The World Cup Has Arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area. Is Anyone Coming?

But so far, local excitement around the tournament has paled in comparison to the Super Bowl, which Levi’s Stadium also hosted earlier this year.

Hotel bookings in the Bay Area are lagging behind early projections, putting a damper on the hopes that the games will deliver a major economic boon.

“There’s plenty of research and data points out there that the expectations for the World Cup were a bit higher than what we’re actually seeing in terms of ticketing and hotels in particular,” said Jeff Bellisario, executive director of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, a local think tank.

While U.S. cities are expected to see an economic boost from hosting the games, the Bay Area is projected to trail other areas in terms of the impact on local tourism, according to a 2025 report from Tourism Economics, due to the popularity of the matches being played in the region and having slightly smaller stadium capacity.

Hotel leaders adjusted their estimates when game schedules started materializing in late 2025, according to Alex Bastian, president and CEO of the Hotel Council of San Francisco.

None of the teams playing in the Bay Area is considered a powerhouse.

“We were keeping a close eye on the team placements and match schedules, and we adopted more conservative budgeting and forecasting strategies,” he said.

San Francisco International Airport said it was already in the midst of the usual busy summer travel season and couldn’t “link passenger volumes” to the World Cup. Among the U.S. host cities, Dallas is seeing the biggest increases in flight bookings leading into the England vs. Croatia game on June 14 and later matches, according to a spokesperson from United Airlines, the largest airline at SFO.

Across the U.S., demand for tickets and international tourism is also lackluster. Nearly 80% of hoteliers in host cities responding to a May 2026 survey from the American Hotel and Lodging Association said bookings were below their initial forecast.

Some experts have speculated that alleged ticketing bait-and-switches by FIFA, the high expense of admission to games in the region, even for low-ranked teams, and ongoing international issues like the U.S. war in Iran and President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement campaign are driving low international travel.

“Experts say ticket prices, inflation fears and the so-called ‘Trump slump’ are putting fans off, with hotel rates down by a third in host cities from Atlanta to San Francisco,” reads a post from the World Economic Forum.

It’s also not cheap to host the World Cup. While FIFA captures much of the revenue from ticket sales, sponsorship and merchandise, cities take on much of the logistical costs and security.

Santa Clara city officials estimated in 2025 that hosting the six matches would cost around $50 million. The Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Federal Transit Administration earmarked nearly $60 million in grants to cover security expenses at Levi’s, and the host committee also agreed to backfill remaining costs.

Costs aside, Bay Area elected officials have championed the World Cup as an opportunity to drive tourism dollars, foster a sense of community and shed positive light on a region that’s still recovering from the coronavirus pandemic.

“We are going to be on the world stage, and we’re excited to welcome tens of thousands of people from different corners of the world to our city,” San José Mayor Matt Mahan said in an interview. “We want to show off our city.”

“Starting this week, the World Cup will bring energy to neighborhoods across San Francisco,” San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie said in a statement. “As the Bay Area hosts six matches, San Francisco is where fans will gather — attending neighborhood watch parties and filling local restaurants and bars. And we are ready to welcome them.”

Australia and Paraguay have made their home bases in Oakland and San José, respectively. This year’s World Cup has expanded to include 48 teams, up from 32 in the 2022 tournament. That means more games — 104 of them — and theoretically, more opportunities for fans to fill bars and attend watch parties over the weekslong event.

The longer duration also extends costs for hosting the tournament, which is spread out among 16 cities and three countries, unlike the Super Bowl, which happens over a single weekend in one city. That creates uncertainty around how many people will travel to the Bay Area for the games and for how long.

The hotel association report specifically called out a “room block over commitment” by FIFA, in which the organization reserved significant chunks of rooms in host cities, only to later cancel most or all of them. The move “created an artificial early demand signal that has since unraveled,” the report said.

The soccer organization withdrew its commitments just three months from the event, “returning some blocks without a single reservation having been made,” sending hoteliers scrambling to backfill the spaces.

Exact hotel data will not be available until after the tournament, but it’s already telling a different story than the 2026 Super Bowl. That game exceeded projections for how much money it would bring in, topping $720 million in total economic activity for the entire region, according to the Bay Area Host Committee.

However, those numbers from the host committee have been called into question by economists like Roger Noll, a professor emeritus of economics at Stanford University.

“It’s just grossly overstated,” Noll said of the report’s findings.

He said such estimates often don’t take into account mitigating factors, such as the large number of people who opted not to visit the Bay Area for business or tourism around the Super Bowl to avoid schedule conflicts and higher prices at hotels.

“It’s purely public relations, it’s advertising,” Noll said. “They want the political leadership of the area to feel good that it did this… It’s not true that we all get richer because there’s a Super Bowl here; it’s just not true.”

Bellisario, with the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, thinks the World Cup is “still going to be positive for the region, but I don’t think we should be thinking about this as five or six Super Bowl-type games the region is hosting.”

Different parts of the Bay Area will also be affected in different ways.

According to the host committee’s report, San Francisco raked in a large portion of the Super Bowl profits, about $425 million, compared to $195 million in Santa Clara County, where the game was played, and about $100 million in other counties.

But the South Bay may see a bigger bump from the soccer matches this time around. The host committee’s predictions suggest Santa Clara County could see up to $360 million of the potential impact, double what it has projected for San Francisco.

Noll hopes it will be a better event for the South Bay, because visitors will come for a longer period and will need to spend money locally in between matches.

“Because it’s multiple events spread over a longer period, you would expect the economic impact per visitor to be substantially higher for the World Cup than it would be for the Super Bowl,” he said.

Until the World Cup concludes, it’s all guesswork, leaving cities unsure about the level of impact it and the Super Bowl had.

Over the years, amid a falling out with the 49ers leadership who manage Levi’s Stadium, Santa Clara Mayor Lisa Gillmor has consistently expressed concern over the onus laid on the city for the Super Bowl, World Cup and even major concerts hosted there.

In a statement this week, the city highlighted that the host committee’s economic impact report only offers high-level data, not city-specific analysis, and said it plans to check the math itself.

“The city is currently procuring a consultant to conduct an independent economic impact study of Levi’s Stadium events, including both the Super Bowl and FIFA Men’s World Cup, to better understand the direct and indirect benefits to Santa Clara,” the statement said. “Until that work is completed, we are unable to quantify the full economic impact to the city.”

While New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has initiated a discounted ticket program for residents, Bay Area leaders have not followed suit. The low-popularity matches are still out of price for many soccer fans in the Bay Area, however, ranging from the low hundreds to over $1,000.

“The matchups that we have here are not the ones that are going to be drawing the superstar players and the headlines and people from across the U.S.,” Bellisario said. “They are interested in seeing a player like [Lionel] Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo, right? So I think that’s part of the muted response in our region.”

Still, the host committee is organizing around 80 free watch parties across the Bay Area, and FIFA has licensed 20 public viewing events in San Francisco alone. Many local bars and restaurants plan to host watch parties of their own, including for the many vibrant diaspora communities who call the Bay Area home.

“My belief is that people engage in soccer in a much more personal way that’s authentic for them, usually around friends and family in the communities in which they live,” said Zaileen Janmohamed, Bay Area Host Committee President and CEO. “We wanted to distribute that economic impact as far as possible across the region.”

San José’s marquee downtown gathering space, San Pedro Square, is serving as the South Bay’s main watch party hub, with all matches televised on large screens across 39 days, and several other events in neighborhoods around the city.

“This is an order of magnitude larger than the Super Bowl for us,” Mahan said.

Laura Potter teaches sports management at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business. She helped run several Super Bowls and other major sporting events before landing her current position as the Chief Revenue Officer for the Oakland Roots and Soul soccer clubs, which have developed intimate yet dedicated fan bases at a time when other major sports franchises have left the city.

Potter said sports executives should not expect fans to flock to games and teams they haven’t heard of without some serious community-building.

“It absolutely comes down to business, community and sport working together hand-in-hand. It has to have all three working together in lockstep,” Potter said on the sideline of a recent packed Oakland Soul match. “One without the other doesn’t provide the results that are possible.”