The 2026 FIFA World Cup will be bringing all eyes to Vancouver as the city will become one of the host cities in the expanded 48 team tournament.
While we’re still three years out, Global’s Julie Nolin had a conversation with Mayor Ken Sim about what the city is doing to get ready for the global event.
Here’s a full transcript of Sim’s interview.
JULIE NOLIN: Here we are three years away from FIFA. How do we get Vancouver ready for the world stage?
KEN SIM: Well, we have conversations about FIFA all the time and everything we can do to make our FIFA a success. We’ve worked with different levels of government, with sport hosting at the City of Vancouver, but we also talked to the community. How many hotel rooms do we need? How do we get restaurants up to speed? How do we make our neighborhoods safer, more vibrant, be it the Granville entertainment district or revitalizing Chinatown? These are all the things that will sort of lead towards having a very successful FIFA 2026.
JN: Last week I was doing the Granville district story and the city wanting to do more to make that a safer area along with revitalizing it for businesses and entertainment. So, that’s just one piece of this this puzzle. What else can we be doing to promote safety? And to create that environment here?
KS: It’s multifaceted. So, there isn’t one little thing, it’s a collection of a lot of different things. So, when we were elected to office, one of the things that we talked about was public safety, and so hiring 100 additional police officers and 100 mental health workers together to triage you know, a very tragic situation right now, but that’s only the start. We have to get to the root cause of why people are in the challenging situations they are in. That goes to mental health, addictions and people experiencing homelessness. So, dealing with those root cause challenges as well, in addition to that, it’s getting more people on the street. And so, what does that mean? Well, you have to give them a reason to want to come into these neighborhoods, and so they have to be safer, but they have to be vibrant as well. So, successful art installations and music and vibrant patios and restaurants and community events. You can’t do one or the other. It’s a combination of a bunch of different things.
JN: How do we bring the fun back to the city when we’ve developed that no fun moniker?
KS: I do want to stress how big FIFA is going to be because the conversations I still hear on the street are like: ‘Oh, FIFA that’s going to be nice.’ No, it’s going to be massive. Imagine the Super Bowl. There are about 115 million viewers, and people understand it. People in North America understand the Super Bowl. A preliminary game in World Cup has a viewership of about 350 million people. There are 211 countries around the planet that are following every single game. This is a Super Bowl on steroids. And we’re probably going to host at least five if not more of these events. The whole world is going to be looking at Vancouver and the buildup to the event is going to be amazing. And then the spin offs after are going to be significant.
JN: I know you got to go to Dubai right around the time you were elected. And what did you learn from your trip to see that event?
KS: I got to experience firsthand what it’s like to be in a city that’s hosting the World Cup. And it’s unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. I lived in London, England when World Cup was happening in France, and it was lights out. This was at a whole different level. And I had some preconceived notions of what the World Cup could mean to the City of Vancouver. And I was completely wrong. It’s way bigger than what I thought. I thought it was just an opportunity where a local business could have a pretty good run leading up to the World Cup. This could be our launch pad for the vision of what Vancouver is going to look like over the next 30 years and we can leverage a World Cup to amplify that message across the planet.
JN: What else are you thinking about to help the city grow into the future?
JN: Thank you so much, Mayor Sim for your time with us today.
KS: Thank you for having me. And by the way, you can just call me Ken.
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