Comment by triceratops
2 hours ago
> FIFA currently makes 40% of what the NHL makes, not the NFL, not NBA.
FIFA holds one significant money-making tournament for a month every 4 years (all due respect to the Women's World Cup in terms of prestige, but its revenue is a small fraction of the Men's World Cup). The NHL runs 6 months a year annually.
Closer to 10 months actually - Oct (Sept if you include the pre-season) through June.
But just to add on for comparison, the NHL has 1312 regular season games. Plus 4 rounds of best-of-7 playoff series with 16 teams making the playoffs. Let's say an average of 5.75 games per round, that's 86 playoff games bringing us to ~1400 games per year.
Over 4 years, that's 5600 games. The FIFA World Cup had 104 games this year. It's actually pretty impressive that the WC can even make 40% while hosting < 2% of the games that the NHL has. Or put another way, 1 WC game is equivalent to 54 NHL games - 2/3 of one team's full regular season.
That’s part of their poor commercial vision. Even the World Cup brings less revenue than one season of the NBA. Doesn’t even make sense to compare it with the NFL.
So what. The point of the World Cup is a worldwide celebration of soccer, interchange of culture. It belongs to the people.
It's one of the only things left whose purpose is not just to make as much money as possible.
Again, it doesn't last as long as one season of the NBA or play as many games.
A single NBA season has over 1200 games - over 12 times as many games as the most recent World Cup (104). And that was already the largest-ever WC. Does the NBA have 12x the revenue of the WC?
> Even the World Cup brings less revenue than one season of the NBA
This isn't even true btw. The 2026 WC made $15b and the 2025-26 NBA season made $14.3 billion. [1][2]
Most of the WC's participating teams represent places poorer than the places NBA teams hail from.
You can't run the World Cup like the NBA. That's not how the sport works.
1. https://www.sportico.com/leagues/basketball/2025/nba-revenue...
2. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/jul/18/fifa-record...