The 2026 FIFA World Cup is being hosted across 16 different cities in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. The city hosting the most games is Dallas, with 9 matches. Supposedly, this is because the city has a nice stadium with a retractable roof and capacity for 70,649 people, and Dallas is a fairly central location for a tournament being hosted across North America.

But here's another way of looking at the stadiums. The School of Cities at the University of Toronto recently published a study called "Transit-Oriented Stadiums." What they did was look at how well connected each stadium is to its host city by public transit. More specifically, they looked at how many people live within a 60-minute public transit isochrone polygon.

Dallas Stadium (AT&T Stadium) is in Arlington, Texas, and it has about 100,000 residents within a 60-minute transit trip:

Now, here's Toronto. BMO Field has a much smaller capacity (43,036 people), but over 2 million residents live within a 60-minute transit trip:

Mexico City's transit catchment reaches over 2.1 million people, despite its stadium being out of the core of the city:

And Vancouver takes the top spot with over 2.3 million people:

These diagrams highlight a striking divide in land-use patterns. The two key factors are stadium placement and transit investment. Obviously, if you flipped the script and mapped the number of residents within a 60-minute drive, then Dallas Stadium would perform quite differently. But bringing 70,000 people to one location via cars will never match the spatial efficiency of public transit.

Cover photo by Ronin

Diagrams from the School of Cities at the University of Toronto