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s 16 host cities in the U.S. prepare for soccer's biggest tournament this week, the recycled myth about a trafficking "spike" during sporting events is once again being used to justify policing the people it claims to protect. But there is no consistent evidence that the 2026 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup or any major sporting event causes an increase in sex trafficking. Two decades of research across the Super Bowl, the Olympics and prior World Cups have found no reliable link.
What does increase? Policing, surveillance and the displacement of consensual adult sex workers.
With the event opening this week, June 12, across the United States, Mexico, and Canada, warnings that these types of major sporting events attract traffickers have become more and more prevalent.
Last month, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) issued a notice urging increased vigilance by financial institutions located in and around cities hosting the Cup, which spans across three countries over 39 days. It also urged banks in host cities to watch for transactions tied to trafficking, flagging cash deposits and peer-to-peer transfers as red flags. In Los Angeles, the FBI and local agencies even staged a joint press conference asking the public to report suspicious activity.
Does a major sporting event really cause a sex trafficking spike?
Dispelling claims that trafficking increases surrounding sporting events, Dr. Lauren Martin of the University of Minnesota and Annie Hill of the University of Texas at Austin, penned an important piece titled Debunking the Myth of ‘Super Bowl Sex Trafficking’: Media hype or evidenced-based coverage, examining data ahead of the 2018 Super Bowl in Minneapolis. Their findings were clear— exploitation happens every day of the year, not on any event-driven schedule.
A 2019 review in the Anti-Trafficking Review went through dozens of scholarly articles on the link between mega-events and sexual exploitation and found the evidence simply does not support it. The pattern holds internationally. Researchers who surveyed roughly 600 female sex workers in South Africa around the 2010 World Cup found no increase in new workers arriving for the tournament. When London hosted the 2012 Olympics, the Metropolitan Police investigated a single trafficking case tied to the games.
Writing for The Conversation ahead of this year’s Cup, University of Texas at Arlington researchers Kathleen Preble and Jennifer O'Brien laid it out again: commercial sex markets fluctuate during big events the way they do around any convention or holiday weekend, but trafficking itself is not event-driven.
Moreover, researchers have concluded that framing trafficking as a problem that arrives with tourists and leaves with them, obscures what it actually looks like, which is cumulative and tied to structural inequity rather than a calendar. It also erases labor trafficking, even though the construction, hospitality and cleaning sectors scaling up for an event like this are exactly where forced labor tends to hide. Resources spent chasing the cinematic version are resources not spent on the real one.
How do World Cup crackdowns harm consensual sex workers?
In Mexico City, where sex work is not criminalized, roughly 2,500 people earn their living along Calzada de Tlalpan near Azteca Stadium. Ahead of the Cup, the city built a bike lane down the avenue with dividers that physically prevent cars from pulling over. They also announced nighttime metro closures along the route.
Workers in the region report earnings cut by more than half, with many left stranded after dark. Elvira Madrid Romero of the advocacy group Street Brigade has been blunt about who the renovation is for: tourists celebrating at the expense of the poor. Activists and the city's own human rights commission have described the broader pattern across Mexico's host cities as a "social cleansing," an urban makeover that quietly relocates sex workers, vendors and unhoused people out of the frame before the cameras arrive. Sex work remains a lifeline for an estimated 15,000 people in the capital, including transgender women shut out of fair pay nearly everywhere else.
Vancouver offers the migrant-worker version of the same story. SWAN (Sex Workers Action Network) Vancouver, which supports immigrant and migrant women in the industry, says many of the workers it serves plan to avoid the downtown core entirely during the tournament for one reason: they do not want contact with police.
SWAN’s Communications manager Crystal Laderas writes that the trafficking myth has been debunked repeatedly, yet host cities keep funding anti-trafficking efforts that in practice, target immigrants the most. The stakes are higher for anyone on a temporary visa, because a sex-work charge can lead to deportation.
The Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW) has called the whole apparatus what it is: a familiar moral panic that does not reduce actual harm because a worker afraid of police and of deportation will not call for help when she encounters an actual predator.
In Los Angeles, where SoFi Stadium has been temporarily rebranded "Los Angeles Stadium" for the Cup, local groups including SWOP LA, Strippers United, and NOlympicsLA used International Whores' Day (commemorating the 1975 occupation of Saint-Nizier Church in Lyon by sex workers protesting police violence and criminalization) to amplify awareness about the city’s long, documented habit of using "safety initiatives" to sweep unhoused people and street-based workers out of high-traffic zones whenever the world is watching.
What do sex workers want instead?
Frontline organizations are proposing practical alternatives. Rather than more surveillance, bank monitoring and sweeps, they’re asking host cities to treat sex work as work: decriminalization, funding for peer-led harm reduction and resources that let adult workers look after their own safety without an arrest waiting at the end of it. The people best positioned to spot a genuine trafficking victim are the workers themselves, but policies that make them fear the police only make the real people affected harder to find.
The problem and the research that debunks the government’s narrative is not new. Advocacy groups have been saying the same thing during every Olympics and every Super Bowl, but panic gets the press conference and the workers get the bill. The World Cup will be a spectacle. Whether it has to be one staged on top of the people who were already here is a choice, and the host cities keep making the same one.
