A 2026 World Cup that doesn’t rip off fans? Some cities are showing that it’s possible

Philadelphia has spotted an opportunity. A chance to burnish a budding reputation as one of the East Coast’s most pleasant and interesting big cities – in the view of this columnist, at least – and one of its most affordable, too.

The ample offering of public transportation to the six 2026 World Cup matches slated for Lincoln Financial Field (dubbed Philadelphia Stadium for the tournament, as per Fifa’s sponsor rules) will set fans back a mere $2.90. Tickets to see those matches are somehow getting cheaper on the secondary market – down about 16% from last month. Hotels are still reasonably priced. And fan fests will remain free for every day of the tournament. There will be no getting charged three times as much for shade, either, as you will in Los Angeles.

“We’ve been working on this for a significant amount of time,” Meg Kane, host city executive for Philadelphia’s local organizing committee told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “We have always really put the fan experience at the center of what we wanted to build the Fifa World Cup in Philadelphia around.”

So much of the narrative about this summer’s World Cup has centered on high prices – either due to Fifa’s pursuit of maximum revenue – which it says will be ploughed back into the sport’s grassroots – or local authorities’ quest to recoup the significant costs, or some combination of the two. But Philadelphia is one of several of the 11 World Cup host cities in the United States to have found some breathing room within this oppressive climate. Here and there, along the margins, a few brave parts of a few brave cities have carved out a little daylight, a spot for them to put fans first.

With match tickets priced similarly to a car, which even chief World Cup cheerleader Donald Trump said he would balk at, and the rocketing rates for hotel rooms – which are coming right back down in the absence of robust demand – the latest assault on the wallet was transportation.

Train tickets from New York City to MetLife Stadium in New Jersey’s Meadowlands on NJ Transit were priced at $150, up from their usual $13, although that subsequently fell to $105 and then to $98 as sponsors were found. From Boston, train tickets to Gillette Stadium in Foxboro cost $80. Bus services aren’t much cheaper, and in some cases they are more expensive.

But after a fan fest in Liberty State Park in New Jersey was canceled on account of its cost to taxpayers – the same reasoning for those eye-watering train tickets, seeing as how Fifa won’t share in any of the cost of getting fans to its games – New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced five free fan fests across all the city’s boroughs.

Other cities have gone further.

Rather than go along with Fifa’s pricey in-stadium concession rates, Arthur Blank – the owner of the Atlanta Falcons, Atlanta United FC, and, crucially, the Mercedes-Benz Stadium they share – made his own rules. Hotdogs will be $2, as they always are at a stadium where cheap concessions are part of its selling point.

Blank wants to showcase Southern hospitality. “Fans give us their energy, their time, their passion, their resources, their families, whatever it may be,” he told WSB-TV. “And we need to honor that in the truest sense of the word, whatever we can.”

In Kansas City, a sprawling metropolis chronically underserved by public transit, an extensive system of cheap bus service is on its way for World Cup ticket-holders. Return rides to its stadium will cost a mere $15, whereas shuttle buses from the airport to downtown Kansas City will be free. A network of regional buses connecting the fan fest to a dozen hubs across the wider area will be $5 a day or $50 for the entire tournament. And, oh yeah, the fan fest will remain free.

On the one hand, these cities are showing that even at this World Cup, behaving reasonably and fairly and in the interest of the fans is still possible. On the other, they do so by sacrificing the opportunity to generate revenue that may otherwise have been invested in a World Cup legacy project. There are really no perfect options. They either extract some small benefit from being a host city, to make the entire endeavor fiscally worthwhile, and get clobbered with bad PR. Or they don’t and are left with nothing but an impression that looks positive by comparison.

Places such as Philadelphia are opting for the latter.

“Being a host city for the World Cup is very different than being a host city for any other major event,” Kane told the Inquirer. “And people recognize that it changes the profile of the city of Philadelphia.”

Host cities have struggled to sell sponsorship to cover their costs, but Philadelphia instead sold its business community on simply making donations, figuring, presumably, that the good press would benefit the whole town. Public funds were also tapped.

Taken together, something of a blueprint emerges for ways to defray the cost of attending the World Cup a little, and for its hosts to leave fans with something other than the sense that they’ve been shaken down for every last dollar.

It can be done. Leaving money on the table is a choice you can actually make.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is the author of The Long Game: U.S. Men’s Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts, which is out now. He teaches at Marist University.

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