The Fiscal Decisions Behind Soccer's Rise
State and local investments in stadiums, land, and youth programs have shaped the sport’s growth—and posed budget risks
Over the early decades of the 21st century, soccer has moved from the margins of the U.S. sports landscape into the mainstream. Major League Soccer has expanded from 10 teams in the 1990s to 30 today, the National Women’s Soccer League launched and now has 16 teams, youth participation has exploded, and international matches regularly fill large stadiums.
States and localities have been instrumental in shaping this expansion through stadium deals, land acquisitions, infrastructure investments, and community partnerships of varying size and scope. These efforts have helped grow soccer’s national profile, but they also have presented governments with a new set of fiscal risks.
Soccer’s growth is now converging with a run of major events that will keep the sport in the national spotlight. The U.S. will cohost the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup and host the 2028 Summer Olympics, offering potential economic opportunities but also raising questions about costs for state and local governments amid tightening fiscal conditions.
“We’re really in the middle of a mega decade of soccer,” said Ed Foster-Simeon, president and CEO of the U.S. Soccer Foundation.
The U.S. last hosted the men's World Cup in 1994, and the 2026 tournament offers an opportunity to step back and consider the factors that have shaped the intervening three decades of growth as well as their implications for state and local budgets.
The public footprint in soccer grows
Before the 1990s, large-scale, soccer-specific public investments were uncommon in the U.S. That began to change when the men’s World Cup arrived in 1994. Although the country had no top-tier professional leagues and no purpose-built professional soccer stadiums, it did have large public and quasi-public venues that could be adapted for the tournament. The event went on to set global FIFA attendance records that still stand today, proving that the U.S. did have a substantial audience for soccer—a fact that was underscored five years later when the 1999 women’s World Cup produced one of the country’s biggest cultural soccer moments.
Two years after the 1994 men’s World Cup, Major League Soccer (MLS) debuted, but the league’s early growth was fragile. Teams played in borrowed NFL and college football venues—oversize settings that made soccer feel secondary and limited MLS’ control over scheduling and operations, constraining its ability to grow, according to soccer journalist Steven Goff, whose long career was recently honored by the National Soccer Hall of Fame. “To have a place of your own, to be able to create the environment to mimic the passion that you see in so many other countries,” Goff told The Pew Charitable Trusts, “was so important for the development of the game in this country.”
Then in 1999, the Columbus Crew in Ohio opened the country’s first modern, professional soccer stadium: Columbus Crew Stadium (later renamed Historic Crew Stadium). Although the venue was constructed without public funding, the sold-out games and intimate fan experience helped establish a proof of concept that influenced a broader push by MLS for building soccer-specific venues—often with public support such as direct financing, tax-backed tools, land deals, or infrastructure spending.
That assistance not only gave teams permanent homes and improved their revenue potential, but also exposed governments to fiscal risk. In cases when attendance, surrounding development, or projected tax revenue have fallen short of expectations, the public—not the teams—have generally been left to cover the gap. For example, in 2005, Bridgeview, Illinois, financed Toyota Park for the Chicago Fire with bonds, but when the expected surrounding development and revenue failed to materialize, the village was forced to absorb a large debt burden that it is still paying off today, years after the team left the stadium. That same year, in Harrison, New Jersey, public entities took on debt for land, infrastructure, and redevelopment around the Red Bull Arena, which contributed to credit pressure for the town after early revenue was lower than anticipated.
These and other projects throughout the country have often been framed as engines of redevelopment, but experts are generally critical of the ability of stadium subsidies to deliver on those expectations. “The typical argument is job creation, income growth, maybe tax revenue increases,” said Dennis Coates, an economist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “There’s very little evidence in any systematic way across any sport, soccer included, that those things are true.” Coates added that a key challenge in evaluating these investments is comparing actual spending related to a stadium with what might have happened otherwise, such as alternative public uses of the land, infrastructure, or tax revenue committed to the project.
A shift in approach
By the 2010s, the structure of public support for stadium projects had begun to change, precipitated by constrained finances after the 2007-09 Great Recession and growing skepticism toward direct stadium subsidies. Rather than financing stadium construction itself, some cities were opting for less direct investments, such as land purchases, environmental cleanup, and tax preferences. Cities also increasingly pursued agreements requiring teams or developers to provide benefits, such as local hiring, youth programs, or public access to facilities alongside public commitments.
However, this support can still involve substantial public resources or forgone revenue. And as former Kansas City, Missouri, Mayor Mark Funkhouser explained, the question for policymakers was no longer simply whether a stadium is a good investment, and local leaders often weigh basic but consequential questions: “Can I afford this? Can my residents support this? Do my residents want this? What sort of long-term exposure comes with the deal?
For example, in 2014, Washington, D.C., reached a deal with MLS’ D.C. United for the construction of a new stadium. The city agreed to provide up to $150 million for land acquisition and site preparation, including infrastructure work and environmental cleanup, while the team financed the stadium itself. The deal also included a community benefits agreement that addressed local hiring, youth employment and programming, and community use of stadium facilities. D.C. Council Budget Director Jennifer Budoff said that city officials viewed the project as a way to more quickly broaden the city’s tax base. “Audi Field was built on a former scrap metal yard,” she said. “Putting these sports facilities into these underutilized areas hastens the pace of development.”
Similarly, in Columbus, when the Crew moved into a new stadium in 2021, public support—provided as part of a broader public-private riverfront redevelopment effort and amounting to about $140 million in city, county, and state funds—focused on the surrounding infrastructure and district improvements, such as parking, a riverfront park, and a community sports center. And in 2010, Sporting Kansas City’s stadium, currently called Sporting Park, received $150 million in funding through Kansas STAR bonds, which were to be repaid through sales tax revenue generated within a defined development district surrounding the stadium. State reports show the debt was paid off early.
This trend has not been perfectly linear. Some projects undertaken in 2010s, such as those in D.C. and Kansas City, used public-private models, and some more recent deals have still involved substantial direct public contributions. But over time, public support has generally shifted in form—with fewer stadium construction subsidies and more land, site preparation, surrounding infrastructure, and limited tax-backed financing.
Public assets and the soccer pipeline
Stadium deals often draw the most public and media attention, but local governments also shape soccer’s growth through lower-profile fiscal and policy choices involving publicly funded or managed fields, gyms, and recreation spaces.
Jon Solomon, research director of the Aspen Institute’s Sports and Society Program, points to Seattle and King County, Washington, which employ permitting and shared-use agreements with youth sports programs, including soccer, to expand access to those public facilities, especially for families and communities with fewer resources. These agreements help to maximize public resources, prioritize youth leagues, establish basic coaching or safety standards, and preserve lower-cost access.
Such state and local initiatives are generally smaller and less visible than stadium financing decisions. However, they still involve public assets—land, facilities, staff time, and maintenance dollars—and the challenge for state and local leaders is to ensure that those resources are used to produce broad, lasting benefits for all residents.
State and local World Cup 2026 investments center on systems
For the men’s 2026 World Cup, U.S. host cities are not building a new generation of soccer-specific stadiums. Matches will be played in existing American football stadiums, which have far more seating capacity than most MLS arenas. With appropriate venues already in place, much of the state and local role has focused not on stadium construction but instead on public systems, including security, transportation, staffing, health and safety, fan movement, and targeted stadium and infrastructure improvements.
In some cities, that has meant fast-tracking projects that were already planned or under consideration: For example, Massachusetts officials have accelerated transportation planning around Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, including commuter rail improvements timed to the tournament. In Atlanta, tournament preparations have helped push forward work on the BeltLine, a planned 22-mile loop of trails, parks, transit, and redevelopment around the city. Atlanta BeltLine Inc. approved a $242 million fiscal year 2026 budget that includes funding aimed at delivering nearly 18 miles of continuous paved trail before the tournament. And in Philadelphia, World Cup planning intersected with a long-term effort to restore FDR Park—a major park near the city’s professional sports complex—that includes the addition of multipurpose athletic fields, playgrounds, and other amenities. City officials described the tournament as an opportunity to support planned athletic fields for local soccer and football leagues beyond 2026.
Even places that are not hosting matches are preparing for the tournament’s spillover effects. Rhode Island, for instance, expects to accommodate visitors attending games in Massachusetts, and Ocean State 2026 Executive Director Liz Tanner said the public role has centered on the systems around the tournament—transportation, staffing, health coordination, and what she described as FIFA’s “safe fan journey” from arrival to match venues to lodging and back home.
Final thoughts
The public sector’s role in American soccer did not begin with this year’s men’s World Cup tournament, and it will not end when the tournament’s final match is played. Rather, it is a central part of the sport’s 30-year stretch of growth.
Over the past three decades, governments have shaped soccer’s growth—through stadium financing, land use decisions, infrastructure investments, and community programming.
But the fiscal impact of these investments has been as varied as the deals that structured them. Some have come in the form of visible public benefits, particularly redevelopment or expanded access to recreation. Others have carried significant costs and produced more limited or uncertain returns.
For state and local leaders, the questions are not whether Americans’ interest in soccer will continue to grow in the coming decades, but instead which fiscal commitments to the sport are worth making, whether the projected benefits will materialize, and what residents stand to gain or lose.
Justin Theal is a senior officer with The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Fiscal 50 project and Abdikadir Eftin is a senior associate with Pew’s state fiscal policy project.
People
