Visa and Bank of America Want Merchants to Get World Cup-Ready

In the United States, it is easy to think the Super Bowl is the biggest sporting event on earth. It is the loudest thing on the calendar here. But the FIFA World Cup plays in a different league: bigger, longer, more international and far more impactful to how people move and spend. The Super Bowl is a big game and a big event, for sure. But for merchants in North America, the World Cup isn’t a game. It’s a commercial surge that will demand an education of the culture of “football” and a lot of planning.

When the 2026 tournament arrives in North America on June 11, it will be more than a sports spectacle. It will be a six-week commerce machine stretching across borders, cities, neighborhoods, airports, restaurants, hotels, bars, transit systems and checkout counters.

Ross McCall, executive director of commercial operations for FIFA World Cup 2026, laid out the scale: This edition spans three countries, 16 host cities, and 48 teams, up from 32 in the last tournament in 2022. The audience, he said, will top 5 billion fans engaged across the globe in addition to the 6 million in the stands. That is not a one-day demand spike. It is a rolling surge.

“This is the largest FIFA World Cup that we’ve had in history, but I think this will actually be the largest sporting event in history,” McCall said as part of a recent PYMNTS panel discussion on retail opportunities surrounding the tournament.

How’s that for scale? It leads to a simple conclusion: Merchants have a huge opportunity, but only if they become World Cup-ready.

McCall urged businesses to stop treating the tournament like “a multiweek sports festival” and start seeing it as “prolonged economic activation windows” with “six weeks of kind of concentrated consumer spending.”

Preparation is key. FIFA is working with global partners like Visa and Bank of America to ensure merchants — from street vendors to multinational brands — are ready to accept payments seamlessly, securely and at scale.

The merchants that win, he said, will be the ones that plan inventory, staffing, experience design and marketing for a long, international event, not a weekend rush.

Survive or Prosper

Steve Twombly, managing director in Global Payments Solutions at Bank of America, framed the choice in crisp terms: “You can survive, or you can prosper.”

Survival means your business does not break when demand surges. Prospering means using that surge to create repeat business after the crowds go home. Not every merchant will have the same opening, he said. Proximity to a stadium matters. Category matters. But the first job is knowing where you sit in the event map and pressure-testing for what is coming.

Twombly’s checklist was practical. Do you have the staff? The inventory? Have you stress-tested the technology? Can your payments setup move people through quickly?

“Have you considered card-only lines?” he asked. “Are you ready to accept potentially foreign currency. … Have you reduced the amount of prompts at the end of your checkout in order to make certain that you can speed people through?”

He also pointed to operating details many U.S. merchants still treat as optional, including pay-at-the-table in restaurants and different customer verification habits around chip-and-PIN transactions.

Andrea Fairchild, senior vice president of global sponsorship strategy at Visa, widened the lens. Retailers, she said, should stop picturing the opportunity as the moment fans enter a stadium and start thinking about the entire experience.

“The fan journey doesn’t just start at the stadium,” she said. “And it doesn’t end there, either. Fans will be navigating airports, transit, hotels, restaurants, pop-ups, small businesses, neighborhood bars, retail … long before and really after match day.” This is not one big spending spike, according to Fairchild. “It is a chain of spending moments.”

Those moments happen quickly. Fans are on tight schedules, in unfamiliar places, making snap decisions. In that environment, frictionless commerce becomes a competitive edge, not a back-office detail.

“It’s a global audience with a lot of local expectations,” Fairchild said. Visitors will arrive with different payment habits, different assumptions and different ideas about what a smooth checkout looks like. The merchants that win, she said, will balance “global readiness with the local personality of their area.”

Visa’s view of the biggest friction points is straightforward: speed, flexibility and reliability. Speed matters because tournament demand does not rise gradually; it surges. Flexibility matters because one fixed register or one rigid acceptance method can become a bottleneck in seconds. Reliability matters because internet congestion, power issues and frozen systems are common in exactly these kinds of high-volume moments.

Fairchild’s advice to merchants was clear: “Don’t try to operate normally but faster; really switch into event mode, test your systems under stress; really simplify your flows and train your teams that payment process should really feel invisible and the experience is what really kind of stays at the front and center.”

Cultural Differences

That same logic applies to culture, not just checkout. One of the biggest mistakes North American stakeholders can make, McCall warned, is assuming FIFA World Cup fans will behave like a domestic American sports crowd. “It won’t, and they won’t,” he said.

Merchants will be serving supporters from 48 qualifying nations, speaking dozens of languages and carrying different expectations around timing, hospitality and payments. Fairchild said the answer is not flashy technology. It is clarity.

“They want familiarity in how they pay, even when everything else around them might be new and different,” she said. Simple signage. Clear payment icons. Straightforward pricing. Sensitivity to tipping norms and service expectations. When international fans feel comfortable, she said, “They stay longer, and they will spend more.”

Twombly agreed, with one added note from the banking side: Merchants may see payment brands and verification habits that feel less familiar than what they usually encounter. The goal is not to force visitors into a domestic checkout script. It is to “make everything simple, meet the customers where they are, understand what that’s going to look like for them, and try to ease them through the experience.”

The Halo Effect

The opportunity also extends beyond the 16 host cities. McCall expects the halo effect to travel farther than many people think because fans will not just fly in, watch a match and leave. They are likely to stay seven to 10 days, travel regionally and spend between games. He also warned that the days between matches are often underplanned. Fans will be touring, eating, exploring and shopping, and as the tournament moves deeper into the knockout rounds, intensity may rise instead of fade.

For retailers outside host markets, that creates a different kind of opening. Twombly’s advice was to build community around the sport itself. Soccer, he noted, is one of the most actively played youth sports in the United States. Even businesses far from a stadium can create promotions, watch parties, partnerships with local clubs, themed experiences and reasons for fans to gather. The point is not to pretend you are in a host city. It is to tap into the celebration and make your business part of it.

Then comes the question too many event-driven businesses forget: What happens after the final whistle? Here, both Visa and Bank of America pointed out that the real payoff may come after the tournament, not just during it.

Fairchild said the biggest mistake is “treating the event as the finish line.” The days right after the tournament are when merchants decide whether the surge becomes sustained growth or disappears. Her suggestions were simple: follow up while memories are fresh, send thank-you messages, use photos to remind customers of the experience, and quickly analyze what sold, when demand peaked and where customers came from.

Twombly made the same case for fast follow-up. Know who visited. Meet them where they are. Then act quickly. “Can you follow up while the audiences are still warm to the event?” he asked. “Find a way to get them to come back within seven to 10, 14 days.” Keep the energy going. Build a community. Turn visitors into advocates.

That may be the clearest way to think about the FIFA World Cup as a merchant: not as a burst of tourism, but as a brand-building platform with unusually high emotional energy. Fans will remember the goals and the atmosphere. They will also remember where checkout was painless, where service felt welcoming, and where the experience felt easy.

McCall summed it up best: “Merchants who really kind of treat this purely as a sporting occasion will probably leave significant revenue on the table. But those who kind of treat this as a business catalyst — planning inventory, staffing, experience design and marketing — I think are the ones that will benefit after the fact.”