I am writing this from Mexico City, five days before the World Cup opens at the Azteca, and the energy here is electric. But this week's newsletter carries more than the excitement of the beautiful game arriving in our hemisphere. While the world focuses on who will lift the trophy in July, a different kind of reckoning is playing out along the Arizona-Sonora border, one that involves a sitting governor, a pattern of revoked visas, and an Arizona government that just quietly pulled back from a man who thought he could use binational relationships as a shield. 

This edition covers it all, from the economic force the World Cup unleashes across North America, to the structural failure behind America's inability to field a championship soccer team, to the FIFA governance problem nobody wants to name out loud. The border is always the story. This week, it just happens to share the stage with the world's biggest sporting event.First time reading?

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I am writing this from Mexico City, and the energy here is unlike anything I have felt in years. The streets are alive. The Azteca is ready. On June 11, the world comes here, and it comes here because North America made a decision that I believe will reshape how the planet sees this region for a generation.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup is not just a sporting event. It is the largest economic activation in North American history. A Boston Consulting Group study projects the tournament will generate more than $5 billion in short-term economic activity across the United States, Mexico, and Canada, supporting approximately 40,000 jobs and over $1 billion in worker earnings. Individual host cities are expected to see between $160 million and $620 million in incremental economic activity, with net benefits ranging from $90 million to $480 million per city.

The tournament is expected to draw 1.2 million international visitors, and analysis estimates those travelers will stay an average of 12 days, attend roughly two matches, and spend more than $400 per day. Hotels, restaurants, transportation, retail, and small border businesses across the corridor will all feel this.

But here is the angle I want you to hold onto: this tournament is being held along the very corridor I have spent my career building. The Phoenix to Nogales to Mexico smart corridor, the manufacturing ecosystem that connects Arizona to Mexico , is on global display right now. Hundreds of millions of people watching games in Guadalajara and Monterrey are seeing a Mexico that is modern, investable, and deeply connected to the United States.

At Intermestic Partners, we have long argued that the binational economic relationship between Arizona and Mexico is one of the most underappreciated corridors in North America. This World Cup just put it on the world's main stage. For any investor, any company in the nearshoring conversation, and any entrepreneur looking at where North American growth is happening, this is your moment to pay attention.

Soccer is the most played sport in America. More kids grow up with a ball at their feet in this country than with a bat or a football. A 2023 survey found that 32 percent of American adults believed stronger World Cup performances by the men's national team would do more to grow soccer's popularity than any other single factor.

And yet here we are, hosting the biggest World Cup in history, and the honest conversation in American soccer circles is not about winning. It is about surviving the group stage.

The U.S. men's national team enters 2026 with more accomplished club-level players than any generation in American history, and yet the national team has consistently underperformed expectations and failed to live up to its golden generation billing. There is not a single result from the 2022 World Cup to now that represents real progress.

Why? Because excellence in American youth soccer has long been locked behind private pay-to-play systems that cut off the most talented kids from the lowest-income families, which is often the Mexican and Latin American community. The kids with the most natural skill and competitive fire are frequently the same kids who could never afford the club fees, the travel, or the equipment. That is not a talent gap. That is a structural failure.

The picture is contradictory: a recent poll found 72 percent of Americans now express interest in soccer, a 17 percent increase from 2020, yet MLS and NWSL have seen stark declines in attendance and TV viewership at the same time.

The path to a genuine U.S. soccer powerhouse runs directly through the same communities that have been producing world-class players for Mexico, Brazil, and Central America for decades. The approximately 40 million Mexican-connected residents in this country are not a footnote to American soccer. They are its most untapped reservoir of talent.

This World Cup should force that reckoning. The question is whether U.S. Soccer is finally ready to have it.

I said this publicly months ago, and I will say it again: anyone paying attention to Sonora's political leadership and its security record was not surprised when Governor Alfonso Durazo ended up on the U.S. radar. What I did not fully anticipate was how quickly his own deflection strategy would collapse.

Durazo has a habit. Whenever questions about his ties to organized crime surface, he leans on his relationships with Arizona leaders as a kind of character reference. He positions himself as a trusted binational partner, the man Arizona knows, the man Arizona works with. It is a practiced move, and it has worked, until now.

This week, Lilian Soto, the Press Director of the Arizona Governor's office, issued a statement that lands like a door closing. Translated from the Spanish original: "We have seen the reports about Mexican officials and we are monitoring the situation closely. Mexico is our main international trading partner and we maintain a very important historical relationship. Any link to organized crime would be unacceptable, and anyone found guilty must answer to the law."

That is not a defense of Durazo. That is Arizona putting distance on the record.

Durazo and Tamaulipas Governor Américo Villarreal Anaya have both been stripped of their U.S. visas amid criminal investigations. Both border Arizona and Texas. Both are Morena party allies of President Sheinbaum. KVIA

The Durazo case carries extra weight because of his national record. He was Mexico's first Secretary of Security under AMLO, and he was the official who appeared in a video message in October 2019 announcing the release of Ovidio Guzmán, the Chapito, after the Sinaloa Cartel launched a full military assault on Culiacán. Durazo said the security cabinet had decided to suspend the detention operation to protect the greater good and the safety of the people of Culiacán. The question U.S. investigators are now formally asking is whether that was a decision forced by chaos, or informed by something more deliberate. pressreader

The mayors of Nogales, Sonora, Agua Prieta, and Puerto Peñasco have also had their U.S. visas revoked, all Morena members. The San Luis Río Colorado mayor was stopped at the port of entry on his way to sign a binational agreement in Yuma. The Hill

This is not coincidence. This is a pattern. And Arizona is no longer willing to be used as cover for it.

I am in Mexico City as the World Cup begins, and I want to be honest with you: I have chills. The opening match takes place on June 11 at the Azteca, the only arena in the world that has hosted both a World Cup final and the opening match of the competition. Mexico vs. South Africa. I will be watching, as I imagine millions of fronterizos will be, with pride in both the host country and the tournament's arrival in our hemisphere.

Now, my picks. I have thought about this carefully.

France is my top selection to lift the trophy. France and Spain are co-favorites at 5/1, with Kylian Mbappé in his absolute prime having scored 42 goals at club level this season. France has reached the last two World Cup finals. They have the depth, the experience, and the best individual player in the tournament.

Spain is my second pick and the defending European champion. They play the most coherent collective soccer in the world right now and have a generational talent in Lamine Yamal.

England at third. The Three Lions carry a weight of expectation that has historically broken them, but this squad is different in tactical maturity. I would not bet against them reaching the final.

As for the United States, I want them to advance, deeply. The 40 million Mexican-connected people in this country will be watching with complicated loyalties and enormous pride. After the 1994 World Cup in North America, soccer's popularity in the U.S. skyrocketed and Major League Soccer was born. A strong USMNT run in 2026 could do the same for the next generation of Latino American athletes.

This tournament, hosted across three countries, with its opening ceremony here in Mexico City and its final at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, is a North American moment. For those of us who live at the intersection of both worlds, it is personal. Enjoy every minute of it.

Before the first ball is kicked, FIFA has already handed us a case study in how governing institutions bend when there is no real accountability.

In December 2025, at the World Cup draw ceremony at the Kennedy Center in Washington, FIFA President Gianni Infantino stood before the world and announced that President Donald Trump had won the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize. The prize, officially called the "FIFA Peace Prize: Football Unites the World," was announced with no explanation of the selection process, no candidates named, and no criteria given. Senior officials within FIFA were reportedly surprised by the announcement, which was not discussed with the FIFA Council. aol

A rights group called FairSquare filed a formal ethics complaint, arguing that awarding the prize to a sitting political leader was a clear breach of FIFA's duty of neutrality and that Infantino had openly flouted the organization's rules in ways that are dangerous and directly contrary to the interests of the world's most popular sport. Al Jazeera

I am not here to make a judgment on the politics of who deserved what award. What I will say is this: FIFA has a long institutional memory of what happens when its leadership gets too close to political power. The corruption scandals that swept through the organization a decade ago, the arrests in Zurich, the indictments, the banned officials, all of it grew from the same soil: a leadership structure with no real checks.

Infantino has cultivated a relationship with Trump that goes well beyond diplomatic courtesy. That relationship helped secure the United States as a host. It may also create obligations that compromise the organization's independence going forward.

The World Cup itself is bigger than any of this. The sport endures. But those of us who care about institutions, accountability, and the role of sports in diplomacy have to name what we see when we see it.

Thanks for reading this edition of my newsletter! I'd love to hear from you. Share your thoughts about what you think are the most critical issues that need to be addressed. Email me at [email protected] or connect with me on social media using the hashtag #Intermestic.

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