New England was exploding with World Cup excitement. It was the first afternoon of Boston’s FIFA Fan Festival on City Hall Plaza, one day before the opening match in Foxborough between Haiti and Scotland.
The moment was already inherently viral, but Boston Police Department Sergeant Connor Hardy kicked it up a notch. A former defender at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire, he dazzled a roaring scrum of fans with his sweet ball-juggling skills. Within hours, videos of the impressive energetic scene—the most circulated one of which was shared directly by BPD—were viewed by millions all around the world.
On top of the international and social media attention, every major local news outlet covered the soccer cop story. Some even interviewed Hardy. What received far less attention, however, is how beyond gaining a significant wave of new followers, Boston cops banked massive sums to work overtime details in service of FIFA this past summer.
Any way you add it up, the 2026 World Cup yielded the most police overtime of any event series in Boston history.
A record-breaking overtime bonanza
A months-long spectacle like the World Cup is not only a feeding frenzy for the fans of football. In Massachusetts, the recent free-for-all also presented lucrative opportunities for first responders, along with the administrators manning the enormous law enforcement apparatus guarding the sophisticated temporary security ecosystem.
With local overall costs hitting the nine-figure range, the recent FIFA action in the Bay State was unprecedented in some spending aspects. That includes the way that tens of millions of dollars flowed from the federal government through an opaque nonprofit intermediary. We examined that peculiar arrangement in a prior article and will revisit the spending of Boston Soccer 2026 Corp., aka the FIFA World Cup Boston Host Committee, in further coverage.
In the meantime, we continue seeking the receipts for claims made by Gov. Maura Healey and her deputies after the final World Cup match in Foxborough back in July. Her administration’s boasting noted that authorities “maintained rapid tactical response capabilities through 145 TACOPS activations, including eight Quick Reaction Force deployments,” and “provided continuous aerial law enforcement support through the State Police Air Wing, conducting surveillance, operational flights and civil unrest response missions,” among other unspecified feats.
While waiting on details about those vague law enforcement accomplishments, we started to reveal various improprieties around the tournament. And the latest batch of documents, obtained via public information request from the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security (EOPSS), starts to clarify how the City of Boston, the biggest recipient of the largest World Cup grant, spent its share on “specialized response units, command-level coordination, and support for fan marches, viewing events, transportation hubs, and the Boston 2026 Special Events Coordination Center.” (You can view all the documents we received about Boston here.)
According to a Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism analysis, adjusting for cumulative inflation, the city likely allocated more on police overtime pay during the FIFA run than it ever has for any other defined series of events, planned or unplanned. That means Boston alone apparently spent more on BPD OT for the 2026 World Cup than it did for the 2004 Democratic National Convention, more than five times more than during the trial and sentencing of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and even more than it did throughout three months of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and Occupy Boston in 2011 combined.
Who got World Cup funding and who didn’t
When funding was finally parsed for this year’s World Cup, there were several stacks of money made available to Massachusetts stakeholder entities, from the state’s Department of Fire Services to small cities hosting watch parties. The biggest pot of all was the plainly named FIFA World Cup Grant Program (FWCGP). In addition to its total award value of $46 million, the “competitive opportunity … to support safety and security needs” was unique in that it did not require applicants to match awards dollar-for-dollar, like other World Cup-related funding opportunities.
With so much money on the table, applicants rushed in. Documents provided to BINJ show the Office of Grants and Research (OGR) under the EOPSS issued rejections to more than 10 municipalities—many of them close to Foxborough like Mansfield, Wrentham, and Walpole, the latter of which unsuccessfully applied to fund resources ranging from first-aid kits to “mass decontamination gowns.” The Massachusetts National Guard was also denied funding, as was the Norfolk County Sheriff’s Office and at least one private security firm. All of the notification letters note that the grantmakers received $94 million in funding requests, but only had $46 million to spread around, “resulting in many commendable applicants not being supported.”
At the top of the list of successful grant recipients were the Mass State Police and the City of Boston, who combined received more than half of the FWCGP pie ($23,254,865.94 between the two). This centralization of funding meant smaller communities which endured local traffic and EMS strains were effectively dissed. A city worker in one southern Mass town who spoke anonymously said the flatout denial of neighboring first responders was “shocking,” especially in light of which entities won out.
In prior coverage, we scrutinized how FWCGP dollars moved, namely through the nonprofit Boston Soccer 2026 Corp. Until now, we were unable to see what these millions of dollars in federal funds were actually used for, but with more documents in our possession after months of delays by the state, the spending picture is beginning to come into focus. This article specifically explores the security and safety funding allocation to the City of Boston.
What Boston Asked For vs. What It Received
In its application for FWCGP funding, Boston submitted a budget request of $23,405,899.42. The total federal award from DHS/FEMA for the entire commonwealth was only $46 million, which means that Boston alone asked for more than half of the entire pot. When the allocations were announced, the capital saw its subaward scaled down to about $12.5 million—much less than officials asked for, but still more than a quarter of the funds in play and a sizable chunk to burn on police and special event coordination.
The single largest item in Boston’s entire grant submission was for BPD “Field Security Overtime,” initially budgeted at roughly $14 million. Specifically, this chunk was for “additional shifts for sworn officers to staff match days, FanFest, 14 fan marches, and bus transportation hubs while maintaining routine policing operations citywide.” Grant reviewers deflated that dream down to $8.5 million, the “partial” amount reimbursed to the city according to documents provided by the state.
We asked the City of Boston and BPD about World Cup overtime (you can read our whole exchange with the latter here). The administration of Mayor Michelle Wu did not respond at all. A police spokesperson furnished a list showing “the cost of OT which was reimbursed through the Federal Grant we received through EOPSS.” That amount is roughly $5 million for nearly 60,000 hours worked across 11 categories, from “Admin Support” to “Hotel Security” and “South Station Queuing.”
The difference between what they said was federally subsidized and what Boston requested is staggering; for example, BPD asked for the feds to cover 16,000 hours of Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC) coverage, but told BINJ the department was only reimbursed for fewer than 7,000 hours. The rest is hazy; beyond that $5 million disclosure, neither BPD nor the city clarified how much was ultimately spent on overtime, or how the costs were covered beyond what is reimbursed from grants.
Boston police World Cup duty assignments
Regarding the parsing of duties, most of the millions in BPD overtime wasn’t for basic boots-on-the-ground security. For that, Boston asked for nearly half a million dollars in grant funding for Municipal Protective Services to cover 11,424 overtime hours for City Hall Plaza protection. While some uniformed Boston cops were seen playing soccer, such uniform sightings were rare, despite officers billing the feds for more than 33,000 hours at Fan Fest. Department sources told BINJ that many dressed in street clothes to avoid making a militarized scene, accounting for the lack of a visible presence.
Other BPD hires worked details for teams and behind the scenes, while one group broadly scanned for threats from online to the streets, tracks, and roads connecting Boston to the heart of the action in Foxborough and every last FIFA valve, vein, and ventricle. It was important work and all parties involved objectively kept people safe throughout the games. What’s unclear is how much they spent doing it.
Most of the remaining Boston slice was for other law enforcement details. The city requested $65,000 for “proactive” human trafficking enforcement, and $1.36 million for 50 BRIC detectives dedicated to behavioral observation and suspicious activity analysis, alongside $94,000 for intelligence command post analysts and supervisors. In its application, BPD additionally asked for more than $28,000 for drug enforcement investigation overtime during the four weeks leading up to the opening matches, plus $1.4 million for “Mobile Field Force” training, and $314,000 for “Public Order Platoon” crowd-control training.
Taxpayers also furnished various police amenities. Despite supervisors grabbing north of $100 an hour in overtime pay, the budget for the Boston Special Events Coordination Center on the South Boston waterfront included $145,000 in “food catering services” “to feed 50–100 staff members daily,” and $127,800 “to procure parking spaces for roughly 100 vehicles over a 45-day period.” That’s in addition to the $500,000-plus planned for equipment at that site.
Imaginary economic benefits versus overlooked costs
Going by the city’s application, with police overtime pay and training accounting for a significant chunk of Boston’s FWCGP funding, most of the rest of the hub’s $12.5 million allotment was split between Boston Emergency Medical Services, the Boston Fire Department for “protester extrication teams” and tending to “fan parades of up to 10,000 on [the] streets of Boston,” and other emergency management expenses. BPD requested $60,000 for an all-terrain forklift to reconfigure concrete, steel, and wooden barriers in real time along parade routes and perimeter locations.
To date, there has been zero public dialogue about these costs. Other than coverage of some minor noise about an outstanding pledge of one million dollars from FIFA that Boston Mayor Michelle Wu noted, no Massachusetts media outside of BINJ has questioned World Cup spending. For context, we previously turned to Andrew Zimbalist, an author specializing in the economics of sports and professor at Smith College in Northampton. For this match, we turned to his co-author on the 2017 book, “No Boston Olympics: How and Why Smart Cities Are Passing on the Torch.”
Chris Dempsey co-chaired the group No Boston Olympics, and was formerly an assistant secretary of transportation for the commonwealth. These days, he runs the urban design firm Speck Dempsey, but still pays close attention to costly large-scale events. When it comes to the World Cup and FIFA, he quipped that “lack of transparency is not a bug, it’s a feature.” In contrast to the scant attention paid to World Cup expenditures, he noted the extensive touting of questionable economic benefits.
Pointing to an August guest opinion published in CommonWealth Beacon by the chairman and CEO of State Street, Dempsey addressed the frequent claim that the hospitality sector did spectacular World Cup business: “Then you look at the actual data, and the hotel rooms this summer were not any more busy than a typical summer. … This is the CEO of State Street. It’s like, this is a guy who has a team of researchers to make sure that he has the data right, and he’s basically just making it up.”
“That was part of our whole point with the Olympics,” Dempsey added. “A lot of the activity you get is just displacing other activity that would have existed.”
These activities, it turns out, required a record-breaking amount of publicly subsidized security. Yet in the short wake of the World Cup, neither Boston nor the state have much to show for the enormous taxpayer-funded expense—not even the documents which detail how they spent the millions they received.
