Last week, FIFA announced that the 2026 World Cup had already broken the all-time attendance record for the tournament. Though this may be a bit less impressive than it seems — an expanded field means many more games this year than in previous editions — the feat was still surprising to many who’d been paying attention. Talk of ridiculous ticket prices, the potential presence of ICE, the dangerous heat, and, more recently, President Trump’s war with Iran dominated previews of this year’s 48-team tournament co-hosted by the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. But it’s been a smooth logistical ride so far and a hell of a spectacle on the field: This World Cup is on track to be the highest-scoring per match in history.
Neither the good vibes nor the results on the field thus far are a surprise to Stefan Szymanski, who knows his World Cup history. He is the co-author of the 2009 international best-selling book Soccernomics, which took a fun, deep dive into the economic forces that create winners and losers in the world’s most popular sport. (It was cited recently by Mayor Mamdani in a BBC interview.) Szymanski, a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, recently updated his classic book and currently hosts The Soccernomics Podcast with his co-author, Simon Kuper, and Ashish Malhotra.
I spoke to Szymanski after group-stage play wrapped up about the tournament’s enduring popularity despite FIFA’s avariciousness and an unpredictable administration, why the favorites are the same as ever, and why a 64-team tournament would make the World Cup even better.
Three weeks ago, I wrote a hater’s guide to this year’s World Cup, about everything threatening to degrade the tournament. How wrong I was!
I think this is always the pattern of the World Cup. If anything, the run-up to the Qatar World Cup in 2022 was even worse in terms of the publicity, but once it happened, it was great and people loved it. For Russia in 2018, I refused to go — Putin’s disgusting. And yet, again, it was a tremendous success. I think this is the nature of it. The World Cup is by far the world’s biggest entertainment event. Let’s not even talk about sports — there is no bigger event on the planet. And none of the players on the field are really interested in politics or political statements or political issues, no matter what is swirling around them. They’re just interested in playing soccer, and these are the best players in the world, and it’s absolutely compelling. So in some sense, I don’t think one should be surprised by the way this is going.
But we’re not done yet. The one big difference in this World Cup is that normally heads of state are absolutely focused on making sure the tournament is a success. You’ve got a completely rogue head of state in President Trump, and who knows what he might do. But I think what’s been interesting is that even he has laid low. He had many opportunities to say nasty things about the nine African nations who qualified for the second round. He didn’t say anything about Haiti. He didn’t say anything about Iran’s team, and although they were treated badly, it could have been worse.
I’ve been assuming he wants to avoid a similar scenario to game three of the NBA Finals, when he got booed so strongly at Madison Square Garden.
I think that’s right. The official position is that he’s going to present the trophy at the final — maybe he’ll try to take it home with him. But my guess is he would be roundly booed at that, and if he turns up in any other games, he’ll get booed. But then again, when has that ever stopped him doing whatever he wants? He revels in his unpopularity. He likes to be hated by the people who hate him.
As the co-author of the seminal book on the macroeconomic and global forces in the game, what are your thoughts on how the tournament has gone so far on the field?
I had a sports-journalist friend at the Telegraph email me asking, “Why do there seem to be so many surprises, and why are the small teams doing so well at this World Cup?” Notwithstanding Cape Verde, I actually don’t think there have been any great upsets so far. And no big team has lost a game that mattered. Germany lost to Ecuador, but the game was totally irrelevant to them. And the U.S. losing to Turkey at the last second was perhaps a surprise.
I looked at all the bookmakers’ predictions, and they got the winning team right 48 times out of 72. And of the remainder, there were 18 draws. Bookmakers don’t predict draws very well, but a draw is not that big of a shock in world soccer because it’s a low-scoring game. As happened with Cape Verde, a team can defend for 90 minutes without having many serious chances of scoring and still get a point, and sometimes they can even win. So there are only six games where the bookmakers predicted the wrong team.
In effect, this looks like a very familiar pattern at the World Cup where the big teams dominate. Who would bet against Argentina or France at the moment? They both look kind of unstoppable. The only teams that might stop Argentina on that side of the draw are Brazil, with a chance for England, but I think a pretty outside chance. And then in the other half of the draw, you’ve got France, Spain, and Germany. If it’s not one of those, there’s also the Netherlands. There’s a 95 percent–plus chance that it’s going to be one of those four. And so we end up with a World Cup where the winner is almost certain to be a team that’s already won it. If it’s not one of those teams, it’s probably either the Netherlands or Portugal, who I didn’t mention and are a bit of a dark horse.
Have any surprise teams caught your eye?
Egypt, I guess, is promising. And some of the African teams — Ghana, Senegal — looked good and they might go on and do something. Morocco, of course.
I hate to say this, but FIFA is totally vindicated in having a 48-team World Cup. I think it’s been so much better than the 32-team format. It’s hard to be clear on why the World Cup has continued to be dominated by the same nations forever — but one of the reasons might be that it’s actually hard for nations outside of the traditional strong groups to get experience, and experience matters. If you’ve been once, you’re much better the second time because you’re more familiar with the experience. So what this is doing is broadening experience. And maybe this will be a stepping stone for future World Cups for some teams.
One of the things that we point out in Soccernomics is that the nations outside of UEFA and CONMEBOL [the European and South American soccer confederations, respectively], which are the traditional powerhouses, have actually been going backward for the last two and a half decades, which is really quite concerning. I wrote a paper about this with a German economist named Melanie Krause, and she pointed out that there’s this thing in economics called the middle-income trap, in which developing nations often can develop to quite a high standard of living through adopting manufacturing best practices and so on. And then they often hit a barrier to progress beyond that to reach the highest levels of wealth. There seems to be a similar thing in soccer. If it’s experience that matters, and this bigger World Cup is giving more teams a chance, then maybe this will be important in the future. In fact, I now think we should go to a 64-team World Cup after Saturday night with Algeria and Iran and Austria.
Why?
There was the Disgrace of Gijon in 1982, when Austria and Germany colluded in order to both advance and eliminate Algeria. On Saturday night, Austria and Algeria were again involved in this situation where a team [Iran, in this case] that was finished playing had its fate depend on the outcome of a game between two teams that had an incentive to collude to keep that third team out. The reason this happened again is because of the 48-team World Cup. From the group stages to get to 32 teams, you have to choose eight of the 12 third-place finishers. So what you actually need is a binary sequence: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64. You could have 16 groups of four teams, and then the top two in each group can go through and you get away from the Gijon problem.
Before the tournament started, I was pessimistic about attendance for these group-stage games with huge ticket prices. Yet most are full, especially the non-marquee games: Curaçao versus Ivory Coast in Philadelphia Thursday was packed, among many others. Why are these games in particular so well attended?
Very few people travel to watch the Olympics from a foreign country — it’s an event for the host nation, really. But the World Cup has always been a big traveling event, and vast numbers of tourists come to watch and follow their teams — although these last couple of World Cups were starting to put a damper on that. But if you go back before that: 2014 in Brazil, 2010 in South Africa, 2006 in Germany, these were fabulously attended international events where people came from all over the world, and they were carnivals. That’s what it’s about. This World Cup seems to be different in the sense that it feels a bit more like the Olympics. Foreign tourists do not seem to have come in droves. We’ve seen several thousand Scots take over Boston and some other similar scenes. But all the news stories are that arrivals in the U.S. are down, and the hotels are complaining.
But that’s the thing about the United States: It’s a vast country with a huge population and enormous diasporas, a nation of immigrants. It seems to me that that’s a big part of what’s been going on. Everybody’s discovered that there are Cape Verdean communities all over the country. It’s bizarre to have this sort of native, anti-immigrant regime in the middle of the world’s greatest international carnival. But of course all of these games are in blue cities; it’s being staged in the most multicultural parts of the United States.
I saw a soccer writer on Twitter mention how interesting it is that the World Cup is taking place during America’s 250th anniversary — that’s it’s a fitting tournament for such an occasion.
Eh … While soccer has always been around in the United States, it’s just been seen as essentially a foreign sport. The previous World Cup in the U.S., in 1994, was FIFA’s attempt to raise the profile of the sport in the country. And you might say that they succeeded in that. It’s becoming part of American life, but it’s still kind of peripheral in some ways. But what happens if it really does become part of American culture?
The culture of soccer is not American. It’s different. And the world has always kind of been pleased about that. Think about the clock: How many Americans complain that the timing of the game is wrong because you should count down the clock and that should determine the end of the game. You shouldn’t have the referee being able to decide when the game ends. It’s a very strongly held opinion among Americans of all stripes. But it’s not the way the rest of the world sees it, and I don’t think the rest of the world wants to change it. I think there are many, many things where soccer does not really integrate fully into American culture. The question is, will it become more integrated, and will that mean changing it in ways that suit Americans that don’t necessarily suit the rest of the world?
I think we’re already there with the “hydration breaks,” creating more commercial opportunities and turning soccer into a game of quarters out of nowhere.
I shock all my friends when I say I think quarters are quite a good idea. I think American sports can learn from the rest of the world, and the rest of the world can learn from American sports. I think they’re a good idea just because they break up the game. And I think if you ask a soccer fan truthfully, they will tell you in a 45-minute half, there are periods where you sort of lose your attention, your mind starts to wander and you start to think, When do I get my cup of tea at halftime?
With the full stadiums and the optimism that followed after all the bad PR and the high ticket prices, it’s looking like soccer is indestructible — and that FIFA was well aware of this all along. That every commercial gamble and every heavy-handed state intervention over the years can’t really slow down the World Cup. A lot of people celebrate that, as if you can’t kill soccer, but I see it much more darkly — that authorities can do whatever they want with it and people will still attend. How far can FIFA and regimes possibly take and corrupt soccer in your opinion?
Oh, I think the sky’s the limit there. It’s important to bear in mind it’s always been like this, like with the 1934 Mussolini World Cup and the 1978 Argentina World Cup. But even when it’s been held in liberal democracies, it’s always been about some national political goal. France ’98 was about French multiculturalism, right? And then Germany 2006 was about the resurrection of the national self-image and that resurgence of national pride. The world’s most popular event is inevitably going to be a political event.
To me, the problem is really the corruption in FIFA. If the money were taken and used for something worthwhile, I wouldn’t have a problem with the ticket prices being very high. The problem is that none of us think anything like that is going to happen with the money. We all think the money’s going to go into somebody’s back pocket and be used for corrupt wheeling and dealing.
So much of the conversation around the high ticket prices prior to the World Cup was about inaccessibility and taking the game away from most people. Do you see this trend continuing? Like, will FIFA continue to price the World Cup outrageously?
FIFA doesn’t often get to have the competition take place in an economy of 350 million people with some of the largest concentrations of wealth in the world. There are enough wealthy Americans and enough sports-loving Americans, even if soccer isn’t the first sport, who just think this is just a great party — which it is, right? Americans are very good at parties. I think that’s built into the national culture as well. And it’s just not going to be like that elsewhere.
If you try to pull these ticket prices where the next World Cup is, in Spain, Portugal, and Morocco, along with one game each in Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, I think the local populations are going to rebel. I think we’ll see ticket prices come down substantially for the next World Cup.
A lot of live events, particularly big concert tours, have been quietly scaled back or canceled within the past year, and yet as we’ve been talking about, this World Cup is exceptionally well attended despite the high prices. Did FIFA do anything particular in bucking that trend or creating exceptional demand?
No, not really. They sit on the most popular event in the world. And if you ask most fans, they hate FIFA. I mean, does anybody really like FIFA? I will say that they certainly seem to have managed the logistics well. It seems like all these games go off very smoothly. And it is noticeable that FIFA do not leave a lot of this to the local organizers. They’re very hands-on. But bear in mind, they have global experience. If you’ve organized the World Cup in Qatar, Russia, Brazil, South Africa — if you’ve been in that institution for the last 20 years, you’ve seen everything already, right?
My impression of FIFA is that when you deal with the people in it below the top layers, these people are really smart, they really love soccer, and they’re always decent people. It’s like a lot of corruption: The fish rots from the head, but that’s where the problem is. In the lower echelons, I’ve always had the impression that these people are in tune with what fans want and are good at making it work.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
