Commentary
When Canada, the United States, and Mexico combined forces to bid on holding the 2026 version of the FIFA World Cup, many people were intrigued. When this united bid
beat out Morocco by a vote of 134-65 at the 68th FIFA Congress in Moscow on June 13, 2018, their intrigue quickly turned into euphoria.
I was among them.
The game of football—or, as it’s more commonly known in this part of the world, soccer—is one of many sports I’ve followed closely since I was young. Hosting the World Cup would be a unique experience for Canadians to watch the best football players on the planet participate in the sport’s premier tournament in their own backyard. Toronto and Vancouver were chosen to be Canada’s host cities. The federal government recently
earmarked $104 million for Toronto to help with its six World Cup matches. It was difficult not to imagine an economic windfall with respect to travel, tourism, and the like.
Alas, my enthusiasm has been waning for some time. It made me wonder if Canada should have given the (golden) boot to FIFA and the 2026 World Cup.
Why?
Ottawa’s decision to earmark a significant amount of taxpayers’ money during a period of massive financial instability is unwise.
Hosting the World Cup gives Canada an opportunity to focus on building a competitive football team on the world stage. Our two previous experiences at this
tournament, in 1986 and 2022, had their share of growing pains, highlights, and disappointment. There have been encouraging moments, close games against top-ranked countries like France and Belgium, and a bright future with star players like Alphonso Davies and Stephen Eustáquio.
Ottawa’s financial commitment to the 2026 World Cup and Canada’s national team notwithstanding, this money should have been doled out more prudently. There are many individuals and families struggling in our country due to the affordability crisis. Basic food staples like bread, milk, and bacon are becoming unaffordable, while heating their homes and paying their mortgages has become a near-daily concern. Allocating funding for the World Cup should have been disseminated more logically with respect to financial announcements and amounts. Alas, we’re now stuck in an economic hole that’s going to be extremely difficult to dig our way out of.
There are also some lingering questions about Canada’s World Cup bid that remain unanswered.
Here’s one notable example. Toronto Star reporter Ben Spurr
revealed in a March 8 piece that “Toronto signed a secret agreement that gave it the right to withdraw from hosting the 2026 FIFA World Cup if it didn’t receive financial support from senior levels of government by mid-2020.” That seems like a logical financial safeguard arranged by then-Toronto Mayor John Tory and city officials, even if the public wasn’t aware of it. “But for reasons that remain unclear,” Spurr wrote, “the city didn’t trigger the deal, leaving it on the hook for the skyrocketing costs of games.”
That doesn’t make any sense.
Financial support clearly wasn’t in place in mid-2020 due to Ottawa’s main priority at the time, COVID-19. If time, money, and resources were largely being devoted to dealing with the global pandemic, then Toronto—which, like most Canadian cities, was struggling beyond comprehension—had the perfect opt-out clause. It could have been explained away as an unfortunate global development that no one could have foreseen or predicted. Toronto could have even suggested putting its hosting duties on hold until COVID-19 was under control. Many North American and international sports, including football, were either
cancelling or delaying tournaments at that time, and it would have been understandable on the city’s part.
Tory didn’t exercise Toronto’s right of withdrawal. Why? I don’t have any first-hand knowledge, but I can make some educated guesses. He may have felt the pandemic would gradually settle down, as many political leaders were thinking and hoping. He may have believed Toronto would still reap huge economic benefits from hosting the World Cup in spite of massive COVID-19 spending. And even though he was still publicly suggesting at that time he
wouldn’t run for a third mayoral term, maybe he was toying with it privately. The World Cup was going to be held in the final year of that term, as it happens.
Regardless of what constituted Tory’s reasoning, it was a poor decision. The cost of holding six World Cup games in 2026, much like the cost-of-living index the past few years, has skyrocketed. Canadian taxpayers will be paying through the nose for much of it.
Football is, and will always be, the beautiful game. It remains to be seen if Canadians will acknowledge the beauty of hosting the 2026 World Cup when they get the final bill.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
