Pitch Profit: The Business of the FIFA World Cup
How big money has transformed the biggest sports tournament in the world.
To its 3.5 billion or so dedicated fans, it will always be the beautiful game. At its highest level, football (or soccer, if you insist) is a sport of grace and panache, one that captures a poetry of motion and purity of spirit in 90-ish minutes of pitch-perfect glory. Add in several layers of national pride, a couple of breakout player performances, and maybe a scrappy underdog team, and even the casual fan can appreciate how there’s something about the World Cup that sets it apart from the other playoffs, tournaments, and championships available on the 24-hour sports channel of your choice.
For all the finesse and athleticism displayed on the pitch, however, the real beauty of football lies in the profits. With the quadrennial men’s competition mere days away, the fans who will be cheering the loudest are the bankers, the broadcasters, the player agents, the sportswear manufacturers, the hoteliers, the taxi drivers, the souvenir shop owners, or anyone else looking to make a quick buck when the biggest sport in the world comes to town.
To label big football a big business is to butt against the limits of the language. Massive, huge, gargantuan, mammoth: such synonyms fail to do full justice to the sheer magnitude of cash generated by the 39-day tournament. Over the course of its four-year cycle, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA, the tournament’s governing body) expects to rake in over $13 billion (U.S.). The tournament’s 16 global partners—Coca-Cola, Visa, Hyundai, Qatar Airways, and a handful of other brands most kindergarteners would recognize—account for about $2.8 billion of that. Television rights account for another $4.3 billion or so. And then there are the actual tickets: more than $32,000 on FIFA’s official site for an edge-of-the-pitch seat at the tournament final. Over on the tournament’s official resale site, the number has officially gone from sublime to ridiculous, with tickets listed (but tellingly, not yet sold) for as much as $2,299,998.85—if they do sell, FIFA will get a 15 per cent cut of the action.
Down in the local economy, most host cities expect big things from FIFA’s self-described “greatest show on the planet.” Like a cannonball shot into a sidewalk puddle, the economic impact of the world’s biggest sports tournament can ripple widely across a city’s hotels, restaurants, and tourism-adjacent businesses. Take Vancouver: Mayor Ken Sim made the much-ballyhooed prediction that the city’s seven World Cup matches would result in an economic boom equal to hosting 30 to 40 Super Bowls. The provincial government is more measured in its expectations—but not by much. It expects the event to generate about $1 billion of incremental revenue to the visitor economy in the five years following the World Cup.
As the CEO and president of the city’s official tourist marketing organization, Royce Chwin is optimistic about such forecasts but cautious about the hard numbers. “I think it’s very, very hard to estimate it,” he says. “Until you see postevent what has happened, you’re not working off of any proof—you’re working off a bunch of assumptions.”
Besides, as Chwin points out, game-day hotel bookings, restaurant reservations, and taxi rides are only one way to measure economic impact. Putting the city on the world stage brings long-term benefits too: new sports facilities, new public transportation, new event infrastructure. Such build-outs for Vancouver’s Expo 86 world’s fair and Winter Olympics in 2010 could now be fairly said to be the city’s patrimony—generational investments that continue to pay dividends to this day.
“The proof lies in the past,” Chwin says, pointing to BC Place, the city’s SkyTrain system, the Vancouver Convention Centre, and improvements to the Sea-to-Sky Highway that connects the city to Whistler. “The facts and the evidence are there that it’s actually improved things once we made the investment. Without these kinds of events, I’m not sure you can try to propel your city forward that results in spending on infrastructure investments that ultimately benefit the community.”
At least, that’s the promise. The fact is, for every fan cheering about the economic benefits, there are at least as many booing about the costs. Count Moshe Lander among them. As a professor of sports economics at Montreal’s Concordia University, Lander has studied both the fact and the fiction of money and sports for 13 years. As far as the World Cup goes, he’s enthusiastic about what happens on the pitch—in the accounting ledger, not so much.
“It’s a huge money maker,” he admits. But“it’s how the slices are allocated that becomes the shocking aspect for host countries and host cities.” Most of the dollars brought in by the World Cup will flow to international hoteliers, big-name broadcasters, and of course, FIFA itself. “How many slices are going to Vancouver? Not nearly as much as you might think. Because you’ve overstated the benefits for political reasons, you’ve underestimated the costs either through neglect or also for political reasons.”
As Lander points out, event organizers, governments, and industry boosters overestimating benefits and downplaying costs is as much a World Cup tradition as flag-coloured facepaint, vulgar chants, and the inevitable dashing of the hopes of English fans. That’s particularly the case in cities such as Vancouver (initial estimate: $45 million; revised estimate: $729 million) and Toronto (initial: $30-45 million; revised: $380 million) that need to build the stadiums, training facilities, and infrastructure the event demands. Given such inflation, Lander asks a pointed question: even if you wanted to put your city on the world tourist map, wouldn’t the money be better spent elsewhere? “You could [develop] the slickest advertising campaign globally for a fraction of the cost and achieve the same ends.”
As the song goes, money changes everything. But will it change football? As yet, there’s no sign the profit will get in the way of the passion for the six billion or so people around the world expected to tune in to at least one World Cup match this year. That unshaken loyalty is as good a reason as any why the tournament trophy is made of 18 karat gold. Too bad everything else associated with it is too.
