It was beautiful. It was fun. It was unifying. But was the World Cup worth it for the United States?

That question is typically answered in financial terms: Add up the economic benefit the games generated and subtract the amount spent to put the games on; if the number is positive, then the games were worthwhile. If it’s negative, they weren’t.

By that measure, the World Cup was almost certainly a bust.

Very little evidence supports any meaningful US financial benefit from the games: The expected jobs boom didn’t happen. Hotel prices weren’t meaningfully higher. The growth in retail sales was way down in June from May. Airfares were flat from May, and so was overall tourism.

But measuring economic benefit is a difficult calculation – how do you separate the boost from an event as large as the World Cup from the rest of an economy as large as that of the United States? The evidence at that point becomes subjective.

But what if the answer isn’t measured in pure dollars and cents? Is there a reasonable price to pay for fun?

There’s no objective measure for that question – because whether a massive soccer tournament is “worth it” is inherently subjective.

Because taxpayers typically foot the bill for giant sporting events on the scale of the Olympics or the World Cup – which cost tens of billions of dollars to put on – event organizers hire fleets of economists to make their financial cases.

FIFA went out of its way to show how the 2026 World Cup would benefit the United States: In a March 2025 report, the global soccer association estimated the games would cost $13.9 billion to put on ($11.1 billon footed by the United States) and create $80.1 billon of global economic benefit, including $30.5 billion for the United States. FIFA claimed the World Cup would create the equivalent of 185,000 full-time jobs in the United States.

If that boost was real, it was hard to see in the data.