The 2026 FIFA World Cup host countries may share the tournament, but their economies look very different when measured by GDP per capita.
The World Cup has increasingly reflected a wide economic spread among host nations, from advanced economies such as France, Japan and Germany to major emerging markets such as Brazil, Russia and South Africa and, more recently, a group of very different co-hosts in North America, namely Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.
Measured by GDP per capita in current U.S. dollars, France hosted the tournament in 1998 at a relatively modest level compared with Japan and Germany, which followed in 2002 and 2006.
The tournament then shifted to three major emerging markets in a row: South Africa in 2010, Brazil in 2014 and Russia in 2018.
Qatar stood out in 2022, with GDP per capita far above most recent hosts, clearly an outlier in the modern World Cup era.
The 2026 World Cup adds another layer to an economic divide.
The recent one was jointly hosted by the U.S., Canada and Mexico, three countries with sharply different GDP-per-capita levels. The U.S. and Canada sit near the higher end of recent hosts, while Mexico is closer to the emerging-market hosts of the previous decade.
The data does not measure whether a country can afford to host the tournament.