That revenue came from broadcasting, sponsorship, licencing and ticketing, all controlled centrally by FIFA, meaning the organisation captured the upside while leaving host cities to absorb most of the costs, according to researchers who study the economics of the tournament. It was a structural feature of how modern World Cups are financed, not a one-off quirk of 2026.

Gains for broadcasters
Broadcasters had a good tournament too, though the picture was uneven. Fox paid an estimated USD 485 million for US English-language rights, a sum several industry analysts reckoned was two to three times below what the rights should have commanded in an open market.

That discount translated into outsized returns: strong ratings, including the most-watched English-language soccer broadcast in US history for a USA last-32 tie, left Fox on course for close to USD 1 billion in advertising revenue from the tournament alone.

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Telemundo, which held Spanish-language rights, had sold 90% of its inventory before a ball was kicked, with Anheuser-Busch, Bank of America and Coca-Cola among the buyers.

FIFA’s decision to introduce mandatory in-game hydration breaks, framed as a player-welfare measure given the summer heat across host cities, doubled as a lucrative piece of advertising real estate.

Fox alone was expected to generate around USD 250 million from the breaks, with 30-second spots during the early rounds fetching USD 200,000 to USD 300,000, and premium knockout-stage inventory rising to USD 750,000.

British broadcasters took a different path: the advertising-free BBC and the heavily regulated ITV declined to commercialise the pauses, even as ITV reported it had sold out its regular inventory and delivered record World Cup revenues regardless.

Tournament sponsors
Sponsorship followed a similar trajectory. Analysts at Ampere put 2026 sponsorship revenue at around USD 2.4 billion, up more than a third on Qatar, while the top tier of official FIFA partners paid between USD 65 million and USD 95 million for the rights to use tournament branding. The United States, as host, dominated the sponsor roster, accounting for 14 of the 26 commercial backers on FIFA’s books.

Gambling firms were another clear beneficiary. With more than 100 matches on the calendar, up from 64 in 2022, financial services firm Macquarie estimated roughly USD 50 billion was wagered globally, or about USD 500 million a match, making it the largest betting event ever recorded. Flutter Entertainment, owner of Paddy Power, Betfair and Sky Bet, reported a corresponding jump in stakes placed through its platforms.

Impact on host cities
The picture looked rather different at street level. FIFA’s own projections, produced with the World Trade Organization, put the global GDP impact of the tournament at USD 40.9 billion, with the US capturing USD 17 billion of that and roughly 185,000 jobs created, concentrated in hospitality and accommodation.

Set against annual US output, though, that gain amounted to a rounding error: Saxo Bank calculated it at less than 0.1% of GDP, hardly the growth driver host-city officials sometimes implied it would be.

Sports economist Victor Matheson of the College of the Holy Cross put it plainly to ABC News before a ball was kicked: Cities should expect a mix of winners and losers, not a uniform windfall. That call held up.

Philadelphia, for example, had anticipated around USD 770 million in local economic impact, among the largest of the eleven US host cities, but the spending clustered tightly around stadiums and tourist districts rather than spreading through the wider local economy.

Canadian host cities illustrated the cost side starkly. Hotel rates in Toronto and Vancouver rose 200% to 300% during match weeks, pushing a typical $200 room past $600. Airbnb had offered Toronto homeowners cash incentives to list their properties for the tournament, a move tenant advocates warned would accelerate displacement of long-term renters.

Transit systems absorbed costs FIFA didn’t cover: New Jersey’s transit authority faced a USD 48 million bill to move fans to and from matches, while Boston raised its game-day rail fare to the stadium to USD 80.

Post-tournament scenario
History suggested some of the enthusiasm would cool once the tournament ended, and the data bore that out. Laboure had pointed to France 1998, when post-tournament demand fell well short of pre-event hype.

By April, around 80% of US hotel operators were already reporting bookings running below forecast; two-thirds of New York hoteliers said the same; and in Seattle, almost eight in 10 hotels described the tournament as something close to a non-event commercially. Final numbers, host cities say, did little to change that verdict.

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Alexander Budzier, a fellow in management practice at Oxford University and chief executive of Oxford Global Projects, was blunter still, arguing that the long-term economic benefits claimed for hosting major sporting events routinely fail to materialise once independent researchers examine the data afterwards, rather than the inflated projections issued beforehand.

And, the winner is…
None of that troubled FIFA’s finances. Between broadcasting fees, sponsorship and ticketing, the organisation’s revenue streams stayed largely insulated from whether individual host cities saw a lasting boost or a temporary sugar rush.

For Fox, Telemundo and the major sponsors, the tournament delivered handsomely. For the taxpayers of Toronto, Boston and a dozen other host cities left holding transit bills and watching hotel booking curves undershoot, the reckoning looks set to take rather longer to arrive, if it arrives in a form they can see on a balance sheet at all.

The post FIFA World Cup 2026: Who got the cash, and who was left with the bill appeared first on International Finance.

So has Apple turned from a low-hanging fruit to a low-growing fruit?

April 24, 2013: Wall Street was grappling with a temptation to mix ‘Apple’ with ‘oranges’ all because the technology behemoth’s fourth quarter profits headed south in a decade. The shareholders are angry that Apple’s growth has slowed down and there is now a ring of unpredictability to its hitherto spectacularly steady growth.

Note: It is still profitable and its revenues increased by 11% to billion. But analysts are seeing red over the drop in Apple’s price-earnings (p/e) ration which has slipped to below ten for the first time. Profits-to-earnings ratio indicates how the markets see future profits compared with current income and any slipup in this metric is where the penny drops.

So it is now official: Apple has lost is mojo. It is no more the master of the universe hovering over the rest of us and is now like any other low-growth, albeit, steady company.

Tim Cook is not Steve Jobs. This is of course indisputable. Tim may have “cooked” up and sold 60 million smart phones and tablets in the three months to March, but Jobs made money for us just by strutting his stuff.

A lot of people believe that if Jobs were around, Apple may have ridden the stock crash from in September to recently with say, an iWatch or an iTV. But Cook decided to placate investors with the biggest share buyback in US corporate history: A payout of some billion by end of 2015 in the form of increased dividends and buybacks.

Of course, Apple under Cook has its own takers (if not tans) notwithstanding the current logjam in its growth and the overwhelming legacy of Steve Jobs. There is no unanimity among economic gurus about Apple’s demise either and one is encouraged to say that reports of Apple’s demise are greatly exaggerated.

Apple still boasts of juicy margins on most of its products. It still accounts for 45% of the profits of the PC. Its operating profit is still more than that of the top five PC vendors combined. Apple’s smart phones still account for more than 70% of its total profits.

Now what has happened that Apple can no more be on auto and spew out cash like an ATM? Blame it on the markets which respect not history or pedigree. Blame it on cheesy and cheeky rivals like Samsung. Blame it on consumers who are as trustworthy as Paul Madoff. And blame it on friends like Wall Street who are prone to pull the trigger at the first sight of an alarm. If Apple’s gross margin drops by a single percentage point, the earnings per share dips by And the panic spreads.

Samsung is now setting a scorching pace and taking the battle to Apple’s camp, with its battery of “phablets” (a combination of a phone and a tablet).

When things go wrong, nothing goes right. Apple got into another mess with its warranty policies in China and had to issue a public apology.

Apple’s USP has always been neither invention nor innovation but an uncanny ability to launch products that end up virtually obliterating the competition. Jobs had this ability to such an extent that the world stopped to take pause when he came up with an i-whatever. People queued up the night before the launch to be the first to own it. The idea was when you buy an iPad or a iPhone you were buying a slice of social status.

The problem for Apple in reality is not its competitors, not the market, not China, but its own image, its own hype. It became its own victim. It is simply unreal to be able to sustain this kind of an image which is itself the creation of a marketing genius. It is far too unreal to expect the paying consumer to continue to buy into your products ad nauseam and in continuum.

An innovator’s nightmare is to keep innovating like a robot. It’s like expecting creativity from a cubicle 9-5. If Apple’s noisy and fanatic fans tone down the music, they will hear that the i-Pod was bought from another company and tablets have been around since the Nineties.

And competition isn’t exactly sleeping to let Apple ride over them. Samsung has updated its phone line twice as fast as Apple. Think S3 and S4, think of the split-screen innovation in the Galaxy Note, and think Google’s Glasses.

Ironically, Apple’s competitors are beating Apple by playing its own game. Steve Jobs perfected the “run” strategy – introducing a new product that consumers want before competition attempts to take on its existing products. Now, Samsung’s S-series is giving Apple a similar “run” for its money.

Apple betted big on Steve Jobs who was a game-changer. It is now betting on Cook’s financial re-engineering. Don’t look for the ending, for the story is only headed toward a new twist…

The post No more ‘Apple’ of your Eye appeared first on International Finance.