U.S. host cities say FIFA promised them $1 million each in legacy money. Vancouver's host committee won't say whether it got the same offer.

A month after hosting seven World Cup games, Vancouver’s host committee won’t say whether FIFA offered it the legacy money U.S. cities say they were promised.

The temporary grass at B.C. Place has been pulled up, the security cordons are down and downtown traffic is back to its usual crawl. What the city has to show for the tournament is harder to point at — and at least one economist argues that’s exactly what a World Cup leaves behind: a large bill and not much else.

The story started south of the border. U.S. cities that hosted 2026 World Cup games are pressing FIFA for money they say they were promised and never got, according to reporting by The Athletic published Tuesday.

Before the 2025 Club World Cup, FIFA President Gianni Infantino announced US$1 million for each of the 11 American cities hosting that tournament — a “legacy contribution” for mini-pitches and community projects. The Athletic reported that when the larger 2026 World Cup came around, U.S. host cities were verbally told by FIFA management that they would get the same. The story cited four host-committee executives who spoke anonymously.

That raises an obvious question in a city that just spent heavily to co-host the tournament: was a similar offer ever made to Vancouver?

The Vancouver Host Committee’s answer, so far, is to talk about a different tournament.

In two emailed responses to Postmedia, the committee said the $1 million funding “originated with the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup, which was hosted exclusively in the United States,” and that ‘Vancouver did not host that tournament and was therefore not part of the related funding discussions.”

A spokesperson for fellow Canadian host city Toronto gave a similar account to the Toronto Sun, saying the payments were only ever meant for U.S. cities that also hosted Club World Cup games.

When the Vancouver Host Committee was asked whether FIFA offered or promised any legacy contribution for the 2026 World Cup it actually hosted, the committee referred Postmedia to FIFA, who did not respond to a request for comment.

B.C.’s gross cost to host the seven Vancouver matches is estimated at $685 million to $729 million, according to the provincial government’s most recent update in late May, though the province projects net core, after revenue and recoveries, at a high of about $114 million. FIFA, by contrast, has reported revenue above USD$15 billion for its current cycle. Against numbers like those, $1 million barely registers.

Moshe Lander, an economist at Concordia University, has been a vocal critic of these hosting deals and was blunt about the $1 million sum.

“It’s a rounding error. It’s insignificant,” he said — a sum that matters to an ordinary household but not to a city carrying a nine-figure bill, and not to a governing body that books billions.

What interests him is the pattern.

“This is standard operating procedure for FIFA,” he said. “Promise one thing and deliver another, and take the money and run.”

The bigger number, in his view, is the one Vancouver spent.

Lander said cost escalation is built into these events. Hosting a World Cup, he said, is like a home renovation where you can have it on time, on budget or on quality — but only two of the three. FIFA sets the dates and the standards, so budget is the one that gives, which is why costs land well past whatever number politicians first floated.

He said he expects that to surface later, once the tournament fades from memory — when a council reckoning with the final bill has to find the money somewhere, and residents see it on their property taxes.

He’s skeptical of the word “legacy” itself. Call a payment a kickback and it sounds like corruption; call it a legacy contribution and it sounds like a gift, he said. And even a gift can become a liability: build soccer fields with a one-time cheque, and a city is on the hook to maintain them for years.

“That’s like me giving you a gift, and then you constantly have to take care of the gift,” he said.

Vancouver’s last big sporting event was structured differently.

Chris Gear spent nearly six years as a director and senior counsel with the organizing committee for the 2010 Winter Olympics. Those games left venues like the Richmond Olympic Oval and the Whistler Sliding Centre. The federal and provincial governments also set up a roughly $110 million endowment to help keep them running.

The difference, Gear said, is planning. In some earlier host cities, venues went up with no thought to what came after. In Vancouver, “it was very important that the venues that got built had a legacy purpose in mind” — so that communities, as he said, “weren’t left holding the bag.”

Gear divides what those Games left into three parts: the buildings, the sport and something harder to price — the 25,000 volunteers, the civic pride, the memory of a city full of visitors from around the world. That last part, he said, is something you can’t pay for.

Vancouver has that from this summer, too. Whether it was offered anything else, the host committee won’t say.