Cities bidding for the 2026 men’s World Cup hosting rights to anticipate discovering whether their bids have been successful, as the next two qualifying events will mark the first with forty-eight teams and the first to be staged in three countries.
FIFA, the international governing body for association football, is expected to announce 16 host cities for the 2026 World Cup on Thursday. Ten of those host cities will be in the United States, and three each will be in Mexico and Canada. These are the candidate cities across the three countries that are eagerly awaiting Thursday’s decision: Atlanta, Boston, Cincinnati, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, New York/New Jersey, Orlando, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Baltimore/Washington D.C. Guadalajara and Mexico City are also in contention but were eliminated during voting by FIFA’s member associations last month. The other cities still in the running are Monterrey in Mexico and Edmonton and Toronto in Canada; Vancouver also made a late application to be considered a host city but was not among the final candidates selected by FIFA last week.
FIFA will announce the host city for the 2026 World Cup at 5 p.m. ET on Thursday. “During the past months we have had open exchanges with the candidate host cities on a number of different topics,” Colin Smith, FIFA’s Chief Tournaments & Events Officer, said in a statement last month. “We are very thankful and impressed by how dedicated and innovative they all are.”
The host cities will be essential in ensuring the successful delivery of the competition. FIFA looks forward to working with them to deliver what will surely be the largest FIFA World Cup in history.”
The 2026 World Cup will be the first in which the US hosts after doing so in 1994, and the third time for Mexico, which also hosted in 1970 and 1984. It will be the first time a men’s World Cup match has been held in Canada, though the country did host the Women’s World Cup in 2015. A 2018 study conducted by US Soccer found that cities chosen to hold World Cup matches could see $160-$620 million in economic activity as well as an estimated 5 billion dollars of economic activity throughout North America.
