been introduced in 2003 to curb crowd violence — reversed because FIFA sponsor Budweiser required it. FIFA's then-secretary-general Jérôme Valcke was characteristically direct about the federation's leverage at the time: "Alcoholic drinks are part of the FIFA World Cup, so we're going to have them... that's something we won't negotiate."

Mexico offers a particularly striking example of that leverage's durability. Mexico passed a 2020 constitutional reform specifically prohibiting exactly the kind of tax exemptions FIFA typically demands from hosts — only to grant FIFA a comprehensive exemption anyway in its 2026 Revenue Law, according to tax-policy analysis reviewed by Phenomenal World.

Timeline

• 1974: João Havelange becomes FIFA president on a platform of tournament expansion, enlisting Adidas co-founder Horst Dassler to secure new commercial sponsors.
• 1978: FIFA debuts bundled, category-exclusive sponsorship rights at the Argentina World Cup.
• 1996: FIFA's executive committee votes to sell global broadcasting rights outside the European Broadcasting Union's traditional consortium model, sharply increasing rights fees.
• 2001: FIFA's marketing agency ISL collapses amid bribery revelations; Havelange is later found to have taken kickbacks tied to marketing rights.
• 2006–2007: MasterCard sues FIFA over a broken sponsorship right of first refusal, wins an injunction, and settles for a reported £45 million.
• 2012: Brazil's General World Cup Law grants FIFA sweeping tax and commercial protections ahead of the 2014 tournament.
• December 2024: Saudi Aramco becomes FIFA's inaugural "Major Worldwide Partner" in a deal reported at roughly $100 million a year.
• December 2024: FIFA awards Saudi Arabia the 2034 World Cup as the sole eligible bidder, following a 25-day bidding window.
• March 7, 2025: Trump signs an executive order establishing the White House Task Force on the FIFA World Cup 2026, with himself as chair.
• February 2025: SURJ Sports Investment, owned by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, acquires a stake reported at $1 billion in DAZN, the streaming service that had separately paid roughly $1 billion for Club World Cup broadcasting rights.
• December 30, 2025: Infantino publicly defends World Cup ticket pricing at Dubai's World Sports Summit amid fan backlash.
• June 11–July 19, 2026: The 2026 World Cup is held across the United States, Mexico and Canada.
• May 2026: New York and New Jersey attorneys general open a joint investigation into FIFA's ticketing practices.
• July 27, 2026: Infantino publicly criticizes tournament critics, saying they spread "hate and false rumors."

What's next

FIFA's next major decision point is the 2034 World Cup, awarded to Saudi Arabia under a bidding process critics have characterized as effectively predetermined once FIFA's confederation-rotation rules left only Asia and Oceania eligible to bid. The infrastructure for that tournament — stadiums, tax exemptions, commercial monopolies, security legislation — remains almost entirely unbuilt and unlegislated as of this reporting. Saudi Arabia's path to hosting, via a sponsorship position through Aramco and a broadcasting investment through the PIF's DAZN stake, suggests a template distinct from prior hosts: rather than simply agreeing to FIFA's terms as a guest, the kingdom has built a financial position inside FIFA's commercial structure before ever hosting a match. Whether the New York and New Jersey ticketing investigation produces regulatory consequences for FIFA's pricing model, and whether host cities for future tournaments negotiate a larger share of commercial revenue than the 2026 cities secured, remain open questions with direct implications for whoever bids to host after 2034.

Sources and references

• Who Owns the World Cup? — Phenomenal World
• LA-FIFA standoff at center of 2026 World Cup's first battle: Who's paying for it? — Yahoo Sports
• The Economics of the FIFA World Cup: Who Really Profits? — NC State College of Natural Resources
• The World Cup's business divide: FIFA cashes in, host cities pay the price — Business Standard
• Economics of the World Cup: Ticket Prices, Revenue, Costs, & Social Impact — Britannica Money
• FIFA reaps World Cup riches while taxpayers shoulder costs — Yahoo Finance
• How FIFA restructured the World Cup into its biggest payday ever, as host cities face a budget shortfall — Fortune
• Infantino defends 2026 World Cup ticket prices — Malay Mail
• FIFA renews with Qatar Airways as a sponsor for the men's World Cup in 2026 and 2030 — Gulf News/AP
• Who owns the World Cup? The case for and against (intellectual) property rights in sports — Kluwer Copyright Blog

This article is intended as independent journalism. It does not constitute legal or financial advice.