The State Department expanded the bond programme to 50 countries on 2 April and admitted seven days later it had not modelled the impact. The original travel ban bars fans from four qualified nations outright; the bond programme layers financial barriers on top of that.
The Council on Foreign Relations independently identified at least nine qualified World Cup nations whose fans face outright bans or significant barriers, 18.75% of the 48-team field. The admission is a governance gap, not a stated policy position: expanding programme scope without baseline measurement contradicts standard performance metrics guidance. When attendance figures arrive in July, neither the government nor FIFA will have a counterfactual to measure against.
South Africa's 2010 approach (waiving visa requirements for all ticket holders and receiving 300,000 international visitors) represents the policy inverse. The current US trajectory is the opposite on every dimension.
North Texas's $2 billion economic projection now stands as an untested assumption. No government body has modelled how many of the projected 6 million visitors come from the 50 bond-programme countries.
