During the 2026 FIFA World Cup, eight matches, including a semi-final, will be played in Atlanta (Courtesy of K/Pexels).
The 2026 FIFA Men's World Cup kicks off June 11 with the United States, Canada and Mexico playing host in the first three-country tournament.
FIFA president Gianni Infantino promises the expanded 48-team tournament will be the "biggest, the most inclusive, the greatest FIFA World Cup ever." But beneath the glossy broadcast, rising ticket costs are pricing out fans, host cities face local infrastructure strains and the promises of economic growth and long-term investment are rarely realized.
Tanner Cooke, an associate professor of media and communication at Portland State University, studies the cultural significance of sports mega-events and the role of sport in place-making. This summer, he's teaching FIFA 2026: Mega-Events & Media, examining how the tournament constructs urban spaces, defines public memory and crafts the stories nations and cities tell about themselves.
"For roughly one month every four years, billions of people are watching the same images, hearing similar narratives and being invited to feel things about nations, players and host cities," he says. "The matches matter, but they're embedded in a vast media apparatus that shapes how we understand global culture itself."
For Cooke, who first experienced the fervor of the tournament during the 1994 U.S.-hosted World Cup, the global spectacle is less about the action on the pitch and more about the stories surrounding it.
We caught up with Cooke to discuss the forces shaping the 2026 tournament.
FIFA often frames the World Cup as a force for global unity and peace. How accurate is that narrative, and in what ways does the modern tournament still reflect unequal global power dynamics?
Cooke: The unity narrative is one of FIFA's most enduring products. I chose that word, product, intentionally. It is something manufactured and sold, not a neutral description of what the tournament does. While the World Cup can bring people together, it does so within structures of profound inequality. While the tournament is immensely profitable, it is only so for a handful of organizations. Often, the burdens of hosting the tournament are felt not by those who desired to make it happen, but by those who it was imposed upon. The labor that builds stadiums, prepares cities, and produces the spectacle is overwhelmingly done by workers who will never benefit from the tournament's celebration of itself. Unity is certainly present, but it's unity organized around spectacle, not that of peace and the celebration of humanity.
What storylines should viewers pay attention to beyond the matches themselves?
Cooke: First, how the U.S., Mexico, and Canada get represented, both to domestic and international audiences. Tournament coverage will produce a particular version of North America that's worth paying attention to. Second, the labor and infrastructure stories that surface during the tournament: labor strikes, stadium readiness, security spending, displacement in host cities, the workers who make the spectacle possible. These are often where the gap between FIFA's promises and lived realities becomes visible. Third, how teams from the Global South get framed compared to European teams; the language of "passion," "discipline," "athleticism," "intelligence" tells you a great deal about whose football is taken seriously and on what terms. And finally, the legacy discourse that begins the moment the final ends: Who is already shaping the story of what 2026 meant?
What are you personally most interested in watching, researching or analyzing during this World Cup?
Cooke: I'm particularly interested in how U.S. media will cover this tournament given soccer's complicated position in American sports culture. Soccer is simultaneously the world's game and, in the U.S., a sport that has long been positioned as suburban, multicultural, or somehow not-quite-American. Watching how American broadcasters and journalists narrate a tournament happening on home soil; what stories they reach for, which players they elevate, which host cities get the prestige treatment and which get treated as inconveniences, will tell us something important about how American media handles its uncomfortable position as host of an event the rest of the world cares about more than it does.
Your summer course explores "the city as media." What does that mean in the context of the 2026 World Cup?
Cooke: When we host a mega-event like the World Cup, host cities become media artifacts themselves: curated, photographed, broadcast, marketed. The city is no longer just where matches happen; it becomes a story being told to global audiences. New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Kansas City, and the other host cities will be presented to international viewers through carefully selected imagery, B-roll and narrative framings. What gets shown, what gets hidden, which neighborhoods become tourist-ready and which become security-managed; these are media decisions with real consequences for the people who actually live in these places. Treating the city itself as a media product helps us see that the World Cup isn't just covered in cities; cities are actively produced by the coverage.
Mega-events often promise economic growth, tourism and international prestige. What tensions tend to emerge between the global image of the World Cup and the realities experienced by residents in host cities?
Cooke: The promises and the realities tend to diverge predictably. Studies of recent tournaments, Brazil 2014, Russia 2018, Qatar 2022, show patterns: cost overruns absorbed by public budgets, displacement of residents from neighborhoods near tournament infrastructure, intensified policing and surveillance that often outlasts the event, and tourist revenue that rarely materializes at the scale promised. Meanwhile, the international image of the host city is carefully curated, often in ways that erase exactly the populations most affected by the hosting itself. The tension isn't accidental, it's structural. The global image requires a particular kind of host city, and producing that city for the cameras has costs that are borne by people who don't appear in the broadcast.
How are streaming platforms, social media and fan-created content changing the World Cup experience, and how does that challenge FIFA's control over its own narrative?
Cooke: FIFA has always tried to control the narrative around its tournaments, but the media environment has shifted dramatically. Where once broadcasters were the dominant storytellers, now millions of viewers are also producers; posting clips, commentary, memes, and critique in real time. This creates challenges FIFA can't easily manage. The most-shared moments from the 2022 tournament weren't always the moments FIFA chose to highlight; they were what fans found striking, funny, or outrageous. Social media also makes it harder to bury the unflattering stories of labor abuses, political controversies, and governance scandals. Earlier mega-events could more easily push these stories to the margins. However, none of this means FIFA has lost control, but the storytelling is more contested than it used to be.
You study sports mega-events as both cultural products and powerful social forces. What does the World Cup reveal about how cities and nations want to present themselves to the world?
Cooke: Mega-events are some of the most concentrated moments of national and urban self-presentation we have. Hosting cities and nations make deliberate choices about what to emphasize; technological modernity, multicultural openness, economic dynamism, historical heritage. Those choices reveal a great deal about how political and economic elites want their places to be seen. The 2026 tournament will give us three national self-presentations alongside 16 distinct host-city presentations. We'll see what Atlanta wants to project, what Mexico City wants to project, what Toronto wants to project, and how those projections relate (or fail to relate) to the actual lived complexity of those places. The tournament becomes a kind of compressed window into how power imagines itself.
The 2026 World Cup will be spread across the United States, Mexico and Canada. How might a multi-country tournament reshape the event's cultural or political dynamics?
Cooke: This is the first three-host tournament in World Cup history, and the political moment makes it particularly charged. Hosting requires real cooperation between three countries whose political relationships have been strained and reshaped in recent years. The tournament will be staged against the backdrop of those tensions, not separately from them. We'll see how borders are framed in coverage, how the three nations are visually balanced or imbalanced in promotional material, how questions of immigration and movement get handled by broadcasters, and which host cities receive what kind of attention. The multi-country format also disperses the host-city impacts across a continent, which may make some patterns of displacement and economic strain harder to track and document. Watching how the tournament narrates "North America" as a unified entity (or perhaps fails to) will be one of the most politically interesting questions of the 2026 tournament.
Looking for more World Cup insight? Read our companion Q&A with PSU historian Bright Alozie on African countries navigating global football governance.