Who Really Won the World Cup
Erling Haaland and StubHub had eventful summers. So did beer.
Spain won the World Cup, but La Roja wasn’t the only winner 🏅. And 47 teams lost the World Cup, but they weren’t the only losers 📉.
Here’s Club Sportico’s take on who emerged from the month-long soccer extravaganza in top form, and who needs to go back to training.
🏅 Winner — Sports in America 🏟️: Soccer will see a jump in interest, both in Americans attending MLS matches and in viewership for overseas leagues. But the impact will be broader still. Politicians are eager to get involved in sports. Brands are hungry for more. TV networks can’t get enough. World Cup 2026 showed it’s not just (American) football that can dominate the public’s attention. The only question now is what comes next?
📉 Loser — Americanized sporting events 🦅: There are some good things about the U.S., as tourists learned this summer. We’ve got great restaurants and beautiful stadiums, for two. But we’ve got our flaws as well, and just about everything this World Cup did to the beautiful game seemed to be for the worse. The hydration breaks, the overstuffed halftime performance, the final flyover (that apparently was mistimed). I’m not sure global viewers loved whatever the Buffer brothers were up to for the pre-match introduction on Sunday either. What makes these elite, global sporting competitions so powerful is that the games get to speak for themselves, but our advertisers and event planners couldn’t help from squeezing a few loud words in as well.
🏅 Winner — Beer 🍺: It’s been a tough few years for alcohol of all sorts—all the data says younger generations are drinking way less than their predecessors. Then the World Cup started. Bars in Boston needed emergency deliveries thanks to Scotland fans. According to the Beer Institute, beer sales in bars, restaurants, stadiums and other venues rose 14% in U.S. host cities during the World Cup compared to the same period last year. Sales were up 4% nationally.
How better to document the culture blend of the World Cup than by tracking vices? Europeans revived smoking and drinking, and America likely converted a whole bunch of foreigners to ranch dressing and blue cheese.
📉 Loser — StubHub 🎫: Our social feeds all tournament were filled with horror stories from fans that bought World Cup tickets months ago on StubHub, only to have the orders broken in the days leading up to the game. It appears hundreds (maybe thousands?) of fans fell victim to one of the secondary market’s more pervasive and pernicious schemes: spec selling, whereby people sell you a ticket they don’t actually have, hoping they can buy one cheaper in the future and then fill your order. StubHub has a “FanProtect Guarantee,” but it allegedly failed to deliver en masse. Lawsuits are already flowing. Yikes.
We’ve largely operated in the past on the idea that all of the big ticket resale marketplaces are the same, but we won’t be ordering on StubHub any time soon.
🏅 Winner — Erling Haaland 🚣: Obligatory, but has to be mentioned. In a tournament where fans seemed hellbent on critiquing everything, including Leo Messi, Erling Haaland emerged unscathed. The Norwegian giant scored seven goals in his World Cup debut, and propelled his country to its best-ever finish in the tournament. Off the field, his social media’s blend of self-deprecation, low-fi tech and earnest selfies was an even bigger hit. For Eben, this is the most enduring photo of the tournament 👇
📉 Loser — Middle Class Fans 💸 : We’ve already written at length about FIFA’s phenomenally lucrative and phenomenally cynical ticket pricing strategy. And sports leagues and teams have taken note for the future. So-called ‘slow ticketing’ is going to be more and more prominent moving forward, and while that likely means more money for some, it also means affordable tickets will be more and more rare for huge games.
U.S. sports have been gradually pricing out their most avid fans for two decades, and this will only accelerate that trend.
🏅 Winner — X 📱: For all the changes the app has undergone over the last four years, it still proved to be the place for sports conversation this summer. More stars seemed to be made online than on the pitch (see above). We’ll always have the memes.
📉 Loser — Automated Officiating 🤖: Folks, technology will not save us. Cameras and sensors that measure player position and ball contact down to the millisecond and millimeter meant there weren’t any blindingly obvious bad calls. But there was still plenty of controversy and conspiracy—to say nothing of the time wasted and goals called back.
Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.