The hidden law of the World Cup.

Start with the word itself. Soccer is not an Americanism. It is a British coinage from the 1880s, a clipping of association football that the English used happily for the better part of a century. Britain only cooled on the word in the 1980s. America, needing to tell the game apart from gridiron football, simply kept it.

The word itself is never litigated. The names around it are fought over fiercely. Major League Soccer and Inter Milan spent years at the US trademark office over a single word, Inter (Major League Soccer, LLC v. F.C. Internazionale Milano S.p.A., Opp. No. 91247160). In December 2020 the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board threw out MLS’s likelihood-of-confusion claim but let a separate descriptiveness challenge survive, and the two sides eventually settled. Nobody actually won the bare word.

The bigger courtroom story sits right next door. The promoter Relevent spent years fighting a FIFA policy that official league matches must be played in the league’s home country, after a plan to stage a competitive La Liga game (Girona v Barcelona) in Miami was blocked in 2018. A federal appeals court revived its antitrust suit in 2023 (Relevent Sports, LLC v. United States Soccer Federation, Inc., 61 F.4th 299, 2d Cir. 2023), FIFA settled in 2024 and US Soccer in 2025. As ESPN summarised it, there is now “no legal impediment” to foreign league games on American soil, although FIFA keeps the final say. The first attempt, Villarreal v Barcelona at Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium, was called off in October 2025, but over player protests and unfinished approvals, not the law. A regular-season El Clásico in Miami is now genuinely on the table.

FIFA is not a company, and it is not a government. It is a private, non-profit association under Swiss law (the same part of the Swiss Civil Code that governs any local club), headquartered in Zurich. Yet that association governs world football through 211 member associations, eighteen more than the United Nations’ 193 member states. It can outnumber the UN because it admits places that are not sovereign countries: the four British home nations play separately, and so do Gibraltar, Hong Kong, the Faroe Islands and others.

How is it run, and who actually holds the power? It flows from the top down, from the 211 members all the way to the staff who run the building in Zurich. As a Swiss non-profit, FIFA also enjoys low-tax association status; a 2018 attempt in Zurich to start taxing it went nowhere.

The short answer is FIFA. It owns the commercial rights to the World Cup, sells the tickets itself, and keeps the proceeds. The host nations get no share of ticket sales, even as each US host city carries an estimated $100 to $200 million in costs for stadiums, security and transport. The stadiums take no cut either; they are rented for the tournament as neutral venues (see No. 04). The money flows up to a private association in Zurich, not out to the places that stage the games.

And FIFA pays very little tax on what it collects: it expects to bank about $13 billion across the 2023–2026 cycle as a low-tax Swiss non-profit. The hosts cleared that path too: three US states wrote special sales-tax exemptions for World Cup tickets, and in a last-minute move in late April 2026 the US Treasury agreed that the 48 national teams may each apply for 501(c)(3) status, the provision normally used by charities and churches. Read the fine print, though: it is a pathway, not a blanket grant. Teams still owe state and city tax, and players face a default 30% US withholding unless a treaty applies.

And FIFA earns twice. Beyond that first sale it also runs the official resale market, skimming roughly 30% out of every resale: 15% charged to the buyer and another 15% taken from the seller. Hover the chart to see where the money lands.

Pricing itself is new this year. FIFA is using dynamic pricing for the first time, so a seat’s price rises and falls with demand. The average ticket for the eight matches at MetLife ran about $2,790, and resale listings for the final climbed past $2 million.

FIFA insists on “clean venues,” so any arena named after a company that is not a tournament sponsor loses that name for the duration. Of the 16 host stadiums, 15 take plain geographic names. MetLife Stadium becomes New York New Jersey Stadium and will host the July 19 final; SoFi becomes Los Angeles Stadium; Lumen Field becomes Seattle Stadium; AT&T Stadium becomes Dallas Stadium. Google and Apple Maps quietly relabelled the venues to match.

Host cities go further, drawing “clean zones,” bands of brand-exclusive territory (about two kilometres in Toronto and Vancouver) around stadiums and fan festivals, where unauthorised commercial activity is restricted and enforced by ordinary bylaw fines.

To land David Beckham in 2007, MLS invented the Designated Player Rule (still nicknamed the “Beckham Rule”), which lets a club pay one star outside the salary cap. The real value, though, sat elsewhere in his contract: an option to buy a future expansion franchise at a fixed, discounted $25 million, exercisable once he had finished his deal and the league had grown to 20 teams. He exercised it in 2014, and the club he built, Inter Miami CF, took the field in 2020.

That clause now looks like the bargain of the century. Inter Miami is the most valuable team in MLS at $1.45 billion (Sportico, 2026), with revenue projected to climb from about $56 million before Messi to roughly $250 million. Beckham reportedly turned down a $50 million offer to sell the option back. His was only a minority founding stake, reported at 10%, yet even a tenth of a $1.45 billion club is a fortune built on a $25 million clause.

Messi’s contract is unlike anything in sport, and its terms are deliberately murky. ESPN reported in 2023 that, on top of his salary, the deal under discussion included a cut of Apple’s MLS Season Pass revenue and a possible profit-share with Adidas (both amounts undisclosed), plus an option to take a part-ownership stake in the club that, unlike Beckham’s, would not be subsidised (ESPN, 2023). Club president Jorge Mas later put his all-in pay at “$70 million to $80 million a year, across everything” (ESPN, 2026). In effect, the league’s sponsors help pay his wages.

A top player is two businesses in one: the athlete who plays, and the brand whose face sells shirts. Many split the second business off into an image-rights company that licenses their name, image and likeness. Routed that way, the income is taxed at corporate rates (in the UK, 19% on small profits, rising to 25%) instead of the 45% top personal rate, and sometimes through an offshore company to go lower still.

But whether the structure saves any tax turns on something the diagram leaves out: the player’s personal tax residency, and the controlled-foreign-company (CFC) rules of the country he lives in. Park the image-rights company somewhere with low corporate tax, and his home tax authority may look straight through it. CFC and related anti-avoidance rules let a country tax the profits of a low-taxed company that its residents control as if the offshore wrapper were not there. So the structure tends to work only where the player is genuinely resident in a low-tax country, or where the company earns real, arm’s-length licensing income that his country of residence will respect. For a footballer who changes clubs and countries every few years, residency is half the battle.

For a while, even that looked bulletproof. The structure was effectively legitimised by the 2000 Sports Club case, an anonymised ruling widely understood to involve Arsenal and players Dennis Bergkamp and David Platt, which accepted image-rights payments as genuine commercial deals. Then the tide turned, and the law has been tightening ever since.

So can a player still use an image-rights company? There is no clean answer. Sports Club says a genuine arrangement is legitimate; Rangers and the Hull case say a sham or inflated one will be unwound and taxed as ordinary salary. Where the line falls is a question of fact, decided case by case, and the authorities keep moving it: HMRC now scrutinises any image-rights share that looks large next to a player’s wages. The tool itself is legal. Whether a particular structure survives is genuinely uncertain, and that uncertainty is the current state of the law.

Some of the most important rules in modern football were not written by players, clubs or referees at all. They were settled in courtrooms. Four rulings in particular reshaped the game: one opened up the transfer market, two have been chipping away at FIFA and UEFA’s control, and one reopened the United States to foreign league games.

Football runs a private justice system, and almost no fan knows it. The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), in Lausanne, Switzerland, hears disputes among FIFA, national associations, clubs, players and officials. It applies FIFA’s own regulations first, and Swiss law in addition.

This is not optional. FIFA’s Statutes (articles 49 to 51) recognise CAS, give a party 21 days to appeal, and bar clubs and players from taking football disputes to ordinary national courts. A CAS award can be challenged in just one place, the Swiss Federal Tribunal, within 30 days and on five narrow grounds set by Swiss arbitration law. Fewer than one challenge in twenty succeeds.

Here is the strangest thing about 2026: you can trade the World Cup like a stock. Alongside the bookmakers, a new kind of venue has exploded, the prediction market, where you buy and sell contracts on who will win. By early June, Polymarket’s World Cup winner market alone had taken in more than $1.7 billion of trades (Polymarket), the largest soccer prediction market ever, pricing France at about 18% and Spain at about 17% to lift the trophy.

A prediction market is not quite a bet. Instead of staking against a bookmaker’s built-in margin, you trade a yes/no contract with other users on a two-sided exchange, and the price, quoted from 0 to 100%, is the implied probability. Two venues dominate, in the US and worldwide: Kalshi, a US federally-regulated exchange, and Polymarket, the crypto-native platform that grew up offshore. Both call the product a “swap,” a commodity derivative rather than gambling. The idea is old (the University of Iowa has run real-money election markets since 1988); what is new is the scale and the legal blessing. Regulated US sports contracts only began trading in early 2025, and trading volumes have since soared.

So is a World Cup contract a regulated derivative or just gambling in a new wrapper? The law has not decided. For sports the line is thin, and the real question is less “is it gambling?” than “who decides: the federal CFTC, or the states?” The same contract can be lawful in one state and prosecuted in the next, and the question looks bound for the Supreme Court.

After the courts, the statutes and the arbitrators, the clause that best shows who really runs football is the smallest of all: the one about beer. Follow the pint and the whole system appears — a sponsor rewriting a country’s law, a host pushing back, and a century of local rules about where a fan may lawfully raise a glass.

The bill they nicknamed after a beer

Budweiser has been the World Cup’s official beer since the 1986 tournament in Mexico — 40 years by 2026. Brazil, the 2014 host, had long kept alcohol out of its grounds: the rule grew from state laws (São Paulo banned stadium drink in 1996, after a fan was killed in stadium violence the year before) and ran through its 2003 Fan Statute, the Estatuto do Torcedor (amended in 2010 to spell the ban out in Article 13-A).

But beer is a sponsor’s contractual right, and FIFA treated it as a condition of hosting. Its then-secretary-general, Jérôme Valcke, put it plainly:

He went further: the right to sell beer, he said, “has to be a part of the law.” And it was. Brazil’s Lei Geral da Copa (Federal Law No. 12.663/2012, signed by President Dilma Rousseff) suspended the stadium-drink ban for FIFA’s events and reserved sales to the tournament’s official sponsors. It never ordered that beer be sold; it simply cleared what stood in the way. Watching from afar, the comedian John Oliver dubbed it the “Budweiser Bill.” A sponsorship deal had quietly rewritten a national public-safety law.

And then it ran the other way

Eight years later the same clause cut against the sponsor. Anheuser-Busch InBev had reportedly paid some $75 million to pour at Qatar 2022, then watched FIFA switch it off two days before kickoff: no alcoholic beer for ordinary fans at the eight stadiums, only alcohol-free Bud Zero on the concourse, with the real thing left to hospitality suites and the official fan zones. Budweiser’s own account posted, then hastily deleted, four words: “Well, this is awkward…” When host and sponsor finally clashed, the host won.

The pint always finds its level. In June 2026 the tournament comes home to North America, Budweiser marks four decades on the shirt, and the taps run from Vancouver to Mexico City. Wherever you watch, just check the local law before you raise it. Cheers.

Disclaimer

This longread is for general information and entertainment, and is not legal advice. Figures, dates, case citations and characterizations are simplified for a general audience and reflect developments up to the date above; sports, tax and competition law differ by country and change quickly. For advice on sponsorship, image rights, ticketing, transfers or a dispute headed for arbitration, please contact Buzko Krasnov directly.