For six weeks this summer, the largest sporting event in the world came to Canada, and some of it ended up in Kingston.
Kingston didn’t host a single FIFA world cup match, nor did it build a stadium, upgrade infrastructure, or take on millions in security and operational costs. What it got instead was a stop along the FIFA World Cup 2026 nationwide tour in the heart of downtown, which brought a surge of international tourists spilling out of Toronto, and one of the busiest stretches of the summer for local restaurants and hotels, all on someone else’s dime.
Tourism Kingston has spent months preparing the city to be a destination for World Cup visitors looking to explore beyond Toronto. Survey data published ahead of the tournament showed nine in ten World Cup visitors planned to explore regions beyond the host cities, with more than half intending to travel outside Toronto after matches ended.
For a city like Kingston, which sits roughly two and a half hours up from Toronto, with a lakefront on Lake Ontario, historic sites, and a downtown that draws in visitors during any ordinary summer, these characteristics made it a natural choice for tourists looking to experience Canada and the FIFA world cup beyond Toronto.
On June 27, Kingston hosted an official FIFA fan festival at Springer Market Square, featuring live game viewings, food vendors, and soccer activities. For restaurants along the downtown core, the energy had been building up long before that weekend arrived.
As one of 24 stops along the nationwide initiative celebrating Canada’s first ever appearance on the world’s largest stage, Kingston drew in soccer fans from across the world alongside locals, to watch Panama vs. England and Columbia vs. Portugal. The very next day, Canada advanced from the round of 32 with a win against South Africa, boosting spirits and energy further.
What makes Kingston’s experience particularly interesting is the contrast with what Toronto absorbed to make it possible.
Canada’s national FIFA World Cup hosting bill is expected to reach around $1 billion in taxpayer dollars, according to the Parliamentary Budget Office, with Toronto alone spending $380 million to host six matches.
A study prepared for FIFA by Deloitte Canada had projected the tournament to generate up to $940 million in economic output for the Greater Toronto Area. As the tournament has come to an end in the last few days, the incoming data is beginning to paint a different picture.
Restaurants and bars in Toronto saw only a three per cent bump in the first two weeks of the tournament, which is incredibly modest returns for the scale of what was spent. For context, when Taylor Swifts Era’s tour came to Toronto in November 2024, it drove 45 per cent average spending increase across all categories, $242 million in economic gain, with Toronto investing only a mere $3.6 – $4.2 million on municipal services.
This raises the question, how was such substantial investment unable to come close to the projected returns by Canada’s top professional services firms?
While it’s hard to say before all of the data is released, one reason that’s becoming clearer is that Toronto might’ve unknowingly subsidized millions of dollars of economic gains to surrounding communities from the thousands of foreign tourists who came not only for the World Cup, but to explore everything the country had to offer.
Regardless of dollar figures and what the economic data shows, Toronto’s investment in hosting the World Cup created something that extended well beyond the city. The international recognition and surge of tourists it brought to Ontario came all the way out to Kingston, which saw packed bars, full hotels, and a free fan festival officially organized by FIFA downtown.
For Kingston and Toronto, the final results are still yet to be tallied up, but the World Cup delivered something that didn’t show up in the data, which was a summer that helped Canada feel like the centre of the world.
Tags
City of Kingston, Economics, economy, FIFA World Cup, soccer, tourism
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