Image by patiyathanathip on Magnific
Somewhere around the middle of June, a Montrealer could stand on Sainte-Catherine and hear a roar go up from a bar, and know without checking that something had happened four hundred miles down the 401.
Canada is co-hosting a World Cup. Thirteen matches on Canadian soil, split between Toronto and Vancouver, from an opening ceremony at BMO Field on the twelfth of June to a final in New Jersey on the nineteenth of July. Sixteen host cities across three countries. Two of them Canadian, and neither of them here.
This is not an accident, and it is not a snub. Montreal walked away, deliberately, in July 2021, and the reasoning is worth revisiting now that the tournament is actually happening and the bills are actually arriving.
Thirteen Matches, One Billion Dollars, Zero in Montreal
Start with the number, because everything else follows from it.
The thirteen matches being played in Canada are projected to cost taxpayers at least a billion dollars, according to documents obtained by Radio-Canada’s investigative programme Enquête through access to information. Toronto’s share climbed to roughly CAD $380 million from an early estimate near $45 million. Vancouver’s went to $620 million from $240 million. Anyone who has watched a public infrastructure project in this province will recognise the shape of that curve.
Quebec’s own estimate for hosting had gone from about CAD $50 million in 2018 to $103 million by 2021, and that was before the real conditions were on the table. The provincial government looked at the trajectory and declined. CBC’s reporting on the Enquête findings sets out what was being asked.
The money was the headline. The conditions were the reason.
No events, activity or programming at Olympic Stadium between the twenty-fifth of April and the nineteenth of July. Playing surfaces unusable for other purposes for twenty-three months, from September 2024 straight through. Access to Parc Jean-Drapeau and the Old Port from late May to mid-July.
Read that list again with a Montreal summer calendar in front of you. The Canadian Grand Prix runs at Parc Jean-Drapeau. The Jazz Festival, the largest in the world, occupies the Quartier des Spectacles in late June and early July. Les Francos sits immediately beside it. The triathlon uses the island. Every single one of them falls inside the exclusion window.
The former tourism minister has since put it plainly: she was not going to telephone Formula One and inform them that the tournament required a blackout. Vancouver, which did host, had to move its dragon boat and jazz festivals to accommodate the clause.
The City That Chose Its Own Calendar
So Montreal made a trade, and this summer you can see exactly what it bought.
The Grand Prix ran in June, as it does. The Jazz Festival is happening. Les Francos happened. The city is marking fifty years since the 1976 Olympics, an anniversary carrying its own instructive lesson about the long tail of hosting, given that the debt from those Games took three decades to clear.
Meanwhile the football is on television, in bars, in living rooms, in the parks, and Montrealers are watching it with an intensity that is not much diminished by the absence of a fixture. Betano’s soccer culture report tracked how Canadians discussed the game online across the run-up to the tournament, mapping which players, teams and questions drew the most conversation in different parts of the country.
It is worth being precise about what that kind of work does and does not show. Social listening measures conversation. It does not poll a population, and it cannot tell you what Canadians in general believe. What it can tell you, quite well, is where the talking is happening and what it is about, which is a different and genuinely interesting object.
Soccer Here Did Not Need a Stadium
The Montreal result in that data is the one a local would expect, and it points at something a host city agreement would not have created.
Montreal is a football town in the way that a city with six of its own players in the national set-up is a football town, which is to say structurally rather than aspirationally. It is a town of Sunday leagues on municipal pitches, of Portuguese, Italian, Haitian, Algerian and Brazilian supporters’ clubs that predate anybody’s marketing plan, of a professional club with a complicated history and a real one.
None of that arrived because of a tournament and none of it would have deepened much because of thirteen matches, two of which the city might have received. What was on offer was a month of visitors and a permanent line on a balance sheet.
What Gets Measured When Nobody Is Hosting
Here is the awkward part, and Montreal should sit with it rather than gloat.
There is a real cost to not hosting, and it is not economic. It is participatory. Children in Toronto and Vancouver spent this June near something enormous. Some of them will play because of it. The counterfactual is unmeasurable and the effect is probably small, but it is not zero, and the people who argued for the bid were not being foolish.
The rebuttal is simply that the effect has to be weighed against a billion dollars and a summer of surrendered public space, and that the case for hosting has, everywhere it has been examined afterwards, turned out to depend on numbers produced by the people who wanted to host.
Montreal gave up two or three matches, a fan festival, and a month of being on the map. It kept the Grand Prix, the Jazz Festival, the Francos, its islands, its stadium schedule, and about a hundred million dollars that has instead gone somewhere less photogenic.
There is no clean answer. What there is, on the eighth of July 2026, is a city that is watching the World Cup as hard as anywhere in the country, having declined to pay for the privilege of standing next to it. That is either a failure of ambition or the most Montreal decision imaginable, and it is entirely possible that it is both.
The tournament ends on the nineteenth. The Jazz Festival will be over by then too, and nobody will have had to phone Formula One.
