I like to say I don’t care about sports, but I must admit that even I have been swept up by the enthusiasm for this summer’s FIFA World Cup. As a lifelong Los Angeles resident, I’ve found the tournament difficult to escape. With eight games hosted a few miles from my home at “Los Angeles Stadium” –– FIFA required SoFi Stadium and other host venues to remove their sponsored branding –– there’s been nowhere to run. “If they were hoping the choice might result in a less politically charged tournament, they were probably disappointed.”
Following a corruption scandal over its selection of Qatar to host the 2022 World Cup, FIFA member nations voted under a revamped process in 2018 to select the United States, Mexico and Canada to jointly host the 2026 games. If they were hoping the choice might result in a less politically charged tournament, they were probably disappointed. The World Cup has cast an enormous spotlight on the United States’ social and political contradictions and drawn even more attention to the whims of the Trump administration.
At the same time, the spotlight placed on LA has allowed the city to showcase an aspirational vision of its future, promoting public transit, businesses and urbanism to cultivate an identity as an interconnected, cosmopolitan world city rather than a mid-century suburban entertainment hub. Even more importantly, the tournament has shown just how intertwined international and local politics can be, in a time where national media coverage frequently overshadows both.
This year’s World Cup was held at more venues over a wider area than any before: 16 stadiums in 16 host cities across its three North American host countries — and actually, many of the stadiums were located outside the legal boundaries of the named host cities, since American stadiums are often built far into the suburbs.
The “Los Angeles Stadium” games actually took place in neighboring Inglewood, CA, a predominantly Black and Hispanic city which sought to attract the increased economic activity surrounding LA. This stirred controversy among longtime Inglewood residents who experienced the brunt of the traffic and displacement caused by venues marketing themselves as part of LA proper. At the same time, though, businesses in Inglewood’s historic downtown saw revenue boosts driven by the World Cup.
In 2024, the World Cup’s Los Angeles Host Committee estimated that the games would bring nearly 150,000 additional visitors to LA, leading to almost $600 million in spending and $243 million in additional wages through new jobs and increased hours for hospitality workers. It remains unclear just how much public money LA and local governments spent on the games to secure these potential benefits, and the extent to which reality aligned with economic forecasts.
In addition to security, upgrades to the stadium, and 11 official fan events (which ultimately required paid tickets, despite initial promises and FIFA’s original expectations), the games functioned, perhaps by necessity given the scale of demand, as a showpiece for Los Angeles’s parks, public transportation, and urbanism.
LA Metro saw its highest ridership since the pandemic, buoyed by the long-awaited opening of the D Line Subway Extension and by special services offered to shuttle patrons to and from World Cup games. LA encouraged public transportation ridership during the games, and one of the fan events offered was at LA Union Station, Metro’s hub. The LA city government, particularly its parks department, also supplemented the paid World Cup fan zones with dozens of free watch parties featuring city resource fairs, local organizations, and even youth soccer clinics.
Beyond city-facilitated events, it seems every establishment imaginable in the area has hosted some kind of open World Cup event to capitalize on the surge of visitors, including historic venues like Clifton’s Cafeteria, a Downtown LA spot which had allegedly been permanently closed prior to the games but reopened for the tournament.
The World Cup has also put LA workers and community leaders in the spotlight. As a notable example of the power held by a vast array of labor and community organizers, a union representing food service workers at SoFi Stadium voted to strike during the opening match , ultimately securing higher wages, additional labor protections and the right to strike if threatened by federal immigration enforcement.
Furthermore, World Cup festivities have illustrated the clash between politicians’ ambitions for the future of LA and its current reality. The closure of a section of Wilshire Boulevard through the middle of MacArthur Park for a World Cup fan event was heralded for months as a showcase of Mayor Karen Bass and Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez’s vision to reunite the park. However, the event coincided with the city’s displacement of dozens of nearby street vendors and weeks of controversial nighttime drug raids around the park arranged by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the LAPD. This was no conspiracy, but rather revealed two very different sets of priorities for the same area.
Meanwhile, watch parties in Koreatown for the June 18 Mexico-South Korea game were successful beyond organizers’ expectations and garnered positive reviews, but the crowds were so massive that they overwhelmed infrastructure and crowd control procedures in a city that still doesn’t expect its streets or subways to be lively, much less crowded.
Events like these have prompted meaningful criticism of LA and its neighbors’ governments, and they point to deep systemic problems in LA that have yet to be adequately addressed. But in today’s attention economy, it’s hard to argue that LA and its peer cities haven’t gotten a good deal out of the games, which gave LA the chance to project an aspirational vision of its future and reckon with the challenges required to make that vision a reality.
Nicholas Steinman CM ‘28 understands the connection between sports and public transit very well, as on rare occasions he has seen soccer fans in real life, but only on the train.
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