As the dust continues to settle on Tarrant County’s World Cup summer, some of its effects are coming into view.
There’s still a lot we don’t know. Officials will be tallying up the score sheet for the next few months.
With two weeks having passed since the semifinal between France and Spain wrapped up activity in Arlington, here’s what we do know so far.
Business Impact
In June, the city of Arlington reported roughly $31 million in hotel occupancy tax revenue, Mayor Jim Ross said.
That amount topped the previous total for most hotel occupancy tax revenue the city has ever received: $23.5 million in Nov. 2024. In that month, the city hosted three Dallas Cowboys games and a boxing match between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson.
During a news conference ahead of the July 14 semifinal match, which represented Arlington’s final game as a World Cup host, Ross said the city was projected to get $160 million in economic impact from the tournament.
He added that the annual economic impact of AT&T Stadium is roughly $324 million.
“$160 million is literally about half of that entire impact on our city, so it’s been substantial,” Ross said.
Ahead of the tournament, officials with the North Texas FIFA World Cup Organizing Committee commissioned a study that estimated a total impact for North Texas of between $1.5 to $2 billion.
Organizing committee president Monica Paul said the actual economic impact numbers won’t arrive for “many months,” as data from the state and businesses comes in.
“I think you’ll have a pretty large wrap-up report after this is over,” Paul said.
Locally, some businesses enjoyed massive rewards from the tournament, while others say they saw little to no impact.
Randy Ford, the owner of J. Gilligan’s Bar & Grill, and Greg Gardner, an owner of Grease Monkey Burger Shop, said their businesses saw increased foot traffic on match days.
Ford said his business experienced roughly four times as many sales as usual during match days, while Gardner said Grease Monkey saw a roughly 25%-30% increase.
On the other hand, the owners of businesses in downtown Arlington’s Urban Union district that aren’t specifically geared to the average sports fan said they saw the same amount of traffic to their stores, or, in some cases, even less than usual due to concerns about traffic.
Transportation
Despite early hesitancy based on uncertainty over World Cup passenger turnout, Paul said the transportation plan went “flawlessly.”
On match days, ticketholders rode the Trinity Railway Express to CentrePort Station. From there, fans took private charter buses from the station to a Texas Rangers parking lot near AT&T Stadium.
Some fans took alternative routes, either driving to a parking lot near the stadium or using a rideshare to be dropped off at the Esports Stadium Arlington lot near the National Medal of Honor Museum.
More than 40,000 passengers used the World Cup public transit, according to officials.
Natalie Bettger, the senior program manager of Congestion Management and System Operations for the North Central Texas Council of Governments, said the transportation plan met her expectations.
“Every match was a little different in what we experienced, like different crashes that would occur on the roadway and working with our partner agencies to get those cleared quickly,” Bettger said. “The transit component, making sure folks know how to get to and from the charter services, really had flown smoothly from our perspective.”
Bettger said organizers were not expecting the use of rideshare to be as high as it was, but they quickly added a drop-off lot to accommodate the extra traffic.
Before the tournament, Bettger said communication across different organizations such as the council of governments and municipalities would be key to making small traffic changes in real time.
Ahead of the final game in Arlington, she said the communication paid off.
“We all have to kind of play our part and know who to contact to make those adjustments on the fly when we see things that happen out there on the transit system or the roadway system,” Bettger said.
How many people went to matches or World Cup events?
In a social media post, FIFA President Gianni Infantino said a total of 631,843 fans attended the nine matches in Arlington.
According to Nina Vaca, a co-chair of the local organizing committee, there were 33,000 volunteer applications for the games and the fan festival in Dallas. Of those, 5,200 were on the ground for the matches.
We also now know how many people got a true Texas experience during the tournament.
In a Monday news release, the Fort Worth Stockyards National Historic District announced it welcomed 1.8 million visitors during the span of the tournament. That amount signified a 44.7% surge in visitation year over year, according to the release.
Cultural Impact
The World Cup also brought soccer fever to the United States for just over a month, and that fever proved contagious in Tarrant County.
From the extension of the “More Than a Match” exhibit at the Arlington Museum of Art to the birth of a new crop of pickup soccer crews, the area has seen an immediate cultural impact.
Questions linger over how this will affect the future of organized soccer, such as whether the youth pay-to-play model will change. Still, the tournament brought more local eyes to the game than ever before.
Arlington’s future
The World Cup wasn’t just the largest sporting event AT&T Stadium and Tarrant County have hosted. Officials in Arlington hope it was a launchpad for the future.
Ross, Paul and others involved with the local World Cup organizing committee have already set their sights on potentially hosting the women’s tournament in 2031.
“We had a vision for putting on the best World Cup that we could for 2026, but our vision is also toward 2031, and hopefully being able to host the FIFA Women’s World Cup in 2031,” Paul said on July 13.
That work may have already begun. In 2025, the United States Soccer Federation nominated a slate of venues in its bid to host the Women’s World Cup alongside Mexico, Costa Rica and Jamaica. The venues for 2031 have not been formally announced.
Among the 14 host sites proposed for the U.S. was AT&T Stadium.
Ross said that he doesn’t know what the future holds for Arlington and the events that could come to town but that anything is possible.
“We have no limits,” Ross said. “We’re only limited by our imagination, and we know how to develop relationships to make anything possible.”
Chris Moss is a reporter for the Arlington Report. Contact him at chris.moss@arlingtonreport.org.
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