Disclaimer
DLG Research is an independent market research firm and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by the National Football League, the Super Bowl, FIFA, or the FIFA World Cup. All references to Super Bowl LI and FIFA World Cup 2026 are for informational and analytical purposes only, based on publicly available data and media coverage.
Houston has hosted a Super Bowl and a World Cup in the same stadium. On paper, both events look similar: packed hotels, busy restaurants, media attention, and fans everywhere.
Seen through a multicultural market research lens, they are completely different worlds.
DLG Research specializes in qualitative market research with a strong foundation in Hispanic and multicultural insights. Our team watched Super Bowl LI in 2017 and FIFA World Cup 2026 from Houston as sports fans and as moderators, paying attention to who showed up, how they moved, and what brands tried to say to them.
Key Takeaways
- Houston hosted more than 1 million World Cup participants versus roughly 150,000 Super Bowl LI visitors, but the difference is about behavior, not just headcount.
- World Cup ticket buyers came from more than 200 countries, while Super Bowl LI drew a primarily domestic, English‑dominant crowd.
- U.S. Hispanic fans over‑index heavily on soccer fandom, making Houston’s World Cup audience uniquely bicultural and multi‑generational.
- A one‑night event rewards a single big story; a multi‑week event rewards evolving, flexible storytelling across touchpoints.
- Treating “Houston visitors” as one audience erases the nuance brands need to actually connect with multicultural consumers.
Why Houston keeps getting the big games
Houston is a natural stage for mega‑events. It’s one of the most diverse cities in the U.S., with a large Hispanic community and significant African American, Asian, and immigrant populations. Add in the energy sector, the medical center, and convention infrastructure, and you get a city that can absorb large visitor flows without breaking.
That mix matters for both sports:
- Super Bowl LI drew primarily domestic visitors and corporate hospitality guests for a U.S.‑centric sport.
- World Cup 2026 brought fans from all 50 U.S. states and more than 200 countries, plus local soccer‑obsessed households.
Our founding partners, Edgardo de la Garza and Elvia de la Garza-Morales, live in Houston and are long‑time soccer fans. They watched both events knowing what it feels like to sit behind the glass in a focus group room—tracking not just excitement, but behavior.
Houston was also one of 16 host cities across three countries for World Cup 2026, alongside places like Vancouver, Toronto, New York/New Jersey, Dallas, and Mexico City. That network gave global brands a continental canvas. Houston’s role was to provide a multicultural, economically diverse lab where international and local fans would overlap.
The timing matters too.
Super Bowl LI happened in 2017, before the pandemic and before streaming and social video reached today’s scale. World Cup 2026 arrived in a world where fans expect to watch, share, and comment from their phones as much as from a couch or bar.
Same city. Different era. Different tools for fans and brands.
World Cup 2026: how many people really showed up?
The World Cup turned Houston into a long‑running football festival, not just a series of matches.
Key numbers:
- 7 matches at Houston Stadium.
- 480,186 fans in‑stadium, averaging nearly 68,600 spectators per game.
- 551,313 attendees at the FIFA Fan Festival.
- More than 1.08 million participants across official World Cup activities in Houston.
Early projections suggested about 500,000 visitors and near billion‑dollar economic impact. Participation in official events exceeded that initial visitor estimate, and downtown Houston recorded roughly 1.47 million visits over the tournament period, reflecting repeat engagement and local foot traffic layered onto tourism.
Houston had to prepare for that scale.
Officials expanded METRO rail service, added multilingual wayfinding, and positioned East Downtown (EaDo) and downtown as core fan hubs. The FIFA Fan Festival offered free watch parties, entertainment, sponsor activations, and food vendors on all 34 match days, creating a central location where locals and visitors mixed.
Some of the most striking moments were outside the stadium:
- Thousands of Netherlands supporters marching in a sea of orange through downtown before their match against Sweden.
- Families gathering at the Fan Festival for free screenings, music, and food, even if they never stepped inside NRG Stadium.
For comparison, Super Bowl LI:
- Brought roughly 138,000–150,000 visitors over about 10 days.
- Generated an estimated $347–$374 million in new spending.
- Produced stand‑out results for individual businesses, like a downtown bar clearing approximately $745,000 during the event.
Both events were big. One unfolded as a short, intense spike. The other stretched into a multi‑week presence, with fans returning to the same neighborhoods again and again.
Looking at World Cup fans through a multicultural lens
Total participant numbers are helpful. They’re not enough. Houston ticket sales data show:
- Buyers from all 50 U.S. states.
- Buyers from more than 200 countries.
- Around 44% of tickets purchased by international fans.
From a multicultural insights perspective, this translates into distinct segments:
- Long‑haul international travelers planning multi‑city trips across North America.
- U.S. domestic travelers following their national team or favorite players between host cities.
- Local Houstonians engaging with matches, Fan Festival programming, or neighborhood watch parties.
The Hispanic fan base amplifies this complexity.
Research shows that about 73% of U.S. Hispanics aged 16 and older identify as soccer fans. They are more likely than non‑Hispanic fans to attend live matches, follow multiple leagues, and describe soccer as part of their family identity. Many say they were “born into” fandom rather than discovering it later.
Put those facts in Houston and the picture shifts again.
When the World Cup comes to a city with a large Hispanic population, you are not only hosting visitors. You are activating a local, bicultural base that has been living with the sport for generations.
This is where our work at DLG Research lives. We design studies to answer questions like:
- How do families decide which matches to attend versus watch at home?
- What trade‑offs do fans make on travel, tickets, merchandise, and food?
- How do language, cultural symbols, and brand behavior influence trust and preference?
In practice, the “World Cup fan” in Houston can be:
- A Dutch supporter on a once‑in‑a‑lifetime trip.
- A Houston‑based Mexican‑American family bringing three generations to Fan Festival screenings.
- A local young adult without a ticket who still wants to be close to the energy in EaDo.
Brands and agencies know they’re speaking to multiple layers. They invest based on how they expect each layer to behave. Our role is to show who is really in the room and what those people actually care about.
How brands showed up differently around Super Bowl and World Cup
Super Bowl LI is a familiar model for many marketing teams. The big game in Houston came with high‑stakes ad spots from major brands:
- Budweiser’s “Born the Hard Way.”
- Audi’s “Daughter.”
- Mr. Clean’s cleaning‑day humor.
- T‑Mobile’s celebrity‑led spots.
A 30‑second Super Bowl ad often costs several million dollars, and the goal is clear: make an impression on a massive U.S. audience in one evening. Creative is built for a primarily domestic, English‑dominant broadcast, even if viewers abroad also watch.
World Cup campaigns are structured differently.
Global sponsors across categories—sportswear, beverage, financial services, telecom, media—treat the tournament as a multi‑week international platform, not a single moment. Creative needs to work across languages, resonate with fans in Houston and Guadalajara, and feel relevant whether someone is watching in a fan zone, a bar, or at home.
In Houston, this meant:
- Global sponsor branding at the stadium and Fan Festival.
- Local bars, restaurants, and hotels designing their own match‑day and non‑match‑day activations.
- Fans experiencing a blend of international brand presence and local hospitality in the same day.
The time frame changes the research and creative brief:
- Super Bowl: a short run‑up, one main event, and a brief aftermath.
- World Cup in Houston: weeks of matches, 34 Fan Festival match days, and ongoing foot traffic on days without games.
For brands, one reality rewards high‑impact storytelling that peaks on a single night. The other rewards sustained, flexible storytelling that can adapt to different cities, segments, and touchpoints as the tournament unfolds.
From a human‑centered segmentation perspective, that difference drives everything from how to test creative to how to measure success.
Beyond “sports fan” and what brands really need to know
“Sports fan” is a category. It’s not a motivation.
Most teams already track:
- Reach, impressions, and ratings.
- Basic brand awareness and recall.
- Ticket sales and attendance.
Those metrics are useful for top‑line reporting and trend analysis. They do not explain why someone chooses one brand over another when they are buying beer, picking a streaming provider, or deciding which venue to trust for a family outing.
Brand tracking and customer journey research are stronger when they sit on top of deeper human insights. That’s where custom market research comes in for events like Super Bowl LI and World Cup 2026.
Useful tools include:
- Focus groups and in‑depth interviews with specific segments—local Hispanic families, international travelers, young adults, corporate guests.
- Mobile ethnography following fans through stadiums, fan zones, and neighborhood bars to see real behavior, not just stated preference.
- In‑venue and in‑store intercepts capturing quick feedback on offers, service, and atmosphere while emotions are still fresh.
Storytelling also changes with the event structure.
For a one‑night event like the Super Bowl, brands often focus on one strong narrative and build surrounding social and PR support to echo it. For a multi‑week event, there is room for story arcs—introducing characters, themes, and community moments over time.
Throughout World Cup 2026, our team supported clients with pre‑event baselines, in‑event listening, and post‑event analysis. We weren’t just counting impressions; we were helping clients interpret what they were seeing and hearing from real people, then turning that into decisions about creative, media, and future investment.
Marketing Houston to Houston, and Houston to the world
Talking about “Houston visitors” as a single audience may be efficient. For effective messaging, it’s risky.
During the World Cup, Houston saw:
- International tourists with limited time and high expectations.
- Domestic travelers mixing soccer with broader tourism.
- Local residents weaving matches and Fan Festival visits into their everyday routines.
Within those groups, Hispanic fans played a central role. They over‑indexed on soccer fandom and live attendance, and many treated the tournament as a multi‑generational experience. For them, World Cup matches and Fan Festival days were opportunities to reaffirm heritage and share rituals with family.
Language and symbolism are practical levers here:
- Multilingual commentary and signage make spaces feel accessible.
- Cultural references—food, music, flags, chants—signal that an activation understands and respects the people in it.
Inside DLG, we saw this up close. Edgardo and Elvia enjoyed Super Bowl LI, but the World Cup they shared more with family and friends—planning match days, attending Fan Festival events together, and turning games into stories that would be remembered.
This is where Hispanic marketing strategy becomes concrete. Our work helps sponsors and agencies:
- Build event plans that speak to bicultural households without flattening them into stereotypes.
- Align global sponsorship strategy with local cultural realities in cities like Houston.
- Identify which parts of an activation are working for core fans, and which are only reaching casual visitors.
Houston showed its hospitality during World Cup 2026. For brands, hospitality is the context. Culturally intelligent research is the filter that turns that context into insight.
How DLG Research turns events into decision‑ready insights
Senior decision‑makers rarely lack data around mega‑events. They often lack clarity.
Visitor counts and economic impact reports are necessary. They answer “how big was it?” They don’t answer “what did it tell us about our audiences?”
DLG’s approach treats events like Super Bowl LI and World Cup 2026 as extended real‑world labs.
We combine:
- Quantitative data on participation, traffic, and spend—what happened, where, and at what scale.
- Qualitative, culturally grounded narratives from participants—how they talk about their choices, values, and constraints.
For brands and agencies, that means we can help:
- Build cross‑cultural segmentation frameworks tied to real behaviors and stories, not just demographics.
- Translate World Cup and Super Bowl learnings into everyday marketing and product decisions.
- Design voice of the customer programs and brand tracking approaches that capture what matters most to multicultural audiences.
We are a full‑service HUMAN market research firm. We blend qualitative depth with quantitative precision, and we focus on turning complex behavior into clear, actionable strategies. Our anthem—Insightful Research, Actionable Results—is not a tagline we put in a footer and forget. It’s the filter we apply to every project.
Houston’s two mega‑events weren’t just good weeks for hotels and restaurants. They were long lessons in how context reshapes “the audience” and how culture shapes every choice fans make.
DLG Research specializes in turning those kinds of lessons into practical frameworks brands can use well beyond the final whistle—segmentations that respect multicultural realities, brand tracking that listens for cultural nuance, and custom studies built around how people actually live.
If there’s one takeaway from watching Houston host both the Super Bowl and the World Cup, it’s this: treating visitors as one crowd is easy. Seeing the many different stories inside that crowd is where the real work—and the real opportunity—begins.
Sources
Houston.org – “Guide to FIFA World Cup 26™ in Houston”
https://houston.org/news/guide-to-fifa-world-cup-26-in-houston
Downtown Houston – “FIFA Fan Festival Houston”
CW39 – “How Houston delivered as a FIFA World Cup 2026 host city”
Houston Business Journal – “Houston’s FIFA World Cup by the numbers”
Click2Houston – “Houston Super Bowl host committee announces economic impact of Super Bowl LI”
ABC13 – “How much did Super Bowl 51 bring to Houston?”
https://abc13.com/post/how-much-did-super-bowl-51-bring-to-houston/2037026/
Scribd – “Economic Impact of Super Bowl LI on Houston” (Pre‑Event Impact Report)
https://www.scribd.com/document/336133246/SB-LI-Pre-Event-Economic-Impact-Final
Soccer Interaction Academy – “The Growth of the Hispanic Fan Base in the U.S.”
Next League – “Hispanic Fandom Rising: The Data Behind a Growing Force”
iSpot.tv – “2017 Super Bowl Commercials”
Sports Innovation Lab – “U.S. Soccer Fan Data Shows Growing Market Ahead of 2026 World Cup”
https://www.sportsilab.com/press/sportsilabxjungvonmattsportslaunch