Issue 6 established the topline: host-city corridor economic activity up 6.3% in aggregate during the tournament window, with a distribution problem underneath the average. This piece is the September close-out. With the tournament fully concluded and initial post-event data beginning to surface, the question shifts from how much activity the tournament generated to how much of that activity is still there now that it is over.

The 6.3 percent figure, drawn from Bank of America Institute's card-spending analysis across host cities, was the strongest metro-level reading in more than four years and a positive surprise nobody had modeled. Visa's Canadian matchday data told a compatible story at a different scale: spending up as much as 24.6 percent in Toronto and 12.7 percent in Vancouver against the comparable 2025 period. Both readings are real. Both are metro-level. Neither tells you what happened on a specific corridor after the final whistle, and that is the gap September is supposed to close.

The distribution problem Issue 6 named is now testable. Kansas City documented the sharpest version of it: operators in the Crossroads, the Westside, Westport, and North Kansas City reported same-store declines of roughly 10 to 12 percent during a period when the metro card panel was up. That gap between a positive citywide reading and negative corridor readings is not a measurement error. It is the predictable geometry of an event that concentrated foot traffic inside a defined footprint and suppressed it everywhere else. The September question is whether the corridors that were suppressed during the tournament revert to baseline once the footprint pressure is gone, or whether the suppression persisted into the weeks after.

The corridors that did well during the tournament were the ones a district built a reason to detour to. Seattle's Chinatown-International District ran a record-setting dim sum event timed to the tournament and saw a 10 percent pedestrian increase built on programming rather than spillover. Downtown Van BIA's initiated Granville Street closure was the model Issue 5 identified: a district that funded and organized a street closure itself rather than hosting whatever foot traffic a nearby stadium produced. The September test for both is whether the elevated activity held into the weeks after the final, or whether it reverted the moment the programming ended and the closure came down.

For sponsors and brand teams, the close-out has one actionable implication. A metro-level card panel is not an activation ROI measurement and should never be accepted as one. If a district or a host committee brings you a 6.3 percent figure as evidence that your activation worked, that figure is evidence the city was busy. It says nothing about whether the corridor you paid for converted, and it says nothing about whether the conversion lasted past the trophy ceremony. The districts that come out of this tournament with durable sponsor relationships are the ones that show up with corridor-level measurement already in place, which is a capital expenditure to make this fall, not a proposal line to write next spring.

Source: Issue 6 CC ("The Full Receipts: 6.3 Percent Across Host Cities, and the Distribution Problem Underneath It"); Bank of America Institute; Visa press release, August 4, 2026; Axios Kansas City; KCUR.