Good Morning ☀️,

It’s Lucas here, your Chief Predictions Officer at What Are the Odds?

Today, we’re looking at the funny economics surrounding this year’s World Cup, and how FIFA turned “FOMO” into a ‘serious’ economic principle. But more on that later.

First, here’s what’s coming up.

What’s ahead in today’s edition of What Are the Odds?:

• FIFA’s FOMO-based economics. 📈

• Our Spain vs Belgium match preview and prediction. ✅

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Today, we’ve got 1 match coming up.

🇫🇷 France vs Morocco 🇲🇦

Thursday 09 July; 22:00 (Europe/Paris)

Want to get the best odds on this match?

Here’s a story that looks like a small speed bump at first, but quickly develops into something much bigger.

Philadelphia, one of this year’s World Cup host cities, is currently on the hook for tens of millions in costs associated with hosting the World Cup. And, to help cover that, they’d initially found a sponsor that was ready to write a check. That sponsor was Wawa — a loved regional convenience chain that’s so much a part of the Philadelphian landscape that it’s practically a state icon.

But there was a problem. FIFA blocked it.

The reason, as reported by The Independent, was that Wawa sells food. And selling food, according to FIFA, was a problem due to its exclusivity agreement with McDonald’s.

Now, at first, this might not seem like too big of a deal.

Sure, a city that had been told it must fund its own security, its own transport, and its own fan festival — and that it could recoup those costs by selling local sponsorships — was forbidden from selling a local sponsorship because a hoagie is a threat to a Big Mac.

But surely it shouldn’t be too hard to go out and find another sponsor given this is the World Cup, right?

Well, not so fast. This year’s World Cup is a little bit… special.

So What Actually Changed in 2026

So far, we’ve written a lot about ticket prices and how fans are getting a rough deal at this year’s World Cup. But, as it turns out, the ticket prices are downstream of something a little bigger that not too many outlets beside the trade press have been covering.

For nearly a century, a World Cup was run by something called a “Local Organizing Committee” — a special body that absorbed the costs, shared in the upside, and dealt with FIFA to make sure the cities were properly represented. But most importantly, all costs and revenues sat on the same balance sheet, which meant the people spending the money had a reason to care whether it came back.

But this time around, FIFA abolished that. Instead, for the first time in World Cup history, FIFA mandated that it was going to operate the tournament itself, dealing with the host cities itself rather than passing it through national federations.

The result of this arrangement is that FIFA keeps essentially all the revenue — media rights, sponsorship, ticketing, hospitality, merchandise. The cities, on the other hand, only get to keep the costs — the security, transportation, stadium retrofits, administration, and public fan zones.

Fortune’s Catherina Gioino gave a pretty good description of what this is — “a franchise model in which the franchisees pay to operate the business and the franchisor keeps the receipts.”

Sources inside the host cities have a blunter phrase for it. They call it "the worst deal in FIFA World Cup history."

The Scoreboard and the Trap

So far, FIFA has collected roughly $8.9 billion from this tournament, while estimates suggest they stand to pocket something in the region of $11–14 billion across the cycle.

The 11 U.S. host cities, on the other hand, have a collective shortfall of at least $250 million.

Smith College economist Andrew Zimbalist describes the setup — "I think it’s fair to say that none of them will benefit economically from the World Cup because they don’t get the revenue, but they get the costs, which can run well over $100 million."

But what’s the actual problem here? If Philadelphia was able to go out and find sponsorship to help cover the costs, then what’s stopping host cities from approaching other sponsors?

And it’s not like FIFA was actively trying to block them from doing so, either. They specifically created a new “Host City Supporter” program for this very reason, and told cities they could make up the gap by selling sponsorships.

But here’s the problem. Remember how Philadelphia's Wawa sponsorship was blocked by FIFA on the grounds that it violated their exclusivity agreement with McDonald’s?

Well, turns out, FIFA structured its own sponsorship tiers so that almost nothing valuable was left to sell. From primary partners (Coca-Cola, McDonald’s) through to tournament sponsors (Bank of America), FIFA structured exclusive deals for itself that cover just about anything and everything of mass-market value.

As one source put it, cities were effectively forced to source sponsorships from “local dry cleaners and mechanics” because, category by category, FIFA had effectively walled off most of the market.

Why the Money Was Never Going to Arrive

Okay, so sponsorships might be slightly problematic under the current arrangement where FIFA gets to block of basically every category under exclusive deals, thus leaving cities with scraps.

But so what, right? Surely the city’s economy benefits in other ways, right? After all, hosting the World Cup brings visitors — visitors who’re spending big bucks.

Unfortunately, the economics don’t quite work out that way. Victor Matheson of the College of the Holy Cross lays out three compounding failures that throw the whole “boost to the economy” thing into question:

• Substitution: Matheson uses an example of buying a $410 ticket to a Scotland vs Morocco game as an example of substitution: “That’s $410 I’m spending for a ticket to go see Scotland–Morocco, so that’s $410 less that I’m spending on Red Sox tickets or Museum of Fine Arts tickets or Legal Seafoods."

• Crowding out:. The tournament displaces the tourists a city would have had anyway. He illustrates this using one of the more recent big events — the Paris 2024 Olympics: “All the hotels were full, but guess what, all the hotels are always full in Paris during the summer.” Meanwhile attendance at some of Paris’s biggest landmarks plummeted about 25%. “You have gotten rid of one kind of tourist and replaced it with another.”

• Leakage: When you spend $400 at a local restaurant, that money recirculates through the local economy several times. When you spend $400 on a World Cup ticket, it all goes to FIFA. “So not only is it not going to any local person in the first place, they’re not taking that money and then respending it in the local economy either.”

Running the Numbers

New York City’s comptroller ran the numbers on their hosting arrangements for this year’s World Cup. Turns out, they don’t work.

Mark Levine estimated that even if FIFA’s projection of 1.2 million regional visitors actually materialized, additional revenue to the city would be no more than $55 million vs roughly $70 million in added costs for NYPD, emergency management, and small-business support. In other words, NYC looses money even when it runs the numbers under the optimistic scenario.

Of course, the optimistic scenario rarely plays out, so it comes as no surprise that the full 1.2 million visitors haven’t actually materialized. An American Hotel & Lodging Association survey across all 11 U.S. host markets found that 80% of hoteliers reporting bookings below initial forecasts, with 65-70% citing visa barriers and geopolitical concerns. In Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Seattle, hoteliers described the tournament as a "non-event." In New York, bookings ran at roughly 65% of expectations.

But all of that’s just a case of poor forecasting, right? Well, not quite.

Turns out, FIFA had also reserved enormous room blocks, which created an early "artificial early demand signal." Then, FIFA simply dumped half of that inventory back onto the market, leaving the hotels to deal with now significantly downgraded forecasts.

And the lower-than-the-optimistic-forecasts-predicted turnout has hit more than just hotels.

To quote one business owner who owns Bisou in Kansas City, "I had staff standing for the past four days. It’s been dead in here. There was a lot of hype behind it. The result has been completely polar opposite. It’s been dead. In [sic?] a ghost town. Everywhere — it’s not just me. People aren’t out."

Then there was Jeff Owens, who created a watch-party space. Opening night, there was 40 people. Then it got slower. "The neighborhood is like it’s Sunday every day."

This is the very crowding-out effect Matheson’s research pointed to — locals stay home because they assume downtown will be chaos; visitors cluster near stadiums. Thus, businesses that weren’t clustered around stadium hotspots ate huge losses.

The Tells Are Everywhere

Part of FIFA’s requirements for host cities is to stage a Fan Fest. FIFA provides almost no money for it, while host cities foot the bill of approximately $1 million per day.

For a while now, these festivals have been one of World Cup’s most ‘democratic’ institutions — a free party for people who can’t afford expensive tickets. But this year things didn’t quite work out.

• New York/New Jersey canceled its 39-day Fan Fest at Liberty State Park, replacing it with scattered community events across 21 counties. However, before canceling, the NY/NJ committee had begun selling $10 tickets — the first time any organizer had ever charged entry to a Fan Fest.

• Boston cut its festival to 16 days — less than half the tournament.

• Seattle sliced a planned 500,000-fan event into fragments.

• The Bay Area considered skipping official fan fests on match days entirely.

Meanwhile, Foxborough simply refused to issue the entertainment license for Gillette Stadium until someone covered $7.8 million in security costs. Select Board vice president Stephanie McGowan put it bluntly — "This is not a moneymaker for this town. In fact, it’s probably more of a headache than it’s worth." Robert Kraft’s company eventually paid the bill, five days before the deadline.

Individually, none of these stories are that dramatic. But combined, they seem to tell an interesting story — at one of the richest sporting events ever staged, simple fan fests are crumbling while billionaires need to step in to personally cover a small town’s police overtime, lest the games doesn’t happen.

And none of this sits in isolation either. It you pick up just about any host-city controversy at this year’s World Cup, everything points back to the same problem.

Take New Jersey, for instance, which initially priced a round-trip from Manhattan to MetLife Stadium — a 20-minute ride that should normally costs $13 — at $150. But, apparently, NJ Transit wasn’t profiteering — moving fans was going to cost $62 million, while outside grants covered just $14 million. According to NJ Transit chief Kris Kolluri, “We’re literally trying to recoup our costs.”

Of course, when public outrage hit, that fare was eventually cut to $105, then $98, with each reduction funded by a hastily assembled roster of corporate sponsors like FanDuel and American Water.

FOMO Finance and the 200 IQ Move

While host cities have had to deal with what’s probably best described as an “interesting” economic scenario, other cities that declined to host are coming out looking like geniuses.

Chicago is one such city that declined on the grounds of it would leave the city in debt. Phoenix also ran the numbers and walked, while Arizona’s sports authority chief Tom Sadler was unusually candid: "The hosting model and potential funding commitment did not work for this community. The estimated cost of hosting this event could have been far greater than a Super Bowl — but with less of a return.”

Montreal also initially opted out back in 2021 after it found FIFA’s demands so restrictive that compliance would have required canceling the Canadian Grand Prix, the Jazz Festival, the Triathlon, and Les Francos.

As for the cities that went ahead and hosted, about the best defense for that decision we’ve seen was offered by Alex Lasry, who runs the NY/NJ host committee. Apparently, the story goes, he was on a bus to MetLife while “sitting next to people from Chicago.” And, according to Lasry, they told him that “they were disappointed” Chicago didn’t host.

And that’s about it.

No one out there seems to be making economic arguments with a straight face. Instead, all we have is a pitch that basically goes, “if you don’t host, people will feel left out.”

So in some ways, FIFA just successfully converted “FOMO” into an economic principle and a municipal financing strategy.

⚽ Spain vs Belgium
🏟️ 2026 FIFA World Cup
📅 Friday 10 July; 21:00 (Europe/Paris)

• Why we’re watching: It’s the World Cup Quarterfinals. Duh!

• Top 3 Stats:

  • Spain is currently #3 in the FIFA World Rankings, and has 4W/1D/0L, 9 goals scored, and 0 conceded in its 5 games so far.

  • Belgium is currently #8 in the FIFA World Rankings, and has 3W/2D/0L, 13 goals scored, and 5 conceded in its 5 games so far.

  • Spain is undefeated in this fixture, with 6 victories and 1 draw from 7 past head-to-head matches with an aggregate score of Spain 19-16 Belgium.

• CXSports says: If there’s two things worth paying attention to here, it’s Spain’s defensive record against Belgium’s offensive one. After five games, Spain’s conceded nothing — literally zero goals in five matches. Meanwhile Belgium arrives having scored 13 in their last five at a rate of 2.6 goals per game.
  
  With that said, Belgium has a couple of problems. First, there’s Amadou Onana’s ACL injury, which removes Belgium’s holding midfielder for the tournament right at the moment they have to face a side that was literally built to suffocate opponents in the central midfield. Belgium’s other problem is that their two best performances have come against sides that actually come out to play (New Zealand and the USA). Unfortunately, Spain doesn’t like to do that — they’ll likely keep the ball, compress the pitch, and dare Belgium to chase.
  
  So what hope does Belgium actually have? Well, they do have the one goalkeeper capable of stealing this (Courtois). They’ve also got a bench in Lukaku, who has now scored off it in three straight games. That’s probably more dangerous than most starting XIs left in the draw. And this route might actually pay off — Spain’s clean-sheet streak has been built partly on control that hasn’t really been properly tested yet. And the 1-0 grind against Portugal combined with the goalless draw against Cape Verde suggests this is a team that wins narrowly just as often as it dominates. And while their 9 goals in five games isn’t nothing, it’s noticeably shy of Belgium’s tally.
  
  So what does all of this mean in practice?
  
  Well, there’s probably a good chance that Spain’s clean sheet streak doesn’t survive this match — Belgium have found the net in 11 of their last 12 games, and we suspect that’s simply too consistent of a scoring pattern to bet against. Particularly with Lukaku sitting in waiting on the bench.
  
  However, while Belgium’s very unlikely to be dominated by Spain, we don’t expect them to keep Spain out at the other end either — they have, after all, averaged 1 goal conceded per game this tournament. And a midfield missing its anchor can’t really press while also protecting a back four who’s only clean sheet this tournament came in a 0-0 draw against Iran.
  
  Finally, Spain also enjoys a historical superiority here, and we’re not just talking about their unbeaten run in this particular fixture. De la Fuente is currently unbeaten in knockout football with this side.
  
  As such, the most likely outcome here is for Spain to keep doing what it’s always done this tournament — minus the clean sheet bit. And, so long as Courtois doesn't have one of his nights, then Spain probably just edges this one.

• Score prediction: 2-1 for Spain

Bet Option #1

• Bet: Spain Victory

• Odds Range: 1.47-1.72

Bet Option #2

• Bet: Both Teams to Score (Yes)

• Odds Range: 1.61-1.87

Make your sportsbook work for you!

That’s it for today. Tomorrow, we’ll be back with more World Cup coverage as we look ahead to this weekend’s quarterfinal action.

Until then, we hope you all enjoy the football and aren’t suffering from too much FOMO.