Attendance for the tournament is being reported at 6,810,966, some 99.7% of average stadium capacity and roughly 65,400 a match, against 3.59 million across 64 matches at the 1994 tournament1. The figure is attributed to FIFA (world football's governing body). It reached the public through wire pickups, chiefly AFP (Agence France-Presse) carried by the Bangladeshi news agency BSS (Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha), and one of those wire summaries states plainly that no official post-final figures were available from FIFA at the time of writing2, with FIFA's last confirmed number standing at 6.6 million through the third-place playoff. The wires do not quite agree with one another on the per-match average either, quoting 65,351 and 65,490.
The revenue line needs a firmer qualifier still. FIFA's wording, as quoted by AFP, is that it anticipates record revenues exceeding seven billion euros, around eight billion dollars, for 20263. Anticipates. That is a projection for the calendar year, not closed and audited revenue, and a reader who files it as money in the bank has been misled by the phrasing rather than by the number. The 56% rise on the 2022 Qatar cycle is at least a clean like-for-like, revenue against revenue.
One figure in the set does stand on firmer ground. Prize money to the competing federations came to $871m, confirmed independently through a breakdown from CNBC (the US financial broadcaster), with $12.5m guaranteed per team and the rest scaling to the champion's share4. That is disbursed cash with recipients who can count it.
AFP's wire copy, not a FIFA release, is what a reader chasing the provenance of these numbers will find. Both lines are already being cited as the evidence base for arguments about the tournament's future shape. Numbers doing that much work usually arrive with a document attached. These arrived with a byline.
