Andi Ronaldo Marbun, a strategic and analytical professional.
If FIFA wanted to maximize revenue, simplify logistics, and showcase football at its very best, why did it decide that the FIFA World Cup 2026 should be hosted by three countries instead of one?
The question sounds almost heretical in an era when governing bodies celebrate ever-bigger tournaments and ever-grander narratives. FIFA's official answer is easy enough. The United States, Canada, and Mexico supposedly represent a united North America. The tournament symbolizes cooperation, integration, and shared prosperity.
It sounds wonderful in a press release. Yet once the confetti settles and the marketing videos stop playing, the numbers tell a different story. This World Cup is not really being hosted by three equal partners. It is being hosted by one giant and two junior partners that contribute far less than the symbolism suggests.
The Economic and Sporting Imbalance
If we want to understand the imbalance in this year's World Cup, we should first look at the distribution of matches.
The 2026 World Cup consists of 104 games, the largest tournament in FIFA history. Of those 104 matches, 78 will be played in the United States, while Canada and Mexico will host just 13 each. In other words, the United States alone will stage 75 percent of the tournament, including every quarterfinal, semifinal, the third-place match, and the final.
Canada and Mexico are effectively excluded from the business end of the competition. If this is genuinely a trinational World Cup, FIFA has a peculiar way of showing it.
The imbalance becomes even more obvious when money enters the conversation.
The United States produces roughly US$30 trillion (Rp534 quadrillion) in annual economic output. Canada generates around US$2.3 trillion (Rp41 quadrillion), while Mexico produces approximately US$2 trillion (Rp36 quadrillion). Put differently, America's economy is larger than those of Canada and Mexico combined by more than six times.
FIFA's commercial partners understand this reality perfectly well. The United States accounts for the tournament's most lucrative revenue streams because that is where sponsors, broadcasters, spectators, and corporate hospitality budgets are concentrated.
FIFA expects the 2026 tournament to generate approximately US$13 billion (Rp231 trillion) in revenue, including around US$4.3 billion from broadcasting rights, US$3 billion from ticket sales, and US$2.8 billion from sponsorships. Much of that commercial firepower comes from American corporations and the American market itself.
The sponsor roster makes the picture even clearer. Coca-Cola, Visa, Bank of America, Verizon, American Airlines, and McDonald's dominate FIFA's commercial ecosystem, and they are overwhelmingly American companies.
Canada has produced many successful firms, and Mexico has major conglomerates of its own, but neither country contributes anything remotely comparable to the sponsorship depth of the United States. FIFA did not need two additional countries to unlock sponsorship money because the money was already sitting in America.
The football argument is not much stronger.
Mexico undoubtedly deserves its place in football history. Liga MX remains one of the strongest leagues in the Americas and routinely attracts attendances that many European clubs would envy.
Canada, however, is a different story. The Canadian Premier League only began in 2019, and hockey remains the country's dominant sporting obsession. Football participation is growing rapidly, but Canada's football industry remains tiny compared with Major League Soccer in the United States and Liga MX in Mexico.
If FIFA's objective was simply to host the best possible tournament, there is little evidence that adding Canada materially improved the football product.
Then there is the stadium issue.
FIFA's most important venues are overwhelmingly American because America's stadium inventory is superior. AT&T Stadium in Dallas can accommodate more than 80,000 spectators. MetLife Stadium, which will host the final, has a capacity exceeding 82,000. Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta seats roughly 75,000, while SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles cost nearly US$5 billion (Rp89 trillion) to construct, making it one of the most expensive sporting venues ever built.
By comparison, Toronto's BMO Field seats around 45,000, Vancouver's BC Place roughly 54,000, and even Mexico's modern venues in Guadalajara and Monterrey are generally smaller.
Once again, FIFA's venue selection quietly acknowledges reality. The biggest matches are going where the biggest stadiums already exist.
The Geography and Logistics Problem
Yet commercial imbalance is only half the problem. The other half is geography.
People often remember the 2002 World Cup in South Korea and Japan as a successful tournament. What many forget is that it generated constant complaints about travel, coordination, and logistics. That tournament involved two neighboring countries with sophisticated transportation networks and a combined land area of roughly 320,000 square kilometers.
By contrast, the 2026 World Cup stretches across a continent.
Vancouver and Mexico City are separated by nearly 4,000 kilometers. Seattle and Miami are more than 4,400 kilometers apart. A fan could easily travel farther following one team during this World Cup than during an entire European Championship.
Unlike South Korea and Japan, the 2026 hosts are not merely separated by geography. They are separated by borders.
Crossing from the United States into Canada involves one immigration regime. Crossing from Canada into Mexico involves another. Crossing from Mexico back into the United States involves yet another.
Three countries mean three visa systems, customs procedures, security frameworks, and sets of political priorities. FIFA has spent years promoting the idea of a seamless continental celebration. The reality is that millions of supporters will spend weeks navigating paperwork, entry requirements, and airport queues.
Football tournaments are supposed to reduce friction. This one seems determined to manufacture it.
Even within the United States, transportation challenges have already emerged. Some studies have ranked several host venues among the least convenient major sporting destinations in North America because of transit limitations and long travel times.
If moving fans around a single metropolitan area is difficult, moving them across three sovereign countries becomes exponentially harder.
Which brings us back to the original question.
Why Did FIFA Need Three Countries?
The uncomfortable answer is that it probably did not.
The United States hosted the World Cup successfully in 1994. Since then, it has added dozens of new stadiums, expanded airport capacity, strengthened its hospitality sector, and become an even larger commercial powerhouse.
The country already possessed enough world-class venues to host every match. It already had the sponsors, broadcasters, hotel rooms, highways, airports, and corporate infrastructure FIFA needed.
In fact, FIFA's own tournament structure effectively admits this reality.
Seventy-five percent of matches are in the United States. Every major knockout match is in the United States. Most sponsors are American. Most revenue comes from America. Most spectators will attend games in America.
The World Cup's center of gravity never left the United States in the first place. FIFA simply chose to wrap that reality in a trinational narrative.
The 2026 World Cup will almost certainly break financial records. It may become the highest-grossing sporting event in history. But record revenues do not automatically validate a decision.
A project can be enormously profitable and still unnecessarily complicated.
The real lesson of 2026 may not be that three countries are better than one. And if the 2030 World Cup proceeds as planned across six countries and three continents, the same question will become even harder to ignore.
The world's biggest football tournament has become so large, so commercialized, and so dependent on grand narratives that FIFA may end up proving something it never intended to prove:
Bigger and more symbolic does not necessarily mean better.
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