With less than three months until the first World Cup match kicks off at MetLife Stadium, the economic promises that city officials and FIFA attached to the tournament are starting to unravel.
Hotel bookings for New York’s World Cup weeks are running 2% below advance reservations for those same dates in 2025, a year with no major events driving demand. That gap is a quiet alarm for an industry that expected a surge, and it raises hard questions about whether the $3 billion economic windfall FIFA projected for the New York area will come anywhere close to materializing.
“The bookings have been softer than expected,” said Sarah Bratko, vice president and policy counsel for the American Hotels and Lodging Association.
FIFA’s projection rests on the assumption that 1.2 million visitors will descend on the New York-New Jersey region during the tournament. The international football body estimated those visitors would spend $1.7 billion, support 26,000 jobs, and generate $432 million in state and local tax revenue. Mayor Zohran Mamdani said earlier this month that the Cup has “the potential to be an immense economic driver in this city.” The hotel numbers suggest that potential is not yet translating into reservations.
Pricing may be pushing travelers away before they even get to the booking screen. The Midtown Hilton is listing its cheapest rooms at $379 a night for late May. For the four days before the first match on June 13, that rate climbs to $533. In the four nights leading up to the final at MetLife on July 19, the price hits $627 a night. Sports economists who study these events say that kind of pricing, while understandable from a revenue perspective, drives fans toward cheaper options in the suburbs or neighboring cities.
Victor Matheson, a sports economist and dedicated soccer fan, told this publication in the fall that he plans to attend two matches in Boston, where he lives, and one in Kansas City. He booked an inexpensive motel far outside downtown Kansas City after finding that hotels near the venue wanted $500 a night during the Cup. His choices illustrate what economists have long argued: most World Cup tickets will go to people already living in the metro areas hosting the matches, not international tourists making their first trip to New York.
The city comptroller’s office added another sobering calculation to the picture. Even in a best-case scenario where the event performs as FIFA projected, a recent budget report concluded that the city would spend more on direct costs, including policing, than it would collect in additional tax revenue. The math does not favor the house.
Then there is the question that city and FIFA officials have been reluctant to address directly. The Trump administration has banned travel from a number of countries, tightened visa rules broadly, and left unclear whether promises made to ease entry for World Cup visitors are actually being carried out. The international fan base that makes a World Cup genuinely global may face real obstacles getting here, and that uncertainty is not something hotel occupancy rates can absorb.
“Mega events like the World Cup rarely deliver a sustained boost for local hotel markets,” said Vijay Dandapani, CEO of the Hotel Association of New York City.
That observation tracks with the broader academic literature on sporting mega-events. Economists have studied Olympics, World Cups, and Super Bowls for decades, and the pattern is consistent: the projected numbers, built by organizations with a financial interest in generating enthusiasm, tend to dwarf the actual returns. New York has hosted enough of these events to know the drill.
None of this means the matches will be poorly attended or that the city won’t see some economic activity it otherwise would not have had. The final at MetLife could still draw a genuine international crowd willing to pay whatever the market charges. But the gap between FIFA’s projections and the current booking data is wide enough that the city should be planning around a much more modest outcome, not the one that looked good on a press release.
