How the World Cup has reshaped Asian neighborhoods
The tournament promises economic opportunity, but many Asian neighborhoods say they are bearing the costs while seeing few of the benefits
Protesters of the World Cup in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Courtesy of Michael Tseng
Words by Quin Nelson
The World Cup, which kicked off in 16 host cities across the United States, Canada, and Mexico on June 11, is bigger than ever. More teams, more money, and more controversy—the World Cup’s governing body, FIFA, has a long history of corruption, enough that this year’s World Cup alone has collected enough controversies to warrant its own Wikipedia page—have surrounded the weeks-long soccer tournament.
In conversations with my community, I found a disconnect—most were aware of the problems with FIFA, but those problems felt far away, on social media feeds and gilded stages with made-up prizes. There was less conversation on how those issues manifest on the ground and in the communities hosting the ongoing matches.
I found those conversations among vulnerable Asian communities in host cities, among engaged community leaders doing their best to support each other through the tournament and beyond. They shared how mega events like the World Cup accelerate existing harms, and how communities could come together to work towards safety and change.
“There’s a party in front of us, but we’re not a part of it”
One of the more polarizing narratives around large-scale events like the World Cup is that they have a positive economic impact for host cities. Seattle’s Chinatown-International District (CID), despite being just east of the city’s major sports stadiums, has often been left out of such profits. Meilani Mandery, an organizer with Seattle’s CID Coalition, remembers when Seattle hosted MLB’s All-Star Weekend in 2023. “The city was promoting this as a big money-making opportunity,” she says. Small businesses in the CID stocked up on inventory and beefed up their staffing for a rush that never came. “All of the locals were scared to leave their homes because of the crowds, and then the crowds themselves did not patronize the neighborhood.”
Many businesses lost money, so they came into the World Cup with lower expectations. “The city and the nonprofits working with the tournament were urging businesses to add more staff and inventory during the tournament, but lots of owners were pretty skeptical,” says Vince Vu, owner of Anh O’i Bake Shop.
"Protect Our Pitch 206" banner created for a protest in Seattle.
Courtesy of Seattle's CID Coalition
I spoke with eight businesses in the CID on June 18, with the United States playing Australia less than a mile away. A couple nearest the stadium were enjoying more business, with most seeing their usual traffic or less; few fans were coming in, and locals and office workers were staying away. “We’re a family owned small business, and to have four people on staff for four to five more hours is a big deal,” says Cory Castagno, manager of Gan Bei Eatery and Bar in the CID. “We’re happy to make this space for people to watch the games and enjoy our food, but financially, it’s not helping us.”
Many neighborhood residents also feel that these games are not for their benefit; Mandery points to infrastructure put in for the Cup including public toilets and trash cans that members of the CID have long asked for that will be removed after the tournament. “All of this is temporary, none of this is here to stay,” she says, fueling a feeling that the city is using the neighborhood without investing in it. “We are seen as a marketing opportunity, not a neighborhood.”
Kwan Ling, an organizer with the Seattle-based and equity-focused organization Puget Sound Sage, noticed an absence of multilingual materials that have left many elders uninformed on how the World Cup disrupts transit and other aspects of their daily lives. The United States-Belgium quarterfinal on Monday was screened in the CID’s Hing Hay Park, where neighborhood elders often congregate; a massive crowd surrounded the screen while elders sat in the back, too far to see. “My biggest feeling is that there's a party in front of us, but we are not part of it,” says Ling. Still, these elders have worked alongside organizers flyering and tabling to inform folks about the tournament’s impacts.
For organizers who are grounded in their communities and see all their needs and opportunities, it can be painful to see the enormous public investment into the World Cup fan experience. “If we had infinite money, I would not care that the city is spending however much on the World Cup,” says Mandery. “But we don't have infinite money, and the money that is being funneled towards the World Cup is money that our communities need.”
“An opportunity to remove poor people”
Protesters in front of the stadium in Los Angeles.
Courtesy of NOlympicsLA
These smaller acts of exclusion serve as microcosms for larger exclusions. Eric Sheehan, an organizer with NOlympicsLA, points out how the World Cup and other large sporting events are used to exclude communities permanently. “Every mega event, every development is used as an opportunity to remove poor people,” he says, which LA organizers are focused on resisting as a host city for both this World Cup and the 2028 Summer Olympics.
I walked through Chinatown in Los Angeles on June 28 while Canada played South Africa on the big screen at the FIFA Fan Zone at nearby Union Station. Unlike Seattle’s CID, it was largely business as usual at Chinatown’s shops, as the match was being played across town.
But the influence of these events still loomed large; the neighborhood’s northern neighbor is Dodgers Stadium, which the city demolished three Mexican American neighborhoods to build. Now developers are looking to take advantage of the upcoming Olympics through special exemptions to expedite the approval process for Olympic-related development projects, pushing to further gentrify Chinatown with a gondola that will slash over the neighborhood and add an expensive housing development that will replace a hospital that long offered vital services to locals.
Communities across the country are resisting these developments, much as they have throughout history. One of the Seattle CID’s most galvanizing moments of activism was protesting the Kingdome in 1972, which the neighborhood parlayed into housing and social services. “Everything we have in this neighborhood, we fought for,” says Yin Yiu, an organizer with Protect Our Pitch 206, an organization with which I’ve participated in through neighborhood support activities.
“You can’t go in or out without being tracked”
While in many ways, Asian communities have felt unseen by the World Cup, they are being heavily surveilled. “With international visitors coming to one place, it implicates not just local police or county or state, but also the national security infrastructure. Both travelers to the United States as well as people who live in the cities where games take place are under a drastically increased amount of surveillance,” says Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst with the San Francisco-based digital civil liberties nonprofit Electronic Frontiers Foundation.
That carries extra concern for Asian communities with many immigrant visitors and residents “The Department of Homeland Security, which is undoubtedly going to be a key player in securing the games, how much of their information do they plan to feed to ICE? I imagine it is quite a lot,” says Guariglia. ICE arrests have recently surged, with 10,000 arrests over five days in late June.
Guariglia also points out the bias built into some technology, adding, “Facial recognition technology carries with it a real risk of misidentification specifically for people of color, and even more specifically for Black people,” which can lead to false arrests.
In Seattle, Mayor Katie Wilson recently chose to turn on Stadium District surveillance cameras alongside the many cameras in the neighboring CID. “To have an immigrant neighborhood in which you can't go in or out of without being tracked is really concerning,” says Mandery.
“Asian Americans should be particularly concerned because they have always been tarred with the reputation of dual loyalty. In the eyes of the national security state…there is more reason to scrutinize your behavior.”
Surveillance risks extend beyond the immediate physical space around the World Cup. Guariglia is monitoring heightened online surveillance in host cities, especially for folks whose activity extends internationally. “Asian Americans should be particularly concerned because they have always been tarred with the reputation of dual loyalty. In the eyes of the national security state…there is more reason to scrutinize your behavior,” he says, encouraging folks to educate themselves on protecting themselves from online spying.
Guariglia advocates for holding entities accountable for what happens to tournament-related surveillance infrastructure after the tournament. “I think it's up to communities to work with local lawmakers to make sure that that infrastructure comes down,” he says. “I also think that it's up to local lawmakers to protect immigrants who might live in communities where World Cup games are being played.”
Much of this protection has been taken on by communities themselves; organizers I spoke with described the ecosystems they’ve created with Know Your Rights campaigns, rapid response networks, political education programs, and the simple, hard work of building relationships among neighbors. “Community organizing has had more impact on safety in the neighborhood (than police or surveillance), because they set the groundwork,” says Castagno, manager at Seattle’s Gan Bei Eatery and Bar.
“No relationships, no curiosity”
Increased surveillance and policing leaves groups like Asian massage workers increasingly vulnerable to over-criminalization. Often unlicensed because of systemic barriers, they are seen as illegitimate and conflated with trafficking victims, which is dangerous when local government and law enforcement are looking to present their cities as “clean” to visitors.
In Pierce County, south of Seattle, 45 massage parlors and spas were recently shut down for fire code violations, threatening the livelihoods of massage workers and stigmatizing their workplaces. “We have been responding to raids for almost 10 years, and what we know is that we need relationships with workers to understand the impact, and these folks (law enforcement) have no relationships, no curiosity,” says Rosanna Sze, an organizer with the Massage Parlor Organizing Project and a friend who has introduced me to much of the organizing activity in the CID.
Crystal Laderas is the communications manager for SWAN Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada, which supports immigrant and migrant women and gender diverse people engaged in indoor sex work; about 90 percent of the community SWAN works with is East Asian. SWAN opted to temporarily close their office, which is near World Cup activity in Vancouver, British Columbia, while increasing their outreach to continue in-person services to a community particularly vulnerable to criminalization and deportation.
Yarrow Society is a Vancouver-based community that supports low-income immigrants.
Courtesy of Michael Tseng
Large-scale events present a high risk to sex workers because they can be mistaken for trafficking victims. “It's been a long myth that (trafficking) spikes during these mega events, like the Olympics and the World Cup. It's been debunked over and over again…But we see that police and NGOs are encouraging everyone…to report a wide range of activities as human trafficking to the police,” says Laderas. Reportable activities can be as broad as having two cell phones, nice hair, or expensive clothes.
This rise in reporting benefits policing, not communities. “If you generate a lot of calls, it creates more data and more moral panic around trafficking so that police can continue and justify doing raids and operations that target immigrant and migrant sex workers,” she says.
Increased policing creates new norms that have impacts beyond any one event, which Vancouver has seen after the 2010 Winter Olympics and 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup.
“Mega events normalize increased policing, which ends up being a permanent change in the neighborhood,” says Beverly Ho, executive director of the Vancouver-based Yarrow Society, which supports youth and low-income immigrant seniors in Chinatown and the Downtown Eastside.
In Los Angeles, for example, the violent police tactics implemented during the 1984 Summer Olympics continued after the Games, setting the stage for the 1992 Watts riots that devastated Black and Asian communities. “Federal agencies and local agencies like LAPD…they're all using the state of exception that comes with an event that has a timeline to force through changes that people would normally never accept,” says Sheehan.
LA, like all World Cup host cities, has a National Special Security Event designation, although LA’s is exceptionally long since it is also hosting the Summer Olympics in two years. That heightened security was clearly established at the Union Station FIFA Fan Zone, where there were several groups of police officers and DHS personnel; as I tried to watch the match alongside other fans, I couldn’t help but feel them watching us.
“We can imagine something more beautiful”
When people understand the histories of violence of these large sporting events, and their accompanying legacies of resistance, the status quo feels less acceptable and alternatives feel more possible. “You can't break the cycle if you don't know the cycle,” says Mandery. “Using history is a way to get people in that critical mindset, and so we don't have to wait for another World Cup for people to be like, ‘Wait a minute, this is problematic!’”
This also doesn’t mean that the World Cup is entirely bad; as many folks I spoke with emphasized, soccer is—as it is nicknamed—a beautiful game, and the joy this World Cup has brought is real. But we can have that joy without the exclusion, the surveillance, the policing; there is a great deal of possibility in considering a different World Cup that could truly benefit everyone. “Nothing is inevitable. (FIFA’s) continued hold over power of these spaces is not inevitable. And we can imagine something more beautiful,” says Sheehan.
Published on July 10, 2026
Words by Quin Nelson
Quin Nelson is a writer, painter, and educator in the Pacific Northwest. They like reading, running, and making jokes with their friends.