At Super Bowl 58 in 2024, NFL sponsor Visa could discuss how both football and the Olympics helped its strategy for the 2026 World Cup, as if it had all the time in the world.
This week, with less than a year until the first World Cup matches kick off in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, Visa has its eyes on the game clock and is already making big marketing plays.
Tonight at the FIFA World Cup 2026 Reception at the Visa Payments Vault near the company’s offices in Washington, D.C., Visa announced its plans to give its cardholders around the globe exclusive early access to World Cup tickets through its Visa Presale Draw. From September 10-19, Visa cardholders can register for the randomized selection process for the opportunity to purchase tickets before the general public.
Visa cardholders with a Visa Debit, Visa Credit or reloadable Visa prepaid cards are eligible for the draw. Cardholders will need a FIFA ID to participate and are encouraged to visit FIFA.com/tickets to create their ID, if they don’t already have one. Those chosen for tickets will be notified by email starting no earlier than September 30 and given a dedicated time slot in October to purchase available tickets on a first-come, first-served basis.
The early ticket draw is just one of the offerings that Visa will be bringing to cardholders and businesses within the next year as FIFA’s global Official Payment Technology Partner. From teaming up with other brands and organizations to build soccer fields to coming up with activations, programs, and payment strategies across its other sports sponsorships, Visa has spent the last few years learning just how much is required to welcome the world to your brand’s doorstep—or doorsteps, in the case of the World Cup’s host cities.
“These are all cities, but they’re also local communities,” said Kim Lawrence, Visa’s regional president of North America. “These cities are going to be hosting literally millions of people from around the world who are going to be staying in hotels and Airbnbs, dining, shopping, and taking in these big events, so they’ll become part of those communities for a period of time.”
From pitch to payment
Visa plans to be a strong presence on the ground in those host cities once cardholders arrive. In June in San Francisco—near Visa’s headquarters and about 45 miles from the World Cup host site at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif.—Visa teamed with Bank of America and Street Soccer USA to open the first of six soccer parks throughout the United States. Each park will feature two professional-grade fields, lighting, digital scoreboards, learning centers, and spectator seating areas—with new facilities heading to Denver in August, Kansas City in September, New York in October, Nashville in November, and Atlanta sometime in winter.
Under Street Soccer USA’s guidance, each park will host youth and adult leagues, as well as programs including after-school academic support and job training.
“It’s a way to bring all of these different communities together and help provide some very basic services and needs in a fun, interactive, and engaging way that brings some positivity to both youth and adults,” Lawrence said.
Visa has also begun building a team to help it create a presence on the ground, signing Spain and FC Barcelona striker Lamine Yamal as a global ambassador while also serving as an official partner of the U.S. men’s soccer team. While the company hasn’t disclosed just how it would use players and teams during watch parties, appearances, and activations, Visa’s full slate of partnerships, including a Formula 1 race team, the NFL’s 2026 Super Bowl in Visa’s Bay Area backyard, and the upcoming 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, provide ample opportunity to promote Visa’s role in the North American soccer tournament.
Even before setting loose its stars, those other sports sponsorships have helped Visa draw 100 to 120 small businesses to events like its Digital Empowerment Program, which sees Visa team up with nonprofit Human-I-T to bring free laptops and both skills and financial literacy training to individuals and businesses.
“I promise you that you’ll see programs like that across all of the 16 cities that we have planned for FIFA, as well as around the Super Bowl as well,” Lawrence said. “We do those programs increasingly with small businesses and local communities.”
The beautiful games
Sports tentpoles also help Visa tweak its contactless payment options ahead of the North American World Cup. The company has worked with its NFL team partners, the Olympics in Paris, and, since 2007, with FIFA on men’s and women’s World Cup events.
Visa
At the last men’s World Cup in Qatar, Visa was able to cull data from all World Cup venues and found 70% of all transactions were on Visa cards, 88% of transactions made with those cards were contactless, and overall spending was up 39% from the 2018 World Cup and 300% from 2014.
After roughly five years of contactless payment in the U.S., Visa noted that roughly 65% of its digital payment transactions here are tapped at the point of sale, with NFL facilities helping Visa prepare to welcome a world that’s come to expect easy payment options at sporting events.
“That’s a key part of what’s going to happen in these cities across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico: We’re going to have this influx of cardholders from around the world, and nearly every market has Visa cards and mobile phones that are capable of tapping,” Lawrence said. “If the U.S. had the World Cup in play here five years ago, it would have been a very different experience, but this is not our first rodeo with these big events and, in places like the Olympics, we even have exclusive Visa acceptance, so getting ourselves ready with all of our partners is a muscle that we’ve built over 20-ish years.”