The FIFA World Cup is a jobs program, at least for a month. As soccer fans crowd into host cities across the United States, Canada and Mexico, the tournament is briefly juicing American hiring — enough to leave a small mark on the June employment report.
A 40,000-job bump
Goldman Sachs estimates the World Cup added about 40,000 jobs to U.S. payrolls in June, most of them in hospitality and leisure — hotels, restaurants, bars and the venues themselves — as host cities staffed up for the crowds, CNBC reported. The bank drew on real-time hiring data and on the employment patterns of past mega-events — the 1994 World Cup in the U.S., the Olympics and years of Super Bowls — to model the effect.
The Labor Department's June jobs report was due July 2, and the World Cup line was one of the few clear positives economists were watching for in an otherwise sluggish hiring picture.
Here today, gone in August
The catch is that this kind of employment is, by design, temporary. Goldman's own projection has the boost fading fast: a smaller gain in July, then a reversal in August as short-term contracts end and the tournament crews are let go, according to CNBC's account of the research. A hire made to work a month of matches does not build lasting momentum in the labor market.
The Los Angeles stake
Los Angeles has a direct interest in the numbers. SoFi Stadium in Inglewood is one of the tournament's marquee U.S. venues, and local officials have projected the World Cup could pump hundreds of millions of dollars into the regional economy, concentrated in food and drink, lodging and transportation. Those are exactly the sectors where the short-term hiring shows up — waiters, hotel staff, ride-hail and shuttle drivers, stadium workers.
Reasons for caution
Even so, the macroeconomic payoff is easy to overstate. Not every host city is seeing the windfall it hoped for: a hotel-industry survey this spring found most hotels across the U.S. host cities reporting World Cup bookings below their earlier forecasts, with visa hurdles and travel jitters blamed for softer international demand, Fortune reported. And economists note that much World Cup spending simply displaces other consumer activity — dollars that would have been spent anyway, just somewhere else — so the net national effect is smaller than the gross figures suggest.
For a $30 trillion economy and a workforce north of 160 million, 40,000 mostly temporary jobs is a rounding error, not a turning point. But for the hotel manager in Inglewood scrambling to cover a sold-out week, and for the workers picking up the shifts, the tournament is a real, if fleeting, paycheck.
