The 2026 World Cup
When soccer became an American product
Description
On June 11, 2026, at the renovated Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, the 23rd FIFA World Cup kicks off — almost a century after the first tournament was held in Uruguay in 1930. For the first time in the competition’s history, three countries co-host: the United States, Canada, and Mexico. For the first time, 48 national teams compete instead of 32, playing 104 matches instead of 64, over 39 days instead of 32. The ritual looks the same. The product is not.
From the outside, you could read this as the great American return to soccer — 32 years after the 1994 World Cup, also held in the United States, which was supposed to acclimate a country that had always shrugged off the global game. The reading would be right but incomplete. The 1994 World Cup did serve as a springboard. Major League Soccer was founded in its wake in 1996. David Beckham landed with the Los Angeles Galaxy in 2007. Apple TV signed an exclusive ten-year, 2.5-billion-dollar streaming deal with MLS in 2022. Lionel Messi joined Inter Miami in 2023. Across three decades, the United States didn’t merely accept soccer — it built the commercial ecosystem around it. And it’s that ecosystem, exactly, that the 2026 World Cup now offers to the rest of the planet.
What this piece decodes isn’t the late American adoption of soccer — that story played out in 1994. It’s the inverse: the moment when the American commercial machine, after three decades of patient preparation, took the most watched sporting event in the world and aligned it with its own playbook — NFL stadiums, streaming-first distribution, halftime show production, broadcast rights at NFL scale. Soccer doesn’t become American in how it’s played. It becomes American in how it’s monetized.
The question we’re asking: what actually changes in the 2026 World Cup, and how have three decades of patient American strategy turned a global soccer tournament into a product calibrated for the American entertainment market?
What we’ll see: the 1994 promise and the ecosystem built around it, what the 48-team expansion really shifts, the NFL infrastructure now hosting the tournament, and what this transformation says about the global sport.
Table of contents
011994, and the thirty years that followed
Before 1994, the United States had a strange relationship with the World Cup. The country had taken part in the very first tournament in 1930 — the American team reached the semifinals, a performance never repeated since — and then did not field a side between 1950 and 1990. Soccer was a school sport, a college sport, behind baseball, American football, basketball, and hockey. FIFA had taken a real risk in 1988 by awarding the 1994 World Cup to a country with no major professional league and no established soccer culture.
The gamble paid off on several fronts. Stadiums filled — 3.6 million cumulative spectators, an absolute World Cup record that still stands. American television audiences exceeded all forecasts. Crucially, the tournament catalyzed the creation of Major League Soccer, founded in 1993 but launched commercially in 1996, which has since grown into a 30-franchise league embedded in American sports media.
0248 teams, and a tournament that changes shape
The most visible reform of the 2026 World Cup is the expansion of participating teams. For three decades, since 1998, the tournament had been played by 32 teams: eight groups of four, then a knockout round starting at the round of 16. In 2017, FIFA president Gianni Infantino, elected a year earlier, pushed through the vote to expand to 48 teams for 2026. The decision was framed as a gesture of inclusion — more countries playing, particularly federations in Africa, Asia, and Oceania that had previously been left out. It was, first and foremost, a commercial calculation.
Expanding to 48 teams mechanically produces more matches: 104 instead of 64. More matches means more TV inventory to sell. More inventory means higher broadcast rights revenue, which makes up the bulk of FIFA’s income. A FIFA-commissioned study before the vote estimated the revenue uplift from expansion at 1.8 to 2.2 billion dollars over the 2023-2026 cycle — roughly 50 percent more than the 32-team format would have generated.
03NFL stadiums and the entertainment infrastructure
The second visible transformation concerns the venues. Of the sixteen stadiums selected for the 2026 World Cup, eleven are in the United States, three in Mexico, two in Canada. And of those eleven American stadiums, nine are NFL venues — SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, MetLife Stadium in New Jersey where the final will be held, AT&T Stadium in Dallas, NRG Stadium in Houston, Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia, Arrowhead in Kansas City, Hard Rock Stadium in Miami, Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara. All are owned or operated by NFL franchises.
This infrastructure changes the World Cup experience for spectators and broadcasters alike. NFL stadiums seat 65,000 to 82,000 — well above the average European Champions League venue. They’re engineered for big spectacle: state-of-the-art LED screens, studio-grade sound, VIP services spread across multiple levels, centralized parking for 20,000 vehicles, food service calibrated to NFL standards. The final will take place at MetLife on July 19, 2026, and the halftime show — nearly nonexistent in European soccer — will be produced by the same team responsible for the Super Bowl halftime show, with global artists whose names haven’t been announced as of early June 2026 but who fit the Shakira-Rihanna-Beyoncé lineage.
04What it says about the global sport
What does this transformation actually mean for soccer itself? The sport, as played, hasn’t changed: eleven against eleven, 90 minutes, one ball, a 100-meter pitch. What has changed is the economic and cultural ecosystem around it. And that ecosystem, as of 2026, is now structured by the codes of North American sports entertainment. FIFA, which long held to a European narrative — tradition, authenticity, terroir — has adopted the commercial language of American marketing.
This shift raises questions the European soccer world is starting to ask out loud. Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Paris Saint-Germain, and the other major European clubs have for years eyed the financial model of NFL franchises, whose revenue growth has run two to three times that of the Champions League. The aborted 2021 European Super League project, killed off within days by supporter and federation pressure, was precisely an attempt to replicate that model. The 2026 World Cup shows that FIFA pulled it off at planetary scale, without the political backlash that took down the Super League. The lesson hasn’t been lost on European clubs.
05Conclusion
The 2026 World Cup isn’t the moment America discovers soccer — that story unfolded in 1994. It’s the moment America, after three decades of patient investment in its own ecosystem, exports its commercial model to the rest of the planet, on the occasion of the most watched tournament in the world. 48 teams, 104 matches, NFL stadiums, a halftime-show final, 5 billion dollars in TV rights: taken individually, none of these elements would seem to alter the nature of the game, but added together, they turn the tournament experience into a product calibrated for industrialized audiences.