This week Mayor Olivia Chow of Toronto promised she will put more controls on the city’s ruinously expensive plan to co-host the FIFA World Cup. Too late, too late.
Way back in 2018, Toronto struck a deal with the soccer federation that laid out everything the city must do to earn the honour of hosting five (now six) matches of the beautiful game. It is signed, sealed and notarized. In short, FIFA has Toronto over a barrel. If the international soccer barons were paying any attention at all to what Ms. Chow said, they must have been laughing up their monogrammed sleeves.
When FIFA said it would be holding the extravaganza in North America in 2026 and was looking for cities to play host, Toronto was eager as a puppy. For a place that is always striving to show it deserves big-boy pants, this was irresistible.
Here was a chance to be a part of the planet’s most-watched sports event. Here was a chance to welcome the world to Toronto, revealing it to a global audience in all its multicultural glory. Here, too, was a chance to raise the city’s game, improving its sport fields and stadiums parks in readiness for the big event and leaving a rich physical legacy behind.
The great deception: Hosting a major sporting spectacle
The barons saw Toronto’s tongue hanging out and took maximum advantage. In the negotiations that followed, they went through our side like Lionel Messi through a middle-school team. Along with extracting the usual suite of tax concessions, they succeeded in persuading Toronto to cover up messy construction sites that might offend the eyes of visiting fans, hold (and pay for) an outdoor Fan Fest, let World Cup officials and visitors ride on Toronto transit for free, and rename BMO Field, a big downtown stadium, for the duration of the event. Oh, and to keep all of this a deep secret, which it remained until some enterprising reporters secured the details.
In the meantime, the cost of the event has soared from around $45-million to $380-million, a staggering increase even by the standards of the sports world. Jean Drapeau himself would gasp.
Ms. Chow said that if she had been in charge when the deal was being made she would not have signed without at least getting the federal and provincial governments to agree to contribute in advance to the cost. She would have made the details public once she took office, too.
“However,” she told council on Wednesday, “I am saddled with what we have now.” Too true. And so is the city.
Her answer is to appoint a quite-bewildering number of committees and subcommittees to make sure Toronto’s hosting plans stay on track and on budget. A “champions table” will drum up funds from donors, a “forever committee” will promote the event and make sure its benefits last. A budget group will review spending. A former city budget chief, David Soknacki, will act as the mayor’s FIFA envoy, making sure that everything is “open, transparent and accountable.”
None of it is likely to make a lick of difference. There is little Toronto can do to improve its bargain with the barons. Making a fuss now, with the event only a couple of years off, would only come across as griping after the buzzer. The boosterism, flag-waving and rah-rah-ing that is the nature of such things is already building.
Rather than complain about the raw deal Toronto is getting or the undemocratic cone of silence that was clamped over the whole business, councillors lined up on Wednesday to wax on about the wonder of it all. Enjoining his fellow councillors not to be “Monday morning quarterbacks,” Michael Thompson boasted that “this great city is going to be staging one of the world’s largest sporting events.”
Anthony Perruzza chimed in that, once the matches start, “People are going to honk their horns, wave their flags. There is a power to that celebration. We should embrace it and we should go for it.”
Only one, Josh Matlow, went on at length about the “absurd concessions” Toronto made to get six football matches. He called the agreement a classic “own goal.”
But all that will be forgotten now. The World Cup is coming to Toronto. Hurray! Olé! What is $380-million between friends?
Marcus Gee