Alexandra Addison: The question isn’t whether there are benefits, but rather whether those benefits justify the risk assumed. The answer is usually no.
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The World Cup is here. Team jerseys are everywhere. Fans have organized watch parties. Hotel rooms are booked and restaurant reservations are increasingly scarce.
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For the next few weeks, host cities across Canada, the U.S. and Mexico will be noisy, colourful and thoroughly distracted. I say that with genuine warmth. Soccer fever is real and it brings real money with it. And yet.
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Fifteen years ago, I was appointed to FIFA’s independent governance committee — an external advisory body created to oversee structural reform at an organization fending off accusations of deep institutional rot.
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I worked on it for 18 months. Multiple attempts at serious reform were neutered or rejected.
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I resigned in 2013 after the committee ultimately failed in its effort, but not until I had heard Mafioso phrases like “we like to keep that in the football family” and startling admissions like “perhaps we should consider ‘compliance light’. ”
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Two years later, the U.S. Department of Justice indictments came, and the world got confirmation of what many of us already knew: that FIFA’s resistance to accountability wasn’t incidental. The organization made some changes to their letterhead and updated some rules, but the underlying governance challenges and extraordinary impunity have proved harder to shift. When the Cup lands in your city, that baggage arrives alongside the trophy.
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Residents of host cities deserve to know what their governments actually signed — the full contractual commitment.
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When a city bids to host the Cup, it doesn’t embark on a partnership. It’s subjected to FIFA’s largely one-sided terms and cities can merely accept or withdraw their bid.
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Hosting agreements run to hundreds of pages, setting out requirements for stadiums, transport, security, branding, concessions and other operations. Buried in the fine print are provisions requiring host cities to absorb costs that would otherwise fall on FIFA — including, in many cases, municipal taxes formally assessed against FIFA’s own local entities.
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Tax law determines who is legally liable to pay, but contracts determine who actually pays. FIFA’s hosting deals separate the two. Cities agree to indemnify FIFA against a range of costs, so that even where a tax is assessed against a FIFA subsidiary, the city picks up the tab. This isn’t a loophole. It’s the point.
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The same logic runs through the entire hosting framework. Security obligations land with local governments, and when requirements escalate, as they always do, the exposure stays local.
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Infrastructure is built to FIFA’s specifications on FIFA’s timeline; cost overruns are absorbed by the city. Long-term venue maintenance is a local problem.
