The World Cup 2026 begins today and, according to a new poll, many Americans don’t really care.
More than 4 in 10 American respondents to a new poll from Emerson College said they weren’t interested in this year’s tournament.
The survey was conducted on June 7 and 8 — just days before the starting matches — and found that 45 percent of the 1,200 respondents said they had no interest in the event. A third of respondents said they had some interest, and 22 percent said they were very interested, The Hill reports.
Some Scottish fans who’ve traveled to Boston to watch World Cup matches told BBC News Scotland that some of the Americans they’ve met don’t even know the tournament is happening.
One fan said he went to send a letter while wearing his Scotland jersey and the American woman working the counter asked him what had brought him to the states.
“She didn’t even know the World Cup is on,” he said.
Another Scottish fan said that the “pubs are brilliant, but I don’t think anybody knows that there’s a World Cup on.”
The poll found that interest in the tournament also differs depending on the respondent’s age. More than 70 percent of respondents between the ages of 18 to 29 said they were either very or somewhat interested in the World Cup, with 19 percent saying they were not interested at all.
Of people ages 60 to 69, 58 percent said they are not interested at all in the event, and only 11 percent said they were very interested.
The poll also found differing interest levels based on the race of the respondent. Sixty-three percent of Black respondents and six in 10 Hispanic respondents said they either planned to watch the World Cup somewhat or very closely. Only 35 percent of white respondents said they’d watch closely.
Emerson’s poll isn’t the first indication of American indifference to the world’s biggest sports tournament.
According to a recent analysis by the Financial Times, nearly 180,000 tickets for the World Cup were still on sale on FIFA’s official resale portals as recently as this week.
FIFA’s ticket prices are so high for the tournament that in some cases scalpers have had to discount their holdings by approximately 20 percent just to move the paper, The Daily Beast reports.
Tickets for even low-profile games in the U.S. can run fans around $140 per ticket. The most expensive tickets for regular seats at the U.S. opener were priced at $2,735. That’s more than the final cost for a seat at the 2022 World Cup final. The cheapest seats for the opener are around $1,000. The Athletic recently reported that the price for any game at any stage of the World Cup 2026 is higher than an equivalent ticket for any prior FIFA tournament.
Even if most Americans aren’t interested and tickets are prohibitively expensive, the tournament is still expected to be one of the most watched events of all time. FIFA estimates that 5.8 billion people worldwide are expected to tune into the matches at some point during the tournament’s run, according to the Sports Business Journal.
The first match of this year’s tournament is between Mexico and South Africa, and kicks off at 3 p.m. EST.
The U.S. will face off in its first match against Paraguay on Friday at 9 p.m. EST.
