Was the World Cup worth it? | CNN Business

It was beautiful. It was fun. It was unifying. But was the World Cup worth it for the United States?

That question is typically answered in financial terms: Add up the economic benefit the games generated and subtract the amount spent to put the games on; if the number is positive, then the games were worthwhile. If it’s negative, they weren’t.

By that measure, the World Cup was almost certainly a bust.

Very little evidence supports any meaningful US financial benefit from the games: The expected jobs boom didn’t happen. Hotel prices weren’t meaningfully higher. The growth in retail sales was way down in June from May. Airfares were flat from May, and so was overall tourism.

But measuring economic benefit is a difficult calculation – how do you separate the boost from an event as large as the World Cup from the rest of an economy as large as that of the United States? The evidence at that point becomes subjective.