Toronto's World Cup Windfall Isn't Trickling Down to the Businesses That Need It
The city spent half a billion dollars hosting FIFA. Forty-five thousand fans will flood Liberty Village on match days. But most small business owners say they won't see a dime.
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Kevin MacDougall has weathered worse. He's kept his Liberty Village restaurant open since 2008—through the financial crisis, through COVID, through the kind of years that shutter most independent operations. But he'll tell you the margins are tighter now than they've ever been.
"Something like this will definitely help increase volume," he said, talking about the World Cup that's about to transform the neighborhood where he works. He is among the optimists. He is also in the minority.
Toronto Stadium sits in the middle of Liberty Village. On match days, 45,000 fans will pour through its gates, fill the surrounding streets, and generate what city projections called $307 million in GDP and 3,300 new jobs. It sounds like the kind of economic lift a neighborhood dreams about. Except across Toronto and Vancouver, nearly three in four small businesses say they expect the World Cup to have zero impact on their revenue. One in ten expects sales to actually decline.
This is not fringe sentiment. This is the majority position of the people who run the city's independent economy, expressed on the eve of the largest sporting event ever held on Canadian soil.
The tournament is already reshaping the physical city in ways that bypass local businesses entirely. Canada Post moved mailboxes away from event zones, commercial garbage pickups have been shifted to delayed schedules, and road closures are affecting residents who have no interest in FIFA and haven't bought a single ticket. The inconvenience is being distributed widely and without consent. The upside is not.
The city struck a revenue-sharing deal with MLSE before the first ball was kicked. FIFA, the major hotel chains, and corporate hospitality operators were positioned to capture the tournament's economic value long before local businesses started printing match-day specials on a chalkboard. The structure of who gets to benefit was built into the tournament architecture itself.
Walk through Liberty Village on a match day and you feel something genuine—the noise, the colour, the sense that the city is on a world stage. Toronto is alive in a way it doesn't usually feel. But the lived experience of most small business owners is quieter and more familiar: they watched the city build the stage, invite the world to it, and forget to send them a ticket.
For MacDougall and the minority of optimists, there's still time for the tournament to prove the pessimists wrong. For everyone else, it's already starting to feel like the city's big moment is someone else's opportunity.