Boom or bust? Vancouver business boost 'a mixed bag' from FIFA World Cup
While the FIFA World Cup is firmly in the rear-view mirror, new data reveals whether the event was a boom or bust for Vancouver businesses.
According to TouchBistro, restaurant sales during the FIFA event period increased by three per cent.
It also found that Vancouver and Toronto didn’t benefit more than any other Canadian cities in terms of restaurant sales.
“They rode the same three per cent wave as the rest of the country. The World Cup came to 16 cities, but it showed up in every restaurant with a TV,” said a spokesperson for TouchBistro, in an email to Daily Hive.
Monday to Wednesday sales saw a significant spike of between 12 and 19 per cent, compared to the weeks before the tournament commenced. However, “Fridays and Saturdays barely moved,” according to a blog post from TouchBistro.
In advance of the tournament, many businesses had higher expectations than what panned out. Prior to kickoff, VistaPrint, a print and design company, surveyed 334 small businesses in Vancouver and Toronto, finding that 64 per cent think that the World Cup will create a positive impact, including increased customer foot traffic and additional product purchases.
“Businesses were really excited about FIFA, the World Cup time. And it felt very genuine the reaction,” said Erin Shea, the senior director of North America Marketing for VistaPrint.
But according to reporting from Dished during the tournament period, these expectations for many restaurants didn’t pan out. Dished reached out to several restaurants at the height of the World Cup to ask how they were faring during the games. Many reported that while they went into it with high hopes, business was flat or even worse.
For example, Chanthy Yen, chef and owner of Touk and Mee Bar at Time Out Market, told Dished that he observed a drop-off in customers at Touk, which is a downtown restaurant on Alberni Street.
“We expected something completely different. We predicted that potentially FIFA would really bring in more business, bring in more clientele, considering the type of food that we’re offering and the current landscape of Vancouver, culinary-wise.”
Instead, he said he thought that FIFA moved people to other parts of the downtown core — like the Granville Street Pedestrian Zone, which saw enormous crowds and late-night celebrations through the five weeks of FIFA.
While other Vancouver restaurants shared similar experiences to Touk’s, some saw a FIFA boom. For example, Ray’s, which was just steps away from Yaletown’s largest outdoor patio destination for FIFA, said that game days brought in bigger crowds of fans.
Overall, this is what Shea said VistaPrint has observed across the board.
“It was a bit of a mixed bag,” she said. “There were mixed signals depending on the types of businesses and the areas that the businesses are in.”
However, tourism experts told Daily Hive Urbanized that much of the benefit of hosting FIFA is what comes afterwards, due to the fact that millions of people around the world might have a glimpse of Vancouver through their screen — and now might want to visit.
We also spoke to Vancouver’s Underground Comedy Club, which shared that it experienced a drop in revenue during FIFA.
Destination BC’s projections show that B.C. will generate an incremental $1 billion from tourism between 2026 and 2031 from the visibility of hosting these games.
What about game days?
Visa recently shared data on game day spend in Canada’s host cities, comparing them to the same time frame in 2026.
Vancouver’s match that brought in the highest spending increase was its first, Australia versus Türkiye on June 13, with spending 12.7 per cent higher. On June 18, when Canada played Qatar, there was a 4.9 per cent spending increase.
Visa said that this highlights “how major sporting events can create temporary and highly concentrated ‘pop-up economies’ driven by increased consumer spending and international visitors.”
Daily Hive asked the spokesperson for Visa to provide data for other FIFA game days in Vancouver, but they said they only have available the data for these two game days.