How Taylor Swift helped Vancouver prepare for the FIFA World Cup | Daily Hive

How Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour helped Vancouver prepare for the FIFA World Cup

Gathering of One/Shutterstock | AlbertArt/Shutterstock

Like many, Christian Diaz is getting ready for Vancouver to host the FIFA World Cup. As the operations and partner manager of La Taqueria Pinche Taco Shop, he said they’ve been planning for the “once in a lifetime event” for weeks.

They started hiring and training staff over a month ago, as well as coordinating with food and drink suppliers to ensure they’ll have enough. They’re also planning events in all three of their locations, which includes one on Seymour Street downtown. He added that they’ve been bringing in TVs to broadcast the games, are planning viewing parties, and have developed promotions and new menu items.

“We’re going to go all out this summer,” he said. “It’s going to be very busy for everyone … I can’t wait to be part of it, and to be in it.”

“This is going to be amazing for all the city. I’m excited to show our guests and our visitors what Vancouver has to offer,” Diaz said.

He’s not the only one getting ready. With the World Cup now days away, the entire city seems to be coming alive — from FIFA banners lining the streets, art installations in public squares, Science World transforming into a giant match ball, and even a record-breaking Canadian flag displayed on Grouse Mountain.

The most recent time that Vancouver transformed itself for a major event was for the Taylor Swift Eras tour in late 2024, when Swift ended her multi-year, record-breaking tour at BC Place with three shows on Dec. 6, 7, and 8.

Vancouverites might recall a plethora of Taylor Swift-themed events, from pre-parties to dining to karaoke, as well as art installations like 13 Taylor Swift lyrics in life-sized letters set up in various parts of the city.

On concert days, Vancouver came alive in a way that is rarely felt, with an estimated 160,000 fans in town. Swifties donned sparkling outfits and handed out friendship bracelets, filmed what they thought to be Swift’s motorcade leaving a downtown hotel, and belted lyrics outside BC Place in the pouring rain.

How did people spend during the Eras Tour?

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Sean McCormick, vice-president of business development at Moneris Data Services, told Daily Hive that local businesses can learn a lesson from the Eras Tour as they prepare for the World Cup.

“Bars and restaurants and retailers can think about the kinds of things that will appeal to that audience — whatever they decide that audience is — then they’re going to be successful, McCormick said.

“Hit it hard for [those] 39 days – it’s going to go by quickly,” he added.

Moneris, which is a commerce provider that accounts for a third of spending transactions in Canada, took a granular look at the spending in Vancouver during the Eras Tour.

They found that over the three-day period that Swift was in Vancouver, total spending rose by 154 per cent week-over week. Moneris also observed that fans were looking for affordable, convenient food, with fast food places seeing a 151 per cent week-over-week increase and bakeries a 102 per cent. And spending at clothing stores saw a whopping 923 per cent increase.

Much of this was from foreign spending, which increased by 97 per cent week over week.

McCormick explained that the Eras Tour was “not just an average concert.” For many of its attendees, “it was once in a lifetime experience.”

“When you’ve got that YOLO element to an event, people are prepared to pay a little bit more for the experience. And that’s not just concert tickets, that’s eating out, that’s shopping, that’s buying new clothes, it’s buying jewelry, it’s buying all of these things that are part of the experience.”

This is unlike a typical concert experience, he said, where someone might go out for drinks and dinner before the show.

But the “Taylor Swift effect” is an entire “consumer spending experience” — which McCormick thinks FIFA will mimic.

As people come to Vancouver from the suburbs, across Canada, or other countries in the coming weeks, he said: “They’re coming to Vancouver to do more than just go to a soccer match; they’re going to be coming to Vancouver to shop, to eat, to sightsee, to stay in hotels.”

He also said he thinks FIFA will have a “YOLO” element.

“Although there’s going to be another World Cup, will there be another World Cup match in Vancouver in our lifetimes? I don’t know. That might not happen. Whereas something like Taylor Swift — yeah, I’m pretty sure Taylor Swift will be back in Vancouver at some point.

The entire city is getting ready

It isn’t only businesses that learned from the Eras Tour. Maya Lange, vice-president of global marketing at Destination BC, said that before Swift came to town, organizations like PavCo (the government corporation that runs BC Place), Destination Vancouver, Destination BC, hotel associations, and restaurant associations worked together to transform the city.

“Everyone got together and said, like, how do we make this amazing?” she told Daily Hive, adding that art installations like the aforementioned lyrics were not “haphazard.”

“That was all done with intentionality,” she said. “We organized ourselves to say, ‘How do we maximize the visibility of this and make sure that Vancouver stands out at the end of the Taylor Swift Era Tour?'”

Jessie Adcock, the lead and chief delivery officer of Vancouver’s host committee for the FIFA World Cup, agreed with Lange that much was learned from facilitating the Eras Tour experience.

“The World Cup experience actually builds off of the Taylor Swift experience, and we got a little bit of a jumpstart because of all of the connections and the network that was built because of Taylor Swift,” she said.

She added that these events are similar in that they are both a “world-class event — lots of profile, lots of visitors to the city, lots of excitement, big crowds.”

For example, Adcock said that for both events, they’ve had to consider major things like working with authorities to coordinate safety and security. Further, she agreed with Lange that a number of partners got together to “elevate and augment the actual event experience itself” with other events and decor throughout the city.

“Whether you’re in the stadium with a ticket or not, whether it’s a ticket to Taylor Swift or whether it’s a ticket to a World Cup match. We want to make sure that people have lots to do while they’re here and that they have a great time,” Adcock said.

But the scale is different

alphonso davies canada soccer fifa world cup

Danielle Parhizkaran-Imagn Images

But unlike the Eras Tour — which was viewed only by the people attending it — billions of people across the world are expected to watch the FIFA World Cup.

Lange said that the scope and scale of FIFA is “like no other sporting event — no other event, really, on the planet.”

Five to six billion people are expected to tune into “some portion” of the games held across the sixteen host cities. Lange said it’s expected that close to a billion people will watch the Vancouver matches on TV or some device.

She said they expect 350,000 people to visit Vancouver over the course of the game, but think close to a billion people will watch the games on a TV or a device.

“That’s really the opportunity,” Lange said. “Not only the people that are coming here to experience it, but to get on the dream list of somebody sitting in Germany, or in China, or in Korea, and then them coming to British Columbia over the next five years.”

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.

Ahead of Taylor Swift, they projected that her concerts would bring $157 million to Vancouver. (However, the time frames are different for these numbers.)

The cost of FIFA

Vancouver hosting FIFA has come with a fair share of criticism, from the sky-high cost of tickets and hotel rooms, to local organizations cancelling their events, to kicking a museum out of BC Place for two months, to costing taxpayers up to $729 million.

Other people, like sports legend Don Taylor, have also pointed out the negativity and indifference surrounding FIFA.

But Lange, who is German Canadian, said that it is “totally Canadian.”

“Soccer in other countries is fandom at its extreme,” she said. “It’s part of the DNA of families for generations, that the local soccer team that they follow, that they really identify with. And I think that’s what we’re trying to tap into.”

Are you a Vancouverite trying to make the most of the city hosting the FIFA World Cup? Email us and tell us how at vancouver@dailyhive.com

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