The World Cup Promises Economic Impact. But Who Actually Measures It? 

The 2026 FIFA World Cup is generating some of the biggest economic impact numbers in sports history. Forty-eight nations. 104 matches. Sixteen host cities across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. A projected $40.9 billion in additional global GDP. 

Those numbers make headlines, shape city planning decisions, justify infrastructure spending, and fuel optimism for thousands of small and diverse businesses hoping to capture a piece of the activity. 

But there is a question that rarely gets asked alongside the projections: how does anyone actually know if the impact materialized? And more specifically — for the procurement professionals and supplier diversity leaders managing billions in spend — are organizations measuring what their sourcing decisions contribute to the communities they operate in?  

The Gap Between Projected and Realized Impact 

Major sporting events have a long history of ambitious economic projections that are difficult to verify after the fact. This isn’t unique to the World Cup, it’s a structural challenge with how economic impact gets communicated versus how it gets measured. 

Projections are built on assumptions: anticipated visitor numbers, average spend per fan, multiplier effects on local economies. When actual results come in, they are rarely tracked with the same rigor. Hotel occupancy rates are reported and tax revenue gets tallied, but the granular question — which businesses actually captured the activity, and in which communities — often goes unanswered. 

For the 2026 tournament, the gap between perception and reality is already visible. Research conducted ahead of the tournament in Canadian host cities found that 64% of small businesses expected a positive impact, and 41% anticipated revenue increases of 20% or more. Consumer demand supported that optimism — 1 in 5 Canadians said they planned to watch matches at a locally or independently-owned business, making them 11 times more likely to choose local over a national chain. 

Yet the same research found that 58% of small business owners expected no revenue impact compared to a typical summer. Rising operating costs, tight margins, and a lack of preparation resources meant many businesses could not position themselves to capture the demand they expected to arrive. 

The opportunity was real, but the capture was not guaranteed. 

Small and Diverse Businesses Face a Structural Readiness Gap 

For minority-owned, women-owned, veteran-owned, and other certified diverse businesses, this readiness gap is not new. It reflects a structural challenge in how economic opportunity reaches smaller suppliers: the window opens early, closes fast, and favors businesses that are already organized. 

This dynamic played out explicitly around the Qatar 2022 World Cup. Industry experts at the time noted that micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) had grown significantly and were major drivers of Qatar’s economy. FIFA’s own leadership acknowledged that SMEs form the backbone of a successful and diverse economy. A logistics company called GWC, which started as a small warehousing operation, became FIFA’s official logistics provider in under two decades because they had built the infrastructure, relationships, and supplier profile to be ready when it did. 

In 2026, multiple North American host cities created formal Local Impact Supplier Programs specifically designed to route procurement to local and diverse businesses. Miami, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Boston all stood up registration programs connecting small suppliers to FIFA procurement leaders. The programs were real, but registration windows closed months before the tournament began and businesses that showed up late had no path in. 

The economic opportunity that mega-events generate is genuine, but access to it is not equally distributed. And, it rarely gets measured in a way that reveals who actually benefited. 

Why Measuring Economic Impact Is the Missing Link 

This is where the conversation shifts from sporting events to something more directly relevant for procurement and supplier diversity professionals. 

Every organization that sources from small and diverse suppliers is generating community economic impact. Jobs supported, worker earnings created, and output generated in local economies. The question is whether that impact is visible to program leaders making the case internally, to executives setting strategy, and to the communities that depend on those sourcing decisions. 

Most organizations know their diverse spend percentage. Fewer can say with confidence what that spend is actually producing in the communities where their suppliers operate. 

That gap matters for two reasons: 

1. Without measurement, it’s impossible to know whether sourcing decisions are generating the community benefit they are designed to create, or whether the impact is concentrated in ways that leave certain businesses and communities behind, just as the World Cup’s economic activity has tended to concentrate in hospitality and tourism rather than flowing broadly.  
2. Without data, supplier diversity leaders have limited ability to make the internal case for their programs, justify budget, or demonstrate alignment with broader ESG and community investment goals.

Measuring economic impact turns a procurement outcome into a story that stakeholders across the organization can understand.

Procurement Access Is Infrastructure 

The World Cup analogy holds further than it might first appear. The cities that positioned their local and diverse supplier bases to benefit from the tournament did so through years of infrastructure investment: registration programs, procurement workshops, certification support, relationship-building between small businesses and prime contractors. 

The same logic applies to supplier programs. The organizations that generate and can demonstrate meaningful community economic impact are the ones that have invested in the underlying infrastructure: 

Certifications are current and tracked: MBE, WBE, VBE, and other designations are prerequisites for many procurement opportunities. Maintaining accurate certification data across a supplier base is ongoing work. 

Supplier data is clean and complete: Outdated, incomplete, or duplicated supplier records create friction from sourcing decisions to impact reporting. Organizations that invest in supplier data quality are better positioned to understand what their spend is doing and where. 

Economic impact is measured, not assumed: Supplier spend percentages are a starting point. Organizations that track the community-level output of their sourcing decisions have a far stronger foundation for program advocacy, stakeholder reporting, and strategic planning. 

The World Cup will generate billions in economic activity across North America. Some of that will reach small and diverse businesses, and some won’t. What gets measured gets managed, and right now, most of the measurement is happening at the macro level, not at the level of which suppliers and communities actually captured the gains. 

Supplier programs have the opportunity to do something the World Cup projections rarely do: close the loop.