Abstract
This paper examines how the 2026 FIFA World Cup has influenced transit investment across its 16 host cities in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. While mega-events are often promoted as infrastructure catalysts, findings indicate the 2026 World Cup functions primarily as a scheduling and framing device rather than a generator of new transit systems. Major rapid-transit expansions directly tied to the event are limited and concentrated largely in Mexico, where centralized authority has accelerated several significant projects. In the U.S. and Canada, fragmented governance and suburban stadium locations constrain new fixed-guideway investment. Most host cities instead rely on corridor improvements, station upgrades, and operational adjustments. The multi-country format further diffuses political incentives for exceptional infrastructure delivery. Overall, in mature, decentralized transportation systems, mega-events are more likely to reshape timelines around existing projects than to produce transformative mobility legacies.
Introduction
Mega-events carry durable promises of transformative infrastructure, and transportation sits at the center of those promises. Bid documents, political messaging, and public expectation routinely frame new transit lines, airport links, and stadium-access corridors as core preparation for hosting. Whether events actually generate this infrastructure (and at what cost) varies sharply across governance contexts, fiscal conditions, and spatial settings (Budzier & Flyvbjerg, 2024; Matheson, 2012; Muller, 2015). Hosts routinely pledge more transformation than they deliver, and that gap demands explanation.
The 2026 FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) World Cup brings the gap into sharp relief. The tournament is the largest and most geographically dispersed ever staged, the first contested across three nations, and the first run under an expanded 48-team, 104-match format (FIFA, 2025). Its 16 host cities span Canada, the United States, and Mexico and must absorb heavy international travel within highly decentralized transportation governance. Many stadiums sit outside central cities, compounding the access challenge. This scale distributes the political incentives that have historically driven infrastructure delivery.
A growing body of scholarship examines the 2026 tournament directly, but with a focus on rhetoric. Beissel and Kohe (2020) read the “United as One” bid as an exercise in legacy craft, arguing that its promises of certainty, opportunity, and unity rest on familiar tropes whose delivery remains uncertain. Wise and Lee Ludvigsen (2022, 2023) show that the bid documents privilege present-tense social and environmental impact over economic legacy, leaving legacy itself a muted category. Sroka (2026) examines how the FIFA Host City Agreement allocates obligation and risk across hosts. Part of what remains unexamined is whether the tournament has produced material transit infrastructure on the ground, and under what conditions.
This paper addresses that gap by moving from the symbolic register of the bid to the empirical record of transit investment across all 16 host cities. It employs a qualitative document analysis of government records, agency planning materials, press releases, and media reporting. The analysis inventories each region’s baseline airport-core-stadium connectivity, identifies candidate projects, codes them by capital scale, and assesses each for event-driven initiation, acceleration, or reframing. The contribution is twofold. First, the paper specifies the conditions under which perhaps the most diffused mega-event in history impacts the initiation, acceleration, reframing, or absence of major transit capital projects. Second, it extends mega-event legacy scholarship beyond the single-host model by showing how a continent-wide, multi-country format diffuses the incentives that drive transformative delivery.
The paper proceeds in five parts. The next section reviews the literature on mega-events, infrastructure, and transport legacy. The methods section details the document-analysis design and coding scheme. Subsequently, the results report stadium siting, existing infrastructure, and the distribution of capital investment. The discussion then interprets these patterns through event exceptionalism, spatial dispersion, and governance fragmentation. Finally, the conclusion draws out policy implications, limitations, and future directions.
Literature Review
Proponents often frame global sporting mega-events as powerful catalysts for urban transformation and large-scale capital development (Essex & Chalkley, 1998; Zimbalist, 2020). Growth coalitions may be led by national politicians and elites seeking to project their image internationally while reinforcing a domestic policy agenda. Goals often include promoting a lesser-known city, highlighting a modern facet of an established urban centre, elevating a tourism profile, or advancing broader “soft power” objectives (see Grix & Lee, 2013). Domestically, mega-events can serve as a political catalyst for accelerating infrastructure investments with long-term legacies (Muller, 2017), or as mechanisms through which local and sub-national governments attract central government funding to specific regions.
These projects can assist in aligning political interests and support coalitions, accelerating bureaucratic processes, and creating the political latitude required for ambitious infrastructure programs (Gold & Gold, 2017; Hiller, 2000). However, many cases demonstrate that mega-events do not automatically overcome institutional, fiscal, or political barriers, and that the actual infrastructure delivered often diverges substantially from early proposals (Flyvbjerg et al., 2003; Muller, 2017; Stewart & Rayner, 2016).
A substantial body of research examines infrastructure investment and legacy outcomes in the context of mega-events. Some studies concentrate specifically on infrastructure provision and cost overruns (Flyvbjerg et al., 2016; Matheson, 2012), while others analyze broader event impacts (e.g., Andranovich & Burbank, 2011; Fourie & Santana-Gallego, 2011; Maennig & Zimbalist, 2012; Pruess, 2015), economic effects (Baade & Matheson, 2016), or contend that leveraging existing infrastructure can yield considerable benefits (Gratton et al., 2006).
Frequent is the concept of “event exceptionalism,” referring to the tendency for governments to alter normal governance practices during the planning cycle of a mega-event, as well as for the practices to often run amiss (Muller, 2015). Early works treated exceptionalism as a relatively consistent feature of event preparation, suggesting that host governments frequently adopt expedited procurement, unusual financing mechanisms, or extraordinary zoning and land use powers (Hiller, 2000). Governments with centralized authority or strong executive capacity may use events to justify substantial capital investment, but in decentralized or fragmented governance environments, extraordinary powers are less likely to materialize (Andranovich et al., 2001).
Many event hosts rely on promises of improved mobility to justify public investment, and the international event profile is useful in extracting senior government funding (Kassens-Noor, 2012). Mega-event investments sometimes have selective geography whereby improvements concentrate on travel corridors used by visitors rather than on the broader urban population (Sroka, 2021a). This pattern has been documented in multiple events where airport access routes or routes connecting venues receive priority investment that would not be present absent the event (Sroka, 2021a; Yamawaki et al., 2020), sometimes even restricting tourist engagement or peripheral improvement outside the event bubble (Duignan et al., 2022; Pereira, 2018). Kassens (2009) found that International Olympic Committee influence produces similar outcomes in terms of transport pattern changes across a study of four cities, including 2026 World Cup host Atlanta.
Event organizers frequently justify stadium and transport infrastructure projects by invoking long-term social and economic benefits (Andranovich & Burbank, 2011; Sroka, 2021b; Zimbalist, 2020). Flyvbjerg et al. (2003) demonstrate that megaprojects are highly prone to optimism bias and strategic misrepresentation, which increases political caution around large-scale investments. In more recent years, attempts have been made to systemize comparisons between events and outcomes (e.g., Budzier & Flyvbjerg, 2024; Muller et al., 2022).
Lurking in the background is the host contract. These contracts, such as the FIFA Host City Agreement (HCA), frame event obligations through detailed, non-negotiable requirements, including those that concern venue readiness, security coordination, and commercial rights protection (Sroka, 2026). Where the FIFA HCA is concerned, this agreement is executed prior to host city selection and includes local responsibility for an event time transport systems. Host contracts function as hierarchical governance tools that bind host governments to delivery obligations regardless of shifting political or fiscal conditions, often compelling municipalities to assume open-ended financial exposure for events physically located outside their jurisdictions, while ceding defacto regulatory discretion to event organizers. The significant costs imposed by these contracts may impact the availability of funding for capital infrastructure projects.
Spatial characteristics of stadium siting form also matter. Many North American stadiums are located in suburban or exurban areas rather than in dense central districts (Long, 2012; Sroka, 2020). This stadium geography influences the feasibility of event-linked transit projects and the types of investments that emerge during event preparation. Suburban stadiums often sit in low-density, highway-oriented environments that are not conducive to fixed-guideway transit. The decision to situate large venues outside central cities frequently reflects political and economic interests in land acquisition, parking, and development incentives. However, this pattern creates significant mobility challenges for mega-events because stadium sites often fall outside the jurisdictional boundaries of major transit agencies.
Institutional fragmentation shapes these outcomes in significant ways. Research on metropolitan governance in North America highlights the challenges associated with coordinating transport investments across multiple agencies, counties, and municipalities (Feiock, 2009). Transit agencies often have limited authority beyond their specific jurisdictions and must navigate restrictive funding models, particularly those dependent on local sales taxes or property taxes. These institutional constraints produce long planning timelines and limited capacity for rapid capital mobilization. As a result, event preparation may reinforce existing strategies rather than initiate entirely new transit programs, or lead to easier to realize projects such as bus rapid transit (BRT) (Kassens-Noor et al., 2018; Wood, 2019).
Further scholarship examines how features of the urban built environment relate to public transit outcomes across established developments. Much of this research assesses these connections using variables tied to some mix of land-use density, functional diversity, street-network form, accessibility to key destinations, distance from transit services, and broader destination-oriented planning frameworks (Cervero & Kockelman, 1997). Ewing and Cervero’s (2010) meta-analysis, in particular, reported that transit ridership is most strongly influenced by network configuration and proximity factors, with land-use characteristics playing a secondary role.
Several project-level investigations further illuminate these dynamics. Pan et al. (2014) demonstrated that rapid rail infrastructure boosts nearby residential property values in World Cup Host City Houston. Similar findings show that the presence of rapid rail stations tends to be positively capitalized into real estate prices (Chen et al., 1998; Debrezion et al., 2007; Hess & Almeida, 2007). Zhong and Li (2016), however, suggest that multi-family housing benefits more than single-family units and that heavy rail systems command larger premiums than light rail. Conversely, Kilpatrick et al. (2007) note that when direct access is lacking, simply being close to a transit corridor may depress adjacent property values.
Existing scholarship on the 2026 tournament specifically has concentrated on the rhetoric, symbolism, and geopolitics of the “United as One” bid rather than on delivered infrastructure (Beissel & Kohe, 2020; Wise & Lee Ludvigsen, 2022, 2023). That work demonstrates how the bid foregrounded social and present-tense impact while keeping economic and infrastructural legacy comparatively muted. This study aims to address some of the infrastructure aspect.
Methods
This study employs a qualitative document-analysis. Because transport planning for the 2026 FIFA World Cup unfolds across many jurisdictions, and sometimes multiple jurisdictions within the same “Host City”, the analysis relies primarily on publicly available media reporting and government documents. These sources constitute the most comprehensive and contemporaneous evidence base for tracing the relationship between project development and the World Cup’s temporal and political horizon.
Qualitative document analysis is well suited to this study’s focus for three reasons. First, the research question is interpretive rather than measurement-oriented: it asks not how much was spent but whether, and how, the event shaped the initiation, sequencing, and justification of transit projects, which is a question about the meaning and framing of decisions as recorded in the documentary trail. Second, no consolidated dataset of event-linked transport projects exists across three countries and 16 host regions, so the evidence base must be assembled from dispersed primary and secondary documents, the systematic reading of which is the core strength of document analysis (Bowen, 2009). Third, because many candidate projects remain proposed, contested, or in progress, the analytical task is to triangulate planning records, agency statements, and reporting to establish the event-relatedness of each project, a task that quantitative methods, premised on completed and comparable observations, cannot perform at this stage of the tournament cycle.
The research design proceeds in three stages. First, the current condition of each host region’s transport systems is inventoried, with a focus on existing connections between primary airport, central business district, and stadium. Secondly, potential event related transport projects were researched. Documents were collected through targeted searches of news archives, local and national media, agency websites, press releases, and government portals. Search terms based on host city, project, category, and event were combined until exhaustion. Documents were analyzed through a categorical coding scheme based on scale. Rapid-transit projects were coded as major capital projects if they involved the construction of new lines, significant extension of existing lines, or capital costs exceeded approximately US $50 million. Minor transit projects of less than US $50 million (such as corridor resurfacing, transit-priority lanes, intersection redesigns, station-area upgrades, accessibility improvements, and small-scale event-service expansions) were coded separately to avoid conflating nodal operational enhancements with structural network expansion.
After classification, each project category was examined for evidence of event-driven acceleration or reframing. This interpretive step involved assessing whether public documents or media sources indicated that (i) the 2026 World Cup influenced project approval; (ii) the event affected the sequencing or scheduling of already-planned projects; or (iii) decision-makers explicitly referenced the World Cup when justifying project timing, funding, or political prioritization. The analysis therefore intends to distinguish between projects that were primarily initiated due to the World Cup, those that were accelerated or re-sequenced because of event deadlines, and those that were independent of the event even if completed near 2026. The comparison to the current condition is also intended to explain where there may have been no clear imperative for a World Cup related transit project.
Results
Stadium Locations
Existing Stadium Location Typology Across 2026 FIFA World Cup Host Cities
Existing Infrastructure
10 of 16 host cities have some pre-existing primary airport to core rail connection, although this is incomplete in New York and Mexico City where there are multiple major airports with varying levels of connectivity. Vancouver, San Francisco, Atlanta, and Mexico City have pre-existing grade-separated metro lines from the primary airport, while Seattle and Dallas have light rail (sections running at grade crossing traffic). Toronto and Philadelphia have regional rail connections (defined as less frequent trains traveling over longer distances at higher speeds with greater spans between stations). Boston has rapid bus, while Kansas City and Houston do not have any airport rapid transit options.
When it comes to stadium connections, metro rail is already found in Vancouver, Philadelphia, and Atlanta. Light rail is adjacent to stadiums in Seattle, Santa Clara (San Francisco), Houston, and Mexico City. Regional rail services stadiums in Foxborough (Boston), East Rutherford (New York-New Jersey), Santa Clara (San Francisco), and Toronto. There was no existing passenger rail near stadiums in Miami Gardens (Miami), Arlington (Dallas), Inglewood (Los Angeles), Kansas City, Guadalupe (Monterrey), and Zapopan (Guadalajara).
Major Capital Projects
11 of 16 host cities exhibit at least some form of capital intervention tied explicitly or implicitly to event timelines. Of these, six meet the major project definition. Mexico is the most consistent source of ambitious transit projects in all three host cities. Mexico City’s Line 1 to Azteca Stadium is being upgraded and expanded, including new train cars and platforms, for US $1.5 billion. There is also a new extension of a suburban train connection to the new Felipe Angeles International Airport (AIFA) costing US $1.4 billion. In Monterrey, the first 12 kilometres of a US $580 million light rail to the airport is intended to be completed for the World Cup. Similarly, Guadalajara’s US $140 million Chapala Corridor BRT line will run an airport-stadium route, although this is a downgrade from original light rail plans.
Los Angeles and Seattle have the strongest collection of American projects with a public connection to the World Cup. In Los Angeles, the $900 million LAX–Metro Transit Center opened in 2025 where a stadium shuttle would depart from. LA Metro also cited the A Line extension, first phase of the D Line subway from Downtown to UCLA, and a new tap payment system as projects that would be completed in time for the World Cup. While the $1.5 billion A Line extension added four stations and is featured on LA Metro’s World Cup subsite, it extends into the far eastern suburbs and has a tenuous geographic connection to areas visitors are likely to experience other than as short-term rental accommodation. The Metro D Line is more connected to the 2028 Olympics, linking competition venues and the athletes’ village. However, World Cup visitors may well use the first phase, opening March 2026 and costing $3.5 billion, to travel to Beverly Hills or connect more easily to traditional accommodation options. Likewise, the implementation of credit card tap access is tourist and World Cup facing in both intent and timeline.
Seattle will see the opening of two major light rail projects in the six months preceding the World Cup. First, is the Federal Way Link Extension, a $2.5 billion light rail expansion of the North-South line running from SeaTac Airport to Seattle Stadium and downtown. Second is the $3.7 billion East Link line running from the nearest station to Seattle Stadium, across Lake Washington to connect to an existing line in the eastern suburbs. Although primarily a commuter legacy, East Link is scheduled to open six weeks prior to the World Cup and will connect major hotel and commercial clusters directly to the stadium.
Atlanta, through MARTA, is also overhauling the downtown interchange Five Points Station for roughly US $230 million. Five Points is the only station in the system where all lines meet. The 2025–2026 construction window and the agency’s public statements tie its urgency in part to World Cup visitor flows as the station is both walkable to Atlanta Stadium, and a relief point for post-event platform crowding at the stadium adjacent station.
Major Transit Capital Projects Linked to the 2026 FIFA World Cup
Minor Capital Projects
Minor transit improvements appear in seven host cities. These projects, falling under US $50 million, generally target the enhancement of specific corridors, stations, or vehicles rather than system-wide expansion or comprehensive modernization. On the larger end, the US $35 million Foxborough commuter-rail station upgrade enhances platform capacity and facilities in advance of 2026. As the Boston’s stadium is located 47 kilometres away in rural Foxborough, the train connection from accommodation clusters in Boston will be the primary means of mass transport for visiting fans short of temporary bus shuttles.
Toronto’s US $6 million transit-priority lanes on Dufferin and Bathurst streets are intended to assist in moving spectators between subway and streetcar lines and the exhibition grounds stadium. However, the replacement of traffic lanes has already proven controversial with drivers. In Dallas, a package of modest transit upgrades was approved, amounting to roughly US $1.2 million, including approximately US $800,000 dedicated specifically to improvements on the M-Line trolley. These works are tied explicitly to projected downtown visitor flows and the need for a reliable circulator, even if they are geographically distant from the stadium site in suburban Arlington.
In addition to its major new line capital project, Monterrey is also purchasing new train cars for existing metro lines to expand station capacity for World Cup service. Atlanta’s MARTA will also enter new cars into service for the World Cup. These projects address key options for expanding existing rail service volume: more frequent trains, longer trains, longer platforms to accommodate longer trains.
Absence of Capital Projects
Host cities without significant capital upgrades appear to rely instead on operational measures, special-event service plans, traffic-management programs, and existing capacity to manage spectator flows. Other regions present cases in which transport expansions will not be timed for the World Cup (Vancouver) or the stadium is located away from non-event regional transit needs or density (Miami, San Francisco). Each of Vancouver, Miami, and San Francisco also have established heavy metro service direct from the primary airport to downtown core and primary hotel cluster. In Vancouver, the Canada Line metro linking the airport and the stadium was completed for the 2010 Olympics.
While the list of existing rail lines explains the opportunity for new World Cup timed projects, there were some cities where new World Cup connected projects were discussed publicly or appeared in planning studies but ultimately remained unfunded or were cancelled. Inglewood, home to the Los Angeles stadium, proposed a people mover to the LA Metro K Line that would have connected the NFL campus, NBA arena, and LA Forum music venue, each also in heavy use for the LA 2028 Olympics. However, the project was failed to obtain additional funding after a cost escalation to over $2 billion by 2024.
In New Jersey, an early proposal for a permanent on-site bus terminal at New York-New Jersey Stadium gained traction but was abandoned due to cost, time, and design constraints. In Dallas, regional actors explored the possibility of expanded rail or bus rapid transit links to Arlington’s stadium district (also home to a Major League Baseball stadium), yet no capital commitments materialized. Philadelphia also saw several potential large-scale transit upgrades discussed but not approved. Indeed, the regional transit agency, SEPTA, is dealing with significant funding cuts that are primed to adversely impact World Cup time service.
The Role of the 2026 FIFA World Cup in Host City Transit Investment
Discussion
Across the set of host cities, the World Cup acts less as an initiator of new infrastructure and more as a calibrating force that influences scheduling, emphasizes nodal reinforcement, and reframes ongoing or modest capital works within an event-readiness narrative. Where substantial spending appears, it tends to align with pre-existing capital plans already on a defined trajectory. The pattern indicates that mega-events, when situated within mature transportation systems such as those of Canada and the United States, may not exert the generative force observed in earlier tournaments held in settings with more significant infrastructural deficits. Instead, the World Cup intersects with ongoing infrastructure cycles, accelerates timelines in selected cases where the event unlocks senior government funding, and reframes public narratives around projects whose fundamentals were determined years in advance by institutional, fiscal, and strategic considerations.
Major American transit-capital investments are notably rare, reflecting structural, fiscal, and spatial characteristics unique to North American transit systems. The limited presence of major transit projects reinforces the difficulty of initiating large-scale capital works under the timelines associated with mega-events, especially within governance environments beset by dispersed authority, extended environmental review processes, high capital delivery costs, and questionable senior and federal government support. While cities in other global contexts (e.g., Paris, Beijing, Doha, Rio, Sydney) have used mega-events to construct entirely new rail lines, the American and Canadian 2026 hosts overwhelmingly rely on incrementalism shaped by existing planning cycles and budgetary commitments.
Mexico provides some contrast. The Mexican federal government has been far more interested in event leveraging for transit projects, which has provided the funding necessary to accelerate timelines beyond what would have otherwise occurred absent the event. Mexico City’s modernization of Line 1, the suburban rail extension to AIFA Airport, Monterrey’s airport light rail project, and Guadalajara’s Chapala Corridor BRT all exhibit explicit alignment with the World Cup timeline. These examples fit the traditional interpretations of exceptionalism in which mega-events enable governments to concentrate administrative attention, relax procedural inertia, and accelerate delivery of transportation infrastructure. The combination of more centralized authority, a willingness to deploy substantial state resources, and event-linked political incentives mirrors patterns observed in earlier Olympic and World Cup hosts where megaprojects have played a more prominent role in event preparation.
The spatial diffusion of the 2026 World Cup across 16 host cities, three countries, and four time zones, marks a significant departure from the more concentrated single nation event geography characteristic of previous FIFA tournaments and virtually all Olympic Games. In fact, the immediately preceding World Cup was effectively a single-city endeavour in Doha. Historically, mega-events derive much of their political and infrastructural momentum from spatial concentration: a single host city or tightly clustered region faces acute pressure to accommodate global visibility, visitor surges, and fixed venue timelines. This concentration has historically incentivized governments to invest heavily in transport networks. By contrast, the 2026 model distributes responsibilities across many metropolitan areas, reducing the symbolic and logistical centrality of any single host. Such distribution dilutes the political rewards associated with transformative infrastructure and reduces the urgency for any one government to undertake large-scale transit expansion. This conservative approach to mega-event hosting has been noted by Lauermann (2022) regarding the LA 2028 Olympics and may be relevant to the broader American World Cup context as well.
The absence of concentrated reputational risk also weakens incentives for exceptional governance measures; with no single city bearing responsibility for the entirety of the event’s success, the political calculus shifts toward incremental operational adjustments rather than high-cost capital interventions. This diffusion therefore helps in part explain the limited scope of new transport infrastructure across the 2026 hosts: the dispersed format lowers expectations for transformative legacies and reinforces a planning rationality in which governments focus on managing localized pressures rather than pursuing ambitious, event-driven mobility agendas.
The geography of stadium siting further complicates the likelihood of new transit investment. A defining structural feature of the 2026 World Cup is the prevalence of American football stadiums located not within central cities but within suburban or exurban municipalities: Arlington (Dallas), Foxborough (Boston), Santa Clara (San Francisco), East Rutherford (New York City), Inglewood (Los Angeles), and Miami Gardens (Miami). In these cases, the stadiums depend on polycentric mobility networks spanning multiple unrelated jurisdictions. This spatial dispersion fractures responsibility for funding, service planning, and capital delivery across municipal governments, county transportation departments, regional transit authorities, and sometimes state lines. This misalignment dilutes political incentives for any one entity to invest in major new transit facilities serving venues outside their jurisdictional boundaries. It also complicates cost recovery, ridership forecasting, and the alignment of capital priorities across agencies with disparate constituencies and planning horizons. As a result, the host-stadium mismatch reshapes the feasibility landscape for event-linked transit development.
The presence of host cities without any documented capital investments (Miami, San Francisco Bay Area, Vancouver) further reflects the manner in which the World Cup is absorbed into routine operational planning. These cities exhibit high baseline capacities and links between their primary airports and cores. In Miami and San Francisco, the stadium is far from the core city in suburban jurisdictions. In fact, the Santa Clara stadium is much closer to downtown San Jose. For Vancouver, the main ongoing transit mega-project would only be of secondary importance for the World Cup. For these cities, the economic and political calculus favors operational adjustments rather than capital interventions. This reinforces a broader shift in mega-event infrastructure management: rather than using events to justify large expenditures, many mature cities can rely on their existing networks complemented by temporary shuttles.
The findings also highlight the significance of unfunded or unrealized proposals. In several host cities, ideas for rapid-transit expansions or major station upgrades appear in early planning documents or public discussions but were not pursued beyond preliminary conceptualization. These cases, which range from the proposed New York-New Jersey Stadium bus terminal to aspirational transit expansions in Dallas, Kansas City, and Inglewood, expose the limits of mega-event leverage in decentralized governance systems. Despite political rhetoric that often accompanies event preparation, the institutional and fiscal barriers to delivering new transit can remain formidable. In these instances, the event shapes discourse more readily than built outcomes.
Taken together, the discussion shows that the 2026 World Cup reinforces a broader evolution in mega-event infrastructure planning in high-income, multi-jurisdictional, and transit-mature contexts. The event does not so much generate transformative infrastructure but instead shapes timelines and prompts targeted improvements in nodes of high visitor concentration. This logic reflects a shift from infrastructural creation to infrastructural calibration: a mode of planning in which cities adjust existing systems to manage temporary surges while minimizing long-term fiscal risk. This shift is reinforced by the spatial distribution of stadiums, governance fragmentation, high capital costs, and institutional caution across the host cities.
This study has notable limitations. Because the analysis was conducted in advance of the tournament, it captures investment as planned, approved, or underway rather than as completed and used, and some projects coded as event-linked may slip, be re-scoped, or be cancelled before kickoff. The reliance on publicly available documents and media reporting means that decisions made without a documentary trail, or framed internally rather than publicly in event terms, may be under-counted, and reporting intensity varies across the three national media environments. The US $50 million threshold used to separate major from minor capital projects is a useful but blunt instrument that does not capture every dimension of project significance. The study also focuses on transit and does not systematically assess airport, road, or active-transport investment, which may follow different logics.
These limitations point to directions for future research. Comparative work could extend the analysis to airport and road investment, or set the 2026 transit record against single-host tournaments such as Qatar 2022 and forthcoming hosts to isolate the effect of the multi-country format. Longer-term work could track post-event ridership and operating subsidies on the corridors upgraded for 2026, building on prior assessments of mega-event transit legacy, to establish whether even the incremental improvements documented here yield durable mobility benefits or fade once the tournament passes.
Conclusion
The analysis of transit investments associated with the 2026 FIFA World Cup demonstrates that event-related infrastructure outcomes in North America are shaped primarily by existing institutional structures, spatial arrangements, and long-term capital planning cycles rather than by the catalytic effects often attributed to mega-events. Across the 16 host cities, major rapid-transit expansions directly linked to the tournament are limited, and where substantial improvements occur, they generally reflect previously planned projects whose timelines align with event deadlines rather than initiatives generated specifically for the World Cup. The prevalence of stadiums located outside central cities further constrains opportunities for new transit investment by dispersing jurisdictional responsibilities and weakening the political incentives necessary to support major capital commitments. These dispersion effects can be overcome by national government funding and political will, as evidenced by Mexico.
Overall, the findings indicate that the 2026 World Cup reinforces an emerging pattern in high-income democracies in which mega-events influence the timing and framing of infrastructure projects rather than generating transformative mobility systems. The event’s legacy is therefore more frequently understood as selective adjustment within established networks than as large-scale infrastructural change.
Several policy implications follow. For host governments and transit agencies, the central lesson is that a mega-event is a poor instrument for initiating new fixed-guideway transit in a decentralized, transit-mature system. The cities that delivered major capital projects did so because the event aligned with plans already funded and underway, or, in Mexico, because a centralized national government chose to deploy resources and political will.
Agencies should therefore treat event deadlines as an opportunity to accelerate and sequence committed projects and to reinforce high-demand nodes, rather than as leverage to fund entirely new lines on a compressed timeline. For bidding cities, the implication is to calibrate public expectations and contractual commitments to reality: where stadiums sit in suburban jurisdictions outside the boundaries of major transit authorities, the realistic transport legacy is operational and incremental rather than structural. For senior governments, the Mexican cases show that national funding and coordination are the binding constraint on transformative delivery, which suggests that any country seeking infrastructure legacy from a mega-event must commit central resources early rather than relying on host-city capacity alone. Finally, the dispersed, multi-country of the tournament format itself dilutes the political incentives that once drove transformative investment, a structural feature that future expanded or co-hosted tournaments will reproduce.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Data Availability Statement
The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on request.