A taxpayers’ advocacy group wants Toronto’s incoming mayor to give the city’s plan to host a handful of games during the 2026 World Cup the red card. (JOANNA LAVOIE/CP24)
Uh… Spending $30m to bring in tens of millions more in tourism dollars is a no-brainer. After COVID, it would help every hotel and restaurant and tourist trap in town.
Unlike Montreal’s ‘Formula E’ boondoggle, the World Cup is always sold out.
How do you figure out how much they’re going to bring in tourism dollars?
This is unfortunately something that we can only look at past events and how they preformed. If I remember correctly, Toronto isn’t building any new stadiums just for the World Cup games so they stand to make more money as there won’t be that huge need for infrastructure projects that would eat into the revenue generated by people coming to the city.
So where is this “tens of millions of dollars more” statement coming from? Where did you get your numbers?
Doesn’t pass a sniff test to me. They plan for 10 games in Canada - split between Toronto and Vancouver. BMO field has 26,000 capacity so assuming 5 games each, that’s only 130,000 tickets. Sure some people will travel with non ticket holders; to counter that some will go to multiple games, and plenty of locals will want tickets. Even allowing for a long tail and seeing this as pure advertising to tourists, I cannot see how this makes a really a significant dent in revenues. That said if the cost is only 30mil then it’s not particularly significant there either (the cities’ budget is 16bn).
Here is an article showing potential breakdown on cost/profits that should be coming to the city. But again, we won’t know the full numbers until afterwards.
Do it
30m is nothing in the grand scheme of things and the potential tourism will be worth it. I hate this attitude that we can’t celebrate anything in this city because we aren’t perfect. Sometimes fun and morale is worth it.