The United States is always a frontrunner when it comes to hosting major sporting events, and the biggest reasons are the most obvious ones: modern stadiums and good infrastructure make for a small leap from planning to reality.

And when it comes to World Cups, the US continually shows its dominance – not on the field, but in terms of ticket sales, digital engagement and television viewership. Just last year, other than citizens of the host nation Brazil, the most tickets for the World Cup were bought by Americans, a team that went out in the last 16.

There is little doubt, then, that the US has what it takes to host a very successful World Cup. But after losing out to Qatar on a bid to host 2022 under controversial, perhaps illegal, circumstances, officials from the US Soccer Federation said they wouldn’t be trying again.



The 2026 host bidding process was supposed to be underway right now, but it was put on hold amid allegations of corruption around the 2018 and 2022 bids. Suddenly, it seemed like the US could be back in the running.

With a global host rotation returning back to North America and potentially huge changes looming at Fifa, the USA’s best chance could be in 2026. But it’s no small task to bid for the planet’s largest soccer tournament. Is it a given that the US will go back to the drawing board and bid for the 2026 World Cup after the shock of losing to Qatar?

Awaiting reforms



The biggest factor that will decide whether the US seeks to host the next available World Cup is not stateside, but in Zurich.

“I said [the US wouldn’t bid again] if the rules don’t change, and some of the rules have already changed,” US Soccer Federation president Sunil Gulati said in July when asked by the Guardian about bidding. But he added: “I think given everything that’s going on in international soccer right now, it would be premature to talk about 2026.”

But the changes in Fifa that Gulati referenced offer hints that football’s governing body is moving in a direction that will tempt the US to bid again. Under a new provision approved in May, no longer will the final say of World Cup host be up to Fifa’s 24-member executive committee. Now, the executive committee will select a shortlist and all 209 nation members of Fifa will cast the final vote.

Fifa’s freeze on the 2026 bidding process adds time for more reforms to be made before a vote, but a larger problem lingers: culture. The charges lodged by the FBI in May against high-ranking Fifa officials paint a picture of widespread corruption and mob-like operations. Simple reforms, like the change in the voting system, do little to fix that.

One source close to US Soccer raised concerns to the Guardian that expanding the number of votes nine-fold to 209 meant it would be even more unwieldy to monitor the behavior around the voting process. Some members of the 24-member committee that voted for Qatar to host in 2022 over the US have been the subject of allegations of vote-selling in exchange for huge sums of cash. A transparent voting process, which Fifa does not have but US Soccer wants, is one possible way to address that.

Fifa president Sepp Blatter cleared the way for larger reforms by announcing plans to step down. His second-in-command Jéröme Valcke will exit alongside him. But until then, it’s a waiting game and the US can only hope reforms have teeth to them.

Alan Rothenberg, a former US Soccer Federation president (although he is no longer affiliated with the organization) and the director of the 1994 World Cup, said as long as reforms are adequate, a bid is likely.



“We don’t know what the reforms will be,” Rothenberg told the Guardian. “We don’t know about timing, we don’t know what the rules of the game will be. But I think once that’s established, the US will undoubtedly put in a big bid. If the current policy on [geographic] rotation continues, it would be our region’s turn.”

Taking the plunge



Assuming Fifa doesn’t change the rotation for hosts, Concacaf will be overdue a World Cup, which certainly benefits the US. But there will be some friendly competition: Mexico and Canada have announced their intentions to bid for the 2026 World Cup. Mexico hasn’t hosted since 1986 and Canada, having just successfully staged this summer’s Women’s World Cup, has never hosted the men’s tournament.

“The [Canada] organizing committee did a great job,” Gulati said from Vancouver after USA won the Women’s World Cup. “They’ve been terrific hosts and they’ve made it clear they are thinking about bidding [in 2026]. Competition is always good.”

Bidding, of course, isn’t free. The budget for US Soccer’s bid for the 2022 World Cup was $10m and, unlike other countries, the US did not use public funds, raising it all privately. For US Soccer, which spends about $60m annually, mostly on its national teams, it’s unlikely the budget will grow significantly for a 2026 bid.

David Downs, the executive director of the USA’s 2022 World Cup bid, said $10m covered two years of work to compile the bid, which was presented to Fifa in 2010. The budget included salaries for a small full-time staff, travel for lobbying activities, hosting technical inspection tours, creating a comprehensive bid book, negotiating deals with 18 cities and stadiums, as well as negotiations with the federal government.

“All those things take time and money and effort,” said Downs, who is no longer affiliated with US Soccer and now does consulting in sports media. “What we didn’t do is spend $50m on a global marketing campaign.”

Qatar, the winner by a vote margin of 14-to-8, has declined to disclose its bid expenditure, but its aggressive marketing campaign likely came with a huge price tag. One report put the marketing alone for Qatar’s bid at $42m in just 2010. Big-ticket items included a slate of international “bid ambassadors” hired to serve as spokespeople, including Zinedine Zidane, who was paid as much as $3m.

The US took a much smaller-scale approach, but the bid will largely need to be thrown out and a new version for 2026 bid would need to be created from scratch. The lessons learned from the 2022 campaign can be carried over, but even if the exact same cities and venues comprise a new bid, which is unlikely, all those details would need to be reworked.

“From a legal framework, you couldn’t just take the same contracts. Everything would need to be renegotiated,” Downs, who has not formally consulted on a 2026 US Soccer bid, told the Guardian. “We literally shipped a pallet of documents to Fifa – it was something like 10,000 pages of original documents signed and six copies of everything. My hand’s still aching from that. None of that actual physical leg work can just be reassigned to the 2026 process.”

Worth the effort



For Qatar, hosting a World Cup is part of a larger strategy to boost its standing in the global community. The small, oil-rich nation spares no expense to attract world-class events and, though the World Cup may be its biggest coup so far, Qatar has been in pursuit top international tournaments for several years. Qatar tried unsuccessfully to host the 2020 Olympics, failing to get selected past the applicant stage, but vowed to try again in 2024.

As a country, the US doesn’t stand to gain the same benefits from hosting a World Cup as Qatar does. For US Soccer, which is the force behind an American bid, the mission seems to be purely about growth of the game in a country where soccer is still seen as less mainstream than NFL, baseball, basketball and ice hockey.

Speaking during the Women’s World Cup earlier this month in Canada, Gulati said there is a pretty clear correlation: where World Cups are played, more future soccer players and stars are born.

“We can show through statistical analysis that our registration numbers went up, particularly in areas where there were Women’s World Cup games,” Gulati said of the 1999 Women’s World Cup. “Not a big surprise. I would expect numbers in Vancouver and Edmonton and Winnipeg to go up after this tournament more so than they would in other places.”

Those long-term benefits are the crux of why US Soccer wants to host the World Cup. In 1994, the tournament was the catalyst to found the domestic league that later became Major League Soccer, a huge component of player development that feeds into the national team program. Now, a World Cup could take MLS to the next level.

MLS Commissioner Don Garber declined to speak to the Guardian for this story.

Rothenberg, who served in various roles with US Soccer and Concacaf after directing the 1994 tournament, said the impact of a potential 2026 World Cup would be different than last time, but still significant.

“The more attention that is paid to the sport at the highest level, the more converts there will be to play, go to games and watch it on television,” Rothenberg said. “All you have to do is look at the popularity of soccer today compared to where it was before we hosted the ‘94 World Cup. Then, it put us on the map. Now we’re on the map, but we want to move toward dominance at all levels.”

To get that sort of benefit out of a World Cup, it needs to be hosted in the right way, though.

Popular speculation has been that Qatar could have its hosting rights stripped and given to the US, the runner-up in the vote. The US, with its existing infrastructure and stadiums, could probably host a World Cup tomorrow. But US Soccer may not want that.

“The idea was that, in 2010, if we were awarded a World Cup in the United States in 2022, you would have a 12-year horizon where people would be getting more and more excited about that day coming,” Downs said. “That would do wonders for the sport in general. Galvanizing the sport in the United States and enfranchising a new next generation, maybe finally producing a Lionel Messi in our US team jersey – those are the sorts of things that make it a great prospect for the United States.”

“It’s not an economic windfall in the sense that you make a profit hosting a World Cup,” he added, “because the deal you end up making with Fifa is that they get that vast amount of the proceeds. You’re left not losing money, but you’re not making a ton of money.”

Perhaps more reforms from Fifa could change that. Fifa, which has around $1.4bn in cash reserves, could likely afford to ease some of the burden on World Cup hosts by allowing them to keep more of the revenue.

But it’s one step at a time for the sweeping reforms the public wants from Fifa. For the US Soccer Federation, the reforms may not even need to be sweeping, but something clearly needs to change.

To hear Gulati tell it, reform – such as a more transparent voting process when it comes to choosing a World Cup host – is not an option but a necessity. The lingering question is whether any change within Fifa will be enough to convince the US to try again and bring the world’s largest football event back stateside.