When the United States embarked on its journey to co-host the 2026 World Cup, the event was promoted as an opportunity to highlight and celebrate North America’s most unique and glamorous cities.
Miami, with its stunning beachfront hotels, was presented in the bid book as America’s “gateway to the world.” San Francisco was imagined as a city where fans would gather in Mission Dolores Park to enjoy the “iconic skyline” and its famous bridge at the continent’s edge. Boston, one of the country’s “most historic” cities, would welcome the World Cup with “elegant simplicity and distinctive New England flair.”
FIFA, the global soccer governing body, embraced this vision and in 2018 selected the United States, Mexico, and Canada as hosts. However, the tournament was never meant to take place in many of the cities highlighted in the bid book. Instead, due to the unique political geography of the U.S., matches were often slated for smaller, less affluent municipalities that might be familiar to sports fans but not to the general public.
“When I tell people I’m the mayor of East Rutherford, they’re like, where’s that?” shared Jeffrey Lahullier, the leader of a New Jersey town of 10,000, set to host this weekend’s final match. “I say, do you know where the World Cup’s being played?”
This reflects a shift in American political dynamics, exposed by the World Cup, where major global events are frequently hosted in towns with just a few thousand residents, compelling local officials to engage with billion-dollar franchises, international bodies, and visiting dignitaries.
For decades, suburban stadium cities—often viewed as mere landing sites for colossal sports complexes—have existed in an uncertain political state. They experience both benefits and pressures from the sports giants nearby, which bring potential financial gains but often deliver them inconsistently. With the World Cup, the local tensions between politicians and their prominent corporate neighbors were elevated to an international platform.
Santa Clara, California, Mayor Lisa Gillmor welcomed King Abdullah II of Jordan upon his arrival, while Arlington, Texas, Mayor Jim Ross hosted Japan’s Princess Takamado. In Foxborough, Massachusetts, the part-time town select board faced off with a global nonprofit. Meanwhile, in Inglewood, near Los Angeles, Mayor James Butts saw a labor dispute with stadium workers intertwine with immigration debates, as workers expressed fears of being apprehended by ICE agents assigned to the games.
As leaders from at least three continents gather in East Rutherford, Lahullier’s focus is less on the World Cup final and more on managing a $34 million municipal budget to cover a police overtime bill exceeding $100,000.
“It was described to me like I’m hosting eight Super Bowls,” Lahullier said of the World Cup’s logistical demands. “But it’s not a money-maker—you’re spending funds you hope to recover.”
Long before they were massive monuments to American sports culture, the sites of suburban stadiums were racetracks, swamps, low-income neighborhoods and sandy expanses of land where locals took weekend dirtbike joyrides and came to dump their trash.
Throughout much of the 20th century, sports were synonymous with the heart and soul of the city. Fans would walk from their homes and workplaces to arenas that embodied civic pride, their cheers and roars blending into the urban soundscape, with players and coaches reflecting a city’s character.
This began to change in the 1960s as teams started to relocate away from the places that inspired their names. Although the rise of the automobile and suburban migration influenced these moves, they were often sparked by conflicts with local political leadership. In 1971, the Boston Patriots left their city after facing challenges in securing a stadium space for their NFL franchise. They found land about an hour away along Route 1 in a small town that did not fund the stadium but welcomed the project. Acknowledging their new home in Foxborough—closer to Rhode Island than Boston’s city hall—the team rebranded as the New England Patriots.
Wellington Mara, owner of the New York Giants, announced that same year that his team would move from Yankee Stadium to a swampy area in New Jersey due to dissatisfaction with the city’s reluctance to build a dedicated stadium. “Every family dreams of moving into its own house and getting away from its in-laws,” Mara remarked at the time. Following this announcement, then-New York Mayor John Lindsay criticized Mara as “selfish, callous and ungrateful,” and threatened legal action to force the team to remove “New York” from its name.
The Miami Dolphins left the Orange Bowl in Little Havana in 1984 after the city sought a rent increase. Team owner Joe Robbie secured a 99-year lease with Dade County for a location in a low-income, rural area about 15 miles northwest of downtown Miami.
The residents of what was then known as Lake Lucerne were not particularly eager to make room for a $100 million professional sports stadium. Many local homeowners, predominantly Black, filed lawsuits on land-use and civil-rights grounds to block development, but their efforts were thwarted by county and state agency maneuvers. Even the discovery of a Native American burial ground on the site couldn’t stop Joe Robbie Stadium from opening to the public in 1987.
Similar scenarios unfolded nationwide over the following decades. The Dallas Cowboys relocated from downtown Dallas to Irving in 1971, and later to Arlington in 2009, after failing to secure taxpayer-funded stadiums in their previous locations. The 49ers left San Francisco’s Candlestick Point in 2013 for the more favorable conditions of Santa Clara, 40 miles down the San Francisco Bay Peninsula. In Southern California, Inglewood was chosen over other sites as the Rams’ home when the team returned in 2020.
Each of these moves transformed small municipalities into development and entertainment hubs that could see their populations swell by over 800 percent on event days. This brought a promising new tax base, along with complex public safety, transportation, and political challenges.
As Foxborough evolved from an isolated farming town into a regional destination surrounded by malls, the city contended with the Patriots over fan behavior, traffic issues, and their understaffed police force. In Inglewood, the stadium’s arrival led to luxury housing developments and new hotels with yoga decks, but also significant displacement of an overwhelmingly non-white community.
Rutherford, New Jersey, is a picturesque borough with a compact, “20th-century quaint” walkable center that Forbes once likened to a Norman Rockwell painting. To its east lies a collection of parking lots surrounding MetLife Stadium (home to the Jets and Giants), Meadowlands Racetrack, and the American Dream mega-mall. It has since become the smallest city ever to host a Super Bowl.
In 2010, the 49ers sought voter approval in Santa Clara—a quiet Silicon Valley suburb known for housing Intel and Nvidia—to support $937 million in total spending on a new stadium. Under the agreement, a public authority would own the building, with the 49ers managing daily operations and sharing revenue from non-NFL events with the city.
“The economy wasn’t great, the team was losing, there was a lot of distrust in politics at the time,” said Lisa Gillmor, a former city council member involved in the pro-stadium campaign. “We worked really hard and convinced our community that it wasn’t going to cost the city any money to build the stadium.”
By the time Gillmor returned to city government in 2016, she noted that Santa Clara’s relationship with the team had started to sour. A nearby youth soccer park became contentious as the 49ers considered converting it into parking lots, and a popular multi-use trail was rerouted on game days. (A 49ers spokesperson claimed the field remained unchanged and that the franchise now funds youth teams using it.) Most notably, Gillmor stated that revenue from stadium concerts for the city soon dwindled to nearly nothing, as the team asserted that security costs had risen. The team maintains, however, that total revenue has exceeded initial projections.
The situation escalated to the point where Gillmor and the city voted to remove the 49ers as stadium managers in 2019, prompting a lawsuit from the team. The 49ers later attempted to unseat her, and in 2022, a challenger backed by the team narrowly lost by 700 votes. (The city and team later resolved their lawsuit, leaving the 49ers in charge of stadium management.)
Ellie Caple, the 49ers vice president of corporate communications and public affairs, described the World Cup as a “tremendous success with no financial risk to the city” and emphasized the 49ers’ commitment to community investment. Gillmor, for her part, has transitioned from a supporter of a San Francisco-based team to a chief critic of Santa Clara’s most renowned resident.
“They were very hospitable during the election,” Gillmor remarked. “Then after the votes, things changed, they rolled back up the red carpet.”
A global mega-event like the World Cup always promises to foster global unity and celebrate the shared passion for football, as emphasized in the U.S. bid presentation. However, the relationship between a host city and FIFA is largely transactional.
FIFA requires host cities to sign agreements covering substantial operational costs such as security and expanded transportation, which can reach up to $150 million per city. In exchange, host cities are assured of publicity, economic benefits from the games, and reimbursements from state host committees. In the United States, several cities, including Chicago, Minneapolis, and Detroit, opted out of hosting due to FIFA’s financial demands.
“The big problem I had was, they wanted to treat taxpayers as dumb money at the table, and I was not gonna let that happen,” former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel explained in an interview about Chicago’s decision against hosting World Cup matches. “I know a bad deal when I see one.”
For those cities that did host the games, the reception was not particularly warm. Politicians from New York and New Jersey publicly clashed with FIFA over its refusal to help finance fan transportation, a cost traditionally borne by host countries. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani successfully negotiated with FIFA for $50 tickets and free transportation for 1,000 New Yorkers and convinced the organization to lift a ban on bringing water bottles into stadiums. (FIFA President Gianni Infantino also facilitated a conversation between Mamdani and Arsène Wenger, the legendary manager of Mamdani’s favorite club Arsenal, to foster goodwill.)
Outrage from New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill over FIFA’s plans to sell stadium grass as a collectible led to the organization reversing its decision and agreeing to return some proceeds to local organizers. (FIFA did not respond to a request for comment.)
However, small-town mayors often struggled to garner the same public attention when challenging FIFA and had to find other means of leverage. The select board of 19,000-person Foxborough withheld an essential event permit for the seven World Cup matches set for Gillette Stadium to secure reimbursement for an estimated $7.8 million in security expenses. Less than three months before the World Cup was scheduled to start, Patriots owner Robert Kraft delivered the funds.
“The concessions are small and meaningless, they can say they’ve extracted this, but it doesn’t really matter,” noted J.C. Bradbury, a sports business professor at Kennesaw State University and author of a forthcoming book on stadiums transforming into “billion-dollar play-palaces for the rich-built increasingly on the backs of taxpayers.”
The settlement between Foxborough and Kraft’s companies enabled the World Cup to proceed in Massachusetts, even as the two parties moved their dispute to court. In mid-June, Kraft Sports & Entertainment sued the town for “repeatedly misusing its state-granted licensing authority unlawfully to extract funds.” In early July, before the final match was played there, Foxborough filed a counterclaim seeking dismissal of Kraft’s lawsuit.
“While the plaintiffs, a collection of multibillion-dollar corporations, would prefer to have Foxborough taxpayers bear these expenses, they are contractually bound to pay for the public safety services that are necessary to ensure safe and efficient events at their private venue,” the town wrote in a brief.
Kraft’s New England Revolution professional soccer team is scheduled to play its next match in Foxborough on Thursday.
When the summer Olympics concluded in August 2024, it was Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass who received the games’ flame, which she handed off to a motorcycling Tom Cruise for an action-packed journey to California. However, the main ceremony for the Olympics in July 2028 will not be held within the city Bass governs.
Instead, it will take place at Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium, which was not yet built when the World Cup and Olympic bids were submitted but is now considered one of the world’s top sporting venues and will be converted into a swimming venue in 2028.
Mayor James Butts attributes his city’s significant financial improvement over the past few decades to the influx of sports teams and stadiums, along with related businesses like the National Football League, which established its West Coast headquarters and media center there. Once home to the Los Angeles Lakers, the city’s team defied the suburban trend by leaving Inglewood’s Great Western Forum for a downtown Los Angeles stadium in 1999. In the years that followed, the city faced challenges with crime, high unemployment, and a $17 million budget deficit. But its fortunes began to change when the Forum reopened and sports mogul Stan Kroenke acquired the city’s former racetrack, eventually turning it into SoFi Stadium, home of the Rams.
Butts estimates that Inglewood now hosts 400 events annually and welcomes half a million visitors, necessitating “very robust” traffic management and safety resources. He insists that the city-stadium relationship is “very healthy.”
However, this relationship has faced tests from numerous disputes, including a long-running legal battle between the city and Kroenke, who owns both SoFi Stadium and the Rams. Inglewood receives millions annually from an admission tax on ticket events, contributing nearly 10 percent to the city’s general fund revenues.
“We went from BBB- bond ratings to AA+. Median value for a home was $225,000 when I took office, it’s $850,000 now,” Butts stated. “Right now we have more in reserves than any city in the county.”
Butts is not the only local politician who believes that having a city defined by a stadium is worth the challenges and financial burdens, and that being mistaken for its larger neighbor can yield benefits. In a promotional video for the World Cup, Mayor Rodney Harris of Miami Gardens—where today’s third-place match between France and England will be played—said that the tournament provides “an opportunity to sell our story” to attract future businesses.
Ultimately, for these mayors, moments of grandeur are rare. Lahullier attended the tournament’s first match at MetLife, between Morocco and Brazil, seated among government officials in a luxury box. “I wish I could tell you that I follow soccer, but I do not,” he admitted.
But when broadcasters captured shots of local politicians, it was always Mamdani on camera, leaving the actual mayor sitting to his right out of view. Even when the world is watching, a small-city mayor can fade into the background.
“I’ve been mayor now for seven years,” Lahullier said. “If I twisted arms, I could probably get a signed football or a signed jersey.”
