Anticipating tourism impacts of the FIFA World Cup 26: a comparative analysis of pre-event discourse across 16 host cities

This study examines the process of publicly articulating expectations and concerns about the future tourism impacts of the FIFA World Cup 26 before the event occurred across its 16 host cities in Canada, Mexico and the United States. Drawing on a search-constructed corpus of 6,587 tourism-related X/Twitter posts, the study combines multi-label issue coding, sentiment analysis, discourse-oriented affiliation and co-occurrence network mapping and comparative host-city profiling. Findings suggest that transportation and tourist experience were the most visible issues in pre-event discourse, whilst safety and entry, cost and affordability and environmental risk carried relatively stronger concern-oriented sentiment. City-issue associations indicated differentiated host-city discourse patterns, including mobility-cost and safety-concern emphasis, visitor-experience and resident-perception emphasis, a New York/New Jersey transportation-cost pressure case and destination-visibility and tourist-experience emphasis. The actor-issue network further suggested that tourism expectations and concerns were publicly associated with multiple issue-associated actors, including tourists, transport agencies, host cities, event organisers, governments, hospitality providers, residents and businesses. The study offers an early account of how future tourism impacts are discursively constructed before they materialise and illustrates the value and limits of LLM-assisted coding for comparative pre-event tourism discourse research.