Minnesota missing out on men’s World Cup

Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City will welcome fans wearing the iconic sky blue and white stripes of reigning FIFA men’s World Cup champion Argentina for its group-stage match against Algeria on Tuesday.

Come June 25, K.C. will have orange-clad Netherlands supporters marching through its downtown streets, along with its famous double-decker bus, before the Dutch play Tunisia.

Those are two of the six World Cup matches to be held at the NFL stadium in Missouri this summer. But 430 miles to the north, Minneapolis will lack an infusion of thousands of soccer-obsessed visitors in town for one of the biggest international sporting events.

Minnesota Sports and Events (MNSE) and Sports Minneapolis — the groups responsible for organizing local bids — pulled U.S. Bank Stadium out of the process to be a World Cup host in March 2018.

MNSE leader Matt Meunier said local stakeholders were interested in hosting World Cup matches, but Minneapolis was stretched too thin. The city just held Super Bowl LII in February 2018, and the NCAA men’s Final Four was up next in March 2019.

“The main reason was a lack of a sustainable funding model and the timing,” said Meunier, MNSE’s bid director and executive vice president of business development and tourism. “It’s painful for us to lose these events.”

To earn the Super Bowl, Minnesota’s corporate community was tasked with collecting “tens of millions” in private donations, Meunier said.

“We were already leaning in heavily on the corporate community to help support these efforts (for the Super Bowl), and we didn’t see a path forward to secure the funding and resources necessary (for the World Cup),” Meunier said.

FIFA’s strict hosting agreements allows soccer’s governing body to keep the majority of the revenues generated, while the host communities are responsible for many costs.

The big line-item expenses are multi-day fan festivals, larger secured perimeters around venues, public transportation allowances, additional law enforcement, emergency services and altering the looks of venues — from covering existing stadium signage, blocking out the venue’s schedule for weeks straight and installing a grass field.

To host the international tournament from Thursday to mid-July, host markets are running up nine-figure tabs. For instance, Kansas City’s bid adds up to almost $200 million in federal, state and local government spending, according to the Kansas City Star.

During the bid process, Minnesota Sports and Events, a nonprofit organization, was communicating with Chicago’s bid team, and both markets declined to further pursue roles as hosts. A statement from the Minnesota group in 2018 said the decision was based on an “inability to negotiate the terms of various agreements … and provide sufficient protections from future liabilities.”

Twenty three markets signed host-city agreements, and in 2022, FIFA awarded a total of 16 sites — 11 in the U.S., three in Mexico and two in Canada.

A Pioneer Press source familiar with Minnesota’s bid process said he was “sad” to miss out on the tournament, but in hindsight said FIFA’s poor contract terms made Minnesota bowing out a blessing in disguise. On top of the huge costs for hosts, the run-up to the World Cup has been marred by reports of exorbitant ticket prices, high transit costs, lackluster hotel bookings and other non-fan friendly restrictions.

Minnesota Sports and Events will be keeping an eye on how this year’s men’s tournament pans out, because they want to be in the running to be a host for the FIFA women’s World Cup in 2031.

A joint proposal from the U.S., Mexico, Costa Rica and Jamaica is the only bid to host that tournament. In April, FIFA pushed back women’s tournament decisions on host nations and potential host cities in those countries until after this men’s tournament concludes.

In an April interview, Meunier expressed confidence Minnesota would be able to host matches for the women’s tournament. But his tone shifted in June after efforts to establish a sustainable funding model for MNSE failed in the Minnesota Legislature.

Meunier’s optimism to host the women’s tournament came from a bipartisan effort to include a Sports and Events Reimbursement Program (SERP) in this session’s tax bill. The SERP plan would take incremental increases in revenue from the state’s 6.5 percent sales taxes, for instance, and create a separate fund to help pay for costs to host large sporting events. MNSE would use that fund to help pay for expenses in future bids.

“This is performance-based model, so it doesn’t have a direct impact on the state budget because funds don’t go out unless there’s a large-scale event hosted in Minnesota,” said Senator Jeremy Miller, R-Winona, one of the bill’s authors. “We call it a but-for tax. The revenue is not there, but-for the event being hosted.”

The University of Minnesota conducts studies to determine an event’s economic impact and the tax revenue generated. That study on an event would be used to determine how much funding would go into the SERP fund.

For Kansas City’s bid, the federal government paid $60 million to K.C., the state of Missouri allocated $78 million and Kansas City Council approved $15 million, the Star reported. Meanwhile, the host organization, Kansas City 2026, estimated the region will see a direct economic impact of more than $653 million from the tournament.

Meuiner said the idea of the SERP fund was based on “best practices” for revenue generation in other states, such as Texas, which has two men’s World Cup hosts in Dallas and Houston.

“We need to have a pot of money ready,” said Rep. Natalie Zeleznikar, D-Fredenberg Township, another bill author. “We can’t wait for the legislative session, (which) is part-time. … These states that are bidding need answers sooner than that. This would have been a mechanism for it.”

But the SERP bill failed to make it out of the conference committee and into the tax bill before the session adjourned in May. This comes after MNSE tried to latch onto a funding source via previous sports betting bills in the Legislature; the state has not yet passed those measures.

Zeleznikar has heard from detractors that point to how Minnesota was just awarded host rights for the NFL draft in 2028. But Meunier said securing that event required headlining sponsors US Bank, Medtronic, Ecolab, Xcel Energy and Vikings to open their checkbooks to provide private funding.

The IIHF World Junior Hockey Championships came to the Twin Cities with the help of $5 million allocated from the state’s general fund. The U of M study said that tournament in December and January generated $71 million in economic activity and produced $48 million in state and local tax collections.

Zeleznikar said she will author another SERP bill for the 2027 legislative session. “Great ideas don’t go away,” she said.

“The fact that it didn’t pass (in 2026) was disappointing,” Meunier said. “But certainly we will be back again with new and fresh ideas to solve our sustainability funding issues.”

Meunier said Minnesota’s lack of sustainable funding for large sporting events is compounded by other markets’ efforts to build new NFL stadiums, such as Buffalo, Nashville, Cincinnati, Washington, D.C., Kansas City, Kan., and Chicago/Indiana.

A source familiar with Minnesota’s bid for the women’s World Cup remains bullish that the event can still come to Minnesota, mentioning a FIFA desire for the women’s tournament to go to new markets not already involved in the men’s event.

The women’s World Cup will have different costs than the men’s tournament, but Meunier emphasized, “until we solve our funding issue, it’s going to be really, really challenging.”