The final games are about to be played in the FIFA World Cup Tournament, taking place in North America, but the seven games played in Canada are over.
The official cost of the world’s biggest sporting event has been pegged at over $1 billion for the country, and fans and experts have been assessing whether it was worth it.
"The World Cup makes a huge amount of money — for FIFA, not for the home countries," said Moshe Lander, a sports economist and an outspoken critic of the World Cup coming to Canada.
The fan celebrations in the streets of Toronto and Vancouver — Canada’s two host cities — reached their peak when Canada made it to the round of 16 before being knocked out by Morocco. Community spirit and pride were at the forefront. After all, Canada had never competed at this level before.
But new data from the Angus Reid Institute suggests that for 7 out of 10 Canadians, hosting the World Cup may not have been worth it for Toronto, and many feel it’s unlikely Vancouver will break even.
The expected spending boom at Toronto’s downtown hotels and restaurants didn’t materialize. Moneris, the country’s largest payment processor for credit and debit cards, says there was only a modest 3% bump in business.
Sports bars were among the big winners, but restaurants were mainly flat. Many owners say their regular customers stayed away because of the downtown crowds.
For how the city managed the event, the games were a success.
"By any account that you use, looking at it from a player perspective, a fan perspective, an operations perspective, I think the broader city and region’s perspective, we performed incredibly well," said Toronto City Manager Paul Johnson. "So the key things that we were concerned about how people would get to and from those matches. I don’t know that it could have gone much better."
Vancouver’s costs ran to about $730 million — almost twice Toronto’s price tag. Still, officials in BC, including the mayor, say the event was a success. And British Columbia’s tourism minister Anne Kang says the payoff will come through future visitors..
"I’m very confident that we will be able to find a very positive output through revenue dollars," she said.
Lander disagrees and says the taxpayers will be left on the hook.
"I’m not surprised that people are starting to realize that, hey, this is a little bit more than what we bargained for," he said. "I’m just very disappointed that our political leaders didn’t walk away from it when they had a chance."
