PNE Amphitheatre Cost Soars to $184M—Triple Original Estimate
According to documents released by the City of Vancouver, city council voted to appropriate a further $46 million towards the new PNE Amphitheatre, which is set to be used to host Vancouver’s Fan Festival during the FIFA World Cup in June and July 2026. The council took this vote in mid-May of 2025, but it has remained under wraps until recently. This was due to the city council meeting being “in-camera.” In-camera meetings are legally allowed to be confidential under BC’s Community Charter when they involve things like:
Financial negotiations
Land/Real-Estate matters
Contractual negotiations
Staffing/business relations
Major capital project budgets, especially for a city-owned asset (the PNE Amphitheatre) tied to third-party partners and World Cup hosting, often fall under these confidentiality rules.
The city originally estimated the cost for the project to be $65 million in 2021. In 2024, this was increased to $137 million. Now, the total cost is expected to be a whopping $184 million.
FIFA upgrades way over budget
The PNE Ampitheatre is not the only project seeing revised budget increases. Earlier this year, the BC government stated that it projects the total cost for the province, the city of Vancouver, and the BC Pavilion Corporation (PavCo) to be between $532 million and $624 million, with a net cost range of $85 million to $145 million.
While the ampitheatre project cost is high, it is nothing compared to the construction costs of BC Place and Rogers Arena when they were built in the early 1980s and mid-1990s. This makes sense as these are much bigger venues with way more responsibilities and bandwidth compared to the amphitheatre, such as hosting the Canucks, the Whitecaps, and doing concerts.
Despite these price concerns, City Councillor Pete Fry, in a statement to the Vancouver Sun, said he was “not especially happy,” but this was “where we’re at.” It appears that FIFA expenses are a fait accompli for the Province and the City of Vancouver, with any costs, no matter how excessive, being viewed as worthwhile.
FIFA World Cup not seen as an economic booster, studies show
There is very little evidence to suggest that hosting major international events like the World Cup or the Olympics results in large economic growth. A study done in 2022, named “Sports Mega-Events and Economic Growth: A Synthetic Control Approach,” which is located in the Journal of Sports Economics, found that after quantitative economic analysis of the Olympics and the World Cup events from 2010-2016, there was no “significant effect of hosting sports mega-events such as the FIFA World Cup and the Olympic Games on economic growth.”
Hosting the World Cup and the Olympics is also going to cities and countries that are no longer small but already have well-established tourist markets, in addition to built-in or easy-to-build athlete facilities. It would be difficult to assess the long-term ramifications of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris or the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, as those are already large tourist hubs. The 2026 FIFA World Cup, to be hosted in Canada, the United States, and Mexico, will likely not change that.
Vancouver is hosting seven matches for the 2026 FIFA World Cup at BC Place.
