The 80-billion-dollar mirage: unpacking Infantino's World Cup maths

“The economic impact of the World Cup is around 80 billion U.S. dollars (USD)”, FIFA President Gianni Infantino announced earlier this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “It’s not FIFA saying this; it’s the World Trade Organisation (WTO)”, he adds.

Infantino’s remarks refer to a report produced by OpenEconomics, a consulting firm that conducts economic-impact analyses for international organisations such as the WTO.

However much Infantino strives to sound economically rigorous here, the FIFA president is not telling the full story. To make that case, I will first scrutinise figures in the OpenEconomics report. I will then turn to an analysis I carried out with the German outlet Der Spiegel, which suggests the return on hosting could be far worse than Infantino lets on.

Who really counts the billions

To begin with, Infantino fails to mention that it was FIFA, alongside the WTO, who commissioned the study from OpenEconomics – as part of GoalEconomy, a joint FIFA-WTO program for evaluating the outcomes of major football tournaments. As a result, the report is arguably not independent.

OpenEconomics has a record with Infantino's signature projects. The firm produced the macroeconomic study behind his 2021 push for a biennial World Cup – staged every two years rather than every four – and it also authored the economic analysis of the 2025 Club World Cup, another Infantino venture, this one bankrolled by Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund. That Club World Cup analysis was released in the very same package as the 2026 figures Infantino now cites.

The numbers in the 2026 World Cup study invite scrutiny too. Of the headline 80 billion USD in global gross output, the authors attribute a concrete slice to the United States: 185,000 full-time-equivalent jobs and a 17.2 billion USD boost to GDP. The two other hosts, Canada and Mexico, get no comparable breakdown: the study reports U.S. figures and global totals, with everything in between left unspecified, under the label “Rest of the World”.

Methodology is yet another point worth questioning. OpenEconomics combines two approaches, which together arguably intend to deliver a desired positive impact: an input-output model that simulates the shock an economy experiences when hosting the World Cup, and the concept of social return on investment (SROI), which measures the social benefits relative to the investments made to host the event.

Their input-output model assumes that new money flows into the economy largely through tourism, and that this fresh spending lifts wages and jobs along with it. The focus here is on international visitors, who, according to OpenEconomics, stay an average of ten days and spend around 500 USD a day, excluding tickets and parking. Combined with the 185,000 full-time-equivalent jobs created, the report estimates an economic boost equivalent to 0.25 percent of U.S. GDP.

The problem is that economists have challenged this kind of modelling for over twenty years, as its results have often been overestimated. And despite the demand shock affecting accommodation, food, and other sectors, OpenEconomics ignores the way prices respond to supply and demand. In a competitive market, price is set by the interplay of the two. When demand surges, but supply cannot grow to match — picture a million visitors all wanting hotel rooms at once, in cities with only so many beds – prices simply rise. The extra spending the study records may then be partly an illusion: not more rooms sold, but the same rooms sold dearer.

New jobs are also unlikely to mean much. A 39-day tournament gives employers no reason to create costly, permanent positions. Faced with the surge in demand, they have two cheaper options: lean on existing staff through overtime or take on temporary workers in the low-wage sector. Either way, the boost to household incomes – and so to lasting purchasing power – is limited.

The concept of social return on investment (SROI) "aims to estimate benefits beyond economic impact, including the improving on health, well-being, and social connections with communities”. OpenEconomics estimates the costs for the U.S. at 1.7 billion USD, while the social benefits amount to 6.9 billion USD. These benefits are distributed across tourism, sports, and the entertainment sector. If the input-output model proves insufficient, the benefits are then promoted through this framework instead.

And here, too, there are glaring misinterpretations in both methodology and results. The study reports that the World Cup will return 4.03 dollars in social benefits for each dollar invested, which sounds like a great payoff. But the figure floats free of any comparison: it says nothing about how that return stacks up against other uses of the same money, or about the opportunity cost of funds that could have a higher return on investment elsewhere.

Ironically, OpenEconomics itself cites a study in which SROI is said to merely serve as a veneer of “business-like legitimacy” and is not suitable for a fact-based analysis. In other words, the firm somewhat openly admits that the method it relies on is a shallow one, used to generate an impressive new figure that sounds good but rests on little foundation.

The projected figures are questionable too – not in their arithmetic, but in where the value supposedly comes from. Take the entertainment sector, where the study projects a 395 million USD gain. This is not from the benefit of actually attending a match. It is what OpenEconomics calls “value per click”: the idea that every like or view on a social-media post delivers a unit of utility that could be equivalent to a money figure.

OpenEconomics also expects the World Cup to help reduce the crime rate among young people and encourage the wider population to become more active and eat more healthily, thereby reducing costs to society. It puts the potential savings at around 2.4 billion USD. These claims have yet to be proven empirically. In some cases, the opposite may be true.

The largest gain, at 4.1 billion USD, is expected to come from tourism – and not only during the World Cup but also in the years that follow. Here, however, Open Economics leaves out crowding-out effects, which are at play more than once during this tournament.

On one hand, there is the classic phenomenon of event tourists displacing regular ones: if you were already planning to visit Philadelphia, Miami, or San Francisco, you will not go during the World Cup. On the other hand, the political situation – and stricter visa rules in particular – is deterring many would-be visitors.

And then there is the crowding-out effect initiated by FIFA itself: ticket prices so high and volatile that they put the matches out of reach for a large share of fans. There are already early signs that the expected tourist rush is not materialising.

The case for a net loss

The FIFA study addresses none of the points I raise here. So let us take a closer look at the bigger picture, and at what a possible World Cup effect might actually mean for the U.S. economy. To do so, I draw on a formula I developed with Der Spiegel to assess whether the investment in hosting a World Cup yields a positive economic return. I also rely on current OECD forecasts in relevant countries.

My model looks into two scenarios: before and after the Iran War outbreak. They indicate that by hosting the World Cup, the U.S. would forgo between 1.4 and 1.0 percentage points of economic output. This is striking, given that the formula also links hosting with economic growth in industrialised countries since Italy 1990.

The magnitude of the calculated effect also exposes the limits of leaning on real-GDP growth and ex ante studies in general. For the U.S. economy, a 1.0 percentage point fall in output would mean a loss of roughly 240 billion USD, which is plainly too large for an event of this scale. Scaling to the eleven host cities and their metropolitan areas, which generate 15 to 20 percent of US output, yields a more plausible net loss of $50 to $67 billion.

Instead of the promised boost, the U.S. is more likely to face an economic hangover after the World Cup party. Infantino, for his part, remains undeterred: he keeps repeating the fairy tale of an 80 billion USD global economic impact. Meanwhile, FIFA is expecting record revenue, no matter what: around 11 billion USD.