The Internal Revenue Service has completed the 2026 FIFA World Cup with a perfect record, having collected or initiated withholding proceedings against every player, coach, referee, physiotherapist, and kit manager who set foot on US soil during the tournament. Spain lifted the trophy. The IRS lifted everything else.
The agency’s tournament statistics are, by any measure, historic. Forty-eight teams entered. Forty-eight teams were taxed. Seven hundred and thirty-six players received or will receive Form 1042-S. Thirty per cent federal withholding was applied to all US-source income, which the IRS defines as “anything that happened while you were here, including standing.”
Spain’s $50 million winner’s prize is subject to proportional allocation based on matches played on US soil. The formula, total earnings multiplied by US matches divided by total matches, was agreed upon by the IRS, Canada’s CRA, and Mexico’s SAT in what sources describe as “the only moment of international cooperation at this tournament that actually worked.”
Previous World Cup hosts, South Africa, Brazil, Russia, and Qatar, all granted blanket tax exemptions for participating teams and players. The United States did not. FIFA was aware of this when it awarded the tournament. FIFA bid anyway. When asked why, a source within FIFA said: “The revenue projections were very exciting. We did not read the footnotes.”
The final was played in New Jersey, a state that does not honour international tax treaties at the state level. This means that even players whose countries have bilateral agreements with the US may still owe New Jersey state income tax on earnings from the match. Spain has a treaty with the US. Argentina does not. The losing finalist may therefore owe more to the IRS than the winning one, a result that analysts describe as “the most American outcome possible.”
New Jersey tax officials briefly considered issuing “jeopardy assessments,” a mechanism to seize prize money before players left the country, but rejected the idea as “impractical,” a word that in tax law means “we wanted to but couldn’t do it at the airport.”
Philadelphia, which hosted a Round of 16 match, applied its 3.43% city jock tax to all participating athletes. The players were informed of this via a document none of them read, in a language several of them do not speak, about a tax that exists nowhere else in international football.
FIFA negotiated a federal tax exemption for national federations’ prize money. It did not negotiate one for players. When asked about this, a FIFA spokesperson said: “We protected the institutions. The individuals are encouraged to consult a tax professional.”
The Brussels Monitor’s editorial board has reviewed its own tax exposure. We covered the tournament from Brussels using American search engines. We are monitoring the situation.