New research reveals impacts of hosting FIFA’s World Cup
Ed.: The essays, analyses and opinions presented as Community Voices express the perspectives of their authors on topics of interest and importance to the community and are not intended to reflect perspectives on behalf of Salish Current.
With the first 12 days of FIFA’s World Cup 2026 in the books, it feels like the summer mega-event is set to be a massive success. Despite what some naysayers predicted, global soccer has never looked better, especially with competitive matches playing out across the three host countries of Canada, Mexico and the U.S., and enthusiastic crowds filling stadiums, fan sites and sports bars.
For Cascadia’s host cities of Vancouver and Seattle, the right to host the World Cup along with 14 other cities represents an extraordinary feat for the Cascadia region, which is the only cross-border corridor to garner such a distinction. The now-underway matches at BC Place and Seattle Stadium are shining an unprecedented spotlight on both coastal metropolises, but also the larger borderlands region fanning out across B.C. and Washington.
FIFA’s legacy in Cascadia will undoubtedly build on the region’s impressive history of professional, collegiate and amateur sport. The cross-border flow of athletes and fans that define the FIFA experience in Seattle and Vancouver is part of a larger story that includes professional leagues in hockey, baseball and football, as well as signature global events such as Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympics. For other cities such as Bellingham, Everett and Surrey, B.C., the World Cup is bringing summer visitors traversing between the host cities, but it is also energizing civic life in these places through the hosting of fan zones and other FIFA activities.
But beyond the surge in tourism and global publicity for the region, it is worth asking what the hosting of the World Cup, along with other major sporting developments, means for the long term. My recent research with Western’s Border Policy Research Institute pondered this question and turned to sporting leaders on both sides of the border to gain some better perspective. Titled Global Sport in the Borderlands: Cascadia, Sport Diplomacy, and the Staging of FIFA’s World Cup, the study found that the hosting of international sport in this part of the world is linked to local realities of infrastructure, mobility, sustainability and human experience.
That connection may come across as lofty. However, much like the Olympics, expos and world’s fairs that have touched down in this part of the continent previously, the World Cup has the potential to transform the way this region thinks about itself. The sporting leaders I interviewed pointed to long-lasting impacts including economic development, urban infrastructure, metropolitan and intra-regional transportation, and environmental sustainability.
They’re not wrong to do so given their importance to the cross-border region and the work that has already been done. In a recent ranking of FIFA stadiums by urbanist Ray Delahanty, Cascadia’s venues finished atop the list owing to variables such as walkability, transit connections and social experience. And the sustainability theme has emerged as a growing focus for FIFA organizers, just as it has for senior leaders of other professional and international sporting programs locally. Cascadia is already home to the Green Sports Alliance, which was founded in Seattle by the late philanthropist and high-technology leader Paul Allen. Described as the largest organization bridging sports to sustainability, it focuses on sport related initiatives focused on clean water, clean energy and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, among other social-environmental impact ventures.
Of course, the cross-border staging of events like the World Cup aligns with existing cultural and economic aspects of the Cascadia region as well, including tourism, entertainment and high-technology industries. Michelle Collens, the City of Vancouver’s Director of Tourism and Destination Events and a strategic advisor to the FIFA 2026 Vancouver organizing team, pointed to longstanding flows between Seattle and Vancouver, including the emergence of satellite operations of Seattle-based companies like Amazon and Microsoft into metropolitan Vancouver.
This cross-border dynamic is also boosted by Vancouver’s film and television industry, or “Hollywood North,” which connects British Columbia’s Lower Mainland to U.S. and global entertainment companies. And the hosting of the World Cup in both cities both complements and energizes existing economic activity such as the cruise ship and aviation sectors. That holistic sense of regional cultural and economic purpose, itself intertwined with environmental and social impact, permeates the regional FIFA ethos and extends to the local growth of sport itself, including amateur and professional soccer. If anything, the World Cup should reinvigorate the local passion for global sport.
But a big part of the FIFA story is catalyzing dialogue and exchange between the host countries and cities. April Putney, Chief Strategy Officer of Seattle FIFA World Cup 2026, noted how Cascadia’s hosting of the World Cup provided “the opportunity to have a Pacific Northwest conversation and be marketing and billing ourselves collectively as the region for soccer (while) trying to get the world’s spotlight here.”
The perspectives of Putney and Collens are heartening. Political tensions at the federal level have set back U.S.-Canada relations considerably, and borderland communities have felt the negative ramifications of this conflict more than other places. In that sense, FIFA’s arrival to local shores couldn’t be timelier as it represents a new and necessary juncture in Cascadia’s bi-national trajectory.
—By Derek Moscato
Derek Moscato is a professor of journalism at Western Washington University and a research fellow with Western’s Border Policy Research Institute.