Hold On, Why Are Journalists Characterizing the LA World Cup as a “Success”?
As the 2026 World Cup has finally come to a conclusion, members of the press have started their predictable wave of coverage praising the 2026 World Cup and using this analysis to project onto the 2028 Olympics. Unsurprisingly, many are calling both the US and LA’s facilitation of the World Cup a “success”, or some version therein.
In one case, paid spokesperson for mega events Paul Krekorian called the World Cup an “unmitigated success” in the pages of the New York Times. Transit accommodations and “good vibes” at fan zones were articulated as the key pieces of evidence that LA has its shit together as we stumble towards a Super Bowl in 2027 and the Olympics in 2028.
But was the World Cup really a “success”? If so, by what metrics and for who? In reality, does anyone actually believe LA has anything in control as fires rage on, pipes continue bursting, unaffordability worsens and LA is still in awful financial shape? Even more, are journalists capable of understanding and communicating a broader context than the narrow definitions of success they’re making up on the fly? (Probably not, but let’s try anyway.)
We would argue that Los Angeles was extremely poorly managed in the lead up to and during the World Cup and that the World Cup exacerbated pre-existing problems that local officials have absolutely no handle on. The World Cup failed Angelenos over and over and over.
Let’s consider:
- ICE raids exploded throughout the country, including the entire LA region, which is home to the largest undocumented population in the country. Lots of ink was spilled worrying about ICE’s presence at SoFi Stadium. For the record: this was never our primary concern or something we expected to see. We know that even for FIFA and ICE that the optics of doing raids in front of the international media inside stadia wasn’t good. We did expect the distraction of the games themselves to provide cover for raids in areas where the media and 100,000 fans weren’t gathered. That was obvious to us. ICE kidnapped 10,000 people in 5 days in June while World Cup activity was at its peak.
- More cops everywhere. The cliche is that LA isn’t a theater town. But in reality our security theater is the envy of the nation, if not most of the world on any given day. But for mega events, it’s an international pageant of policing. As we’ve covered in our series of WC dispatches (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4), there was a huge presence of police (including many of LA’s 88 local law enforcement agencies), all sorts of federal agencies outside of ICE, and state police. We documented snipers on rooftops in activation zones a mile away from SoFi stadium. We saw cops on horses (why!?) and a massive police presence around USC. We saw raids take place on public spaces like MacArthur Park and other police raids under the auspices of cracking down on drug trafficking and bootlegging merch. We saw raids of sex work hotspots, and we know this isn’t a coincidence. At the end of the day, did any of this make us safer? Probably not. (There were numerous WC shootings where police failed to apprehend shooters or do anything meaningful at all, if that’s the point of getting all this overtime). How much did World Cup security cost local municipalities? We have no idea!
- Actual public safety was a complete afterthought. Throughout the games, a common motif in reporting was the supposed “good vibes” at fan zones, which was a crutch for journalists who traffic in vibes-based discourse. For example, the Mexico-Korea match was lauded as a beautiful showcase of Korean Angeleno and Mexican Angeleno solidarity during the Mexico-Korea Fan Zone watch party in Koreatown. But what got buried in most of this reporting was the fact that it was insanely dangerous and that it could have very easily turned deadly due to inadequate planning and essentially no efforts at crowd control. Following a match in Mexico during this World Cup cycle, 3 people were trampled to death due to a similar inability to plan for a safe event (which is allegedly why we’re paying for all of this police overtime!). The same could have easily happened in Koreatown, given how poorly prepared everyone on the ground was for swelling crowds, but that more materially significant point was lost on most. Vibes uber alles.
- LA could not meet the moment of a concurrent state of emergency, proving our point about diversion of resources. LA declared a state of emergency — the first for a World Cup host — because of the Lineage Logistics fire in Boyle Heights, an unprecedented disaster in LA city that rendered airborne pollution worse than the 2025 fires, by some measurements. Since June 17 when the fire began, the City and County have responded horribly and chose not to suspend any of its World Cup programming as the fire raged. Resources are finite, and we know that it was deemed more important that the World Cup proceed than LA directing all of its effort and attention to mitigating this crisis. Two days before the World Cup final, locals were describing the remaining odors in Boyle Heights as if the whole area smelled like a “dead cat”.
- Airbnb use spiked (legal and illegal). Of course, Airbnb usage increased in the region. Our partners at SAJE tracked Airbnb listings in Inglewood and found a noticeable bump. More Airbnbs mean more displacement, higher rents, and a decrease in housing stock. Of course, this study does not include short term rentals on other platforms and other areas in LA City and County. A week after the World Cup concluded, the 2026 LA County and City homelessness count was released. Unsheltered homelessness increased 7.9% in the previous year (and we believe these volunteer-driven LAHSA counts have always been extremely inaccurate and essentially undercounts). We don’t have data on 41.18 sweeps and eviction data from this year across the county, but when we do we will share that analysis and any other trends we can find.
- Focusing on transit ridership numbers misses the point. Above all, journalists trumpeted how tourists were able to catch buses and trains to and from matches and watch parties. Service was increased and beefed up to meet this extra demand, and Metro published historically high ridership numbers during the World Cup. First, we don’t know how much this is going to cost us. Also, it doesn’t account for the fact that normal bus service (for the people who live here) was often disrupted or slower than normal, both in areas around World Cup activity and areas far from the action. Are we honestly supposed to be excited because the trains ran on time for tourists but not necessarily residents? Why should residents subsidize overtime transit for rich tourists? Is LA Metro in phenomenal shape? If so, what the fuck is up with the People Mover, for example? For us, any transit “wins” for temporary events are ephemeral as these extra buses and such won’t be a permanent reality for the transit-dependent Angelenos who would benefit the most. Where was the reporting about residents of Inglewood who posted on social media when they could not access routes to their homes? If it’s not a transit, mobility or accessibility win for everyone, then it’s not really a win. In a region so desperate for any good news it makes sense to try to scrape any silver lining, but using our public trust to satisfy private needs isn’t actually that cool. If anything, it’s depressing and further cements our upside-down priorities.
- How much are we paying for all of this transit, security, and our elected officials’ and agencies’ time? No one knows! So, there were no public contracts between localities and FIFA before the tournament began, even though the event was approved in 2018. What are we doing!? LA has been facing bleak financial crises for years, forcing us into longstanding austerity where it takes two years to change a broken traffic light. Last year there was a $1B shortfall on the city budget before Bass, Jurado et al. rubberstamped a ludicrous Convention Center expansion, the tune of likely $5B of public funds, and FIFA’s tab is what exactly? We don’t know! Nothing about this process has been transparent, identical to the Olympic model. We likely owe a lot and that is a problem for a region where pipes exploding, after a century of no meaningful infrastructure maintenance, are now a daily occurrence. LA has a truly awful recent history of signing the worst contracts (Garcetti gifting $1B to hotel developers, rubber-stamping the Olympics and World Cup with no taxpayer guarantee, the laughable Convention Center expansion). Our elected officials are absolute rubes working at the behest of billionaires, and the people who live here will again be left picking up the tab.
- Workers got creamed. Because of course they did. Mega events always mean mega worker exploitation, despite the efforts to mitigate otherwise. Labor unions representing SoFi workers threatened a strike before the World Cup began and, in the process, secured the ability to walk off the job site if ICE were present at the stadium. However, that did little/nothing to mitigate an all time surge in ICE kidnappings nor mitigate the astronomical cost of living or any of the other issues the World Cup exacerbated. It cannot be negotiated away. Instead of making more money during the World Cup, we saw workers lose shifts because of piss poor projections on the hotel industry’s behalf. This very bleak passage from a NYT piece on how bad workers fared sums up the whole mega event vs. labor dialectic:
After 14 years at the hotel, his salary slowly crept up to $33.44 an hour. Mr. González Lobos supports his wife, who has health problems and is unable to work. His wages put them below the living wage of $38.12 an hour for a household of two adults in Los Angeles County, according to a tool developed at M.I.T.
As his hours have been cut, he has often worried about losing the health insurance he gets if he works 60 hours a month and how he’ll cover his wife’s expensive medication. To make up for the lost hours, he has drained some of his savings and used vacation days to pad his paycheck.
He had found a bit of reprieve, however, in the collective joy of rooting for the U.S. and Mexican soccer teams. - Many small businesses reported not experiencing a rush of income for the World Cup as they were promised. Some experienced the opposite. This is always the pattern. Before the World Cup, Inglewood small businesses were very vocal in how they had been left behind as their normal traffic has been disrupted by concerts and other large scale events. We talked to some small business owners in Long Beach and Los Angeles who were very upset that street blockages for Fan Zones made it difficult to access their building, resulting in loss of normal business.
- Everyone hates FIFA, likely now more than ever. And the international community has more reasons to reject America and the idea of traveling here for mega events and their corrupt organizers under Trump. This augurs poorly for 2028. FIFA threw away any lingering goodwill they may have had and exposed how how little integrity this event actually carries and how ultimately meaningless it therefore is. The sport is cool, sure. But the event and the people who profit from it are on a scale of despicable to pure evil. The results of these games have little meaning, no integrity, and no weight in fans’ eyes, outside of the victors. Fans are sick of Infantino, of FIFA’s bending the knee to sickos like Trump, the detail of entry to referees and fans, the punishment of countries like Iran, VAR, “hydration” breaks, and price gouging.
How can anyone with a straight face possibly claim this World Cup was a ‘success’ and solid proof that LA is a functional place full of capable leaders when all of the above is true?
Be serious.