The Deep Dive: Unearthing the US 2022 World Cup Ghost Bid
Man, I was just sitting here last week, trying to figure out what to binge next, when a silly thought hit me. We are getting ready for the 2026 World Cup, and everyone is already talking about the host cities. But I suddenly remembered that whole mess back in 2010 when the US lost the 2022 bid to Qatar. I had completely forgotten what our proposal even looked like. I figured it was just the usual suspects—LA, NY, Dallas—but I wanted to see the receipts. I wanted the original pitch document.
So, I started digging. This wasn’t an easy search, let me tell you. If you type “US 2022 World Cup bid” into any search engine, you mostly get articles from 2010 talking about the loss, or current articles about 2026. The actual meat of the forgotten plan? That stuff is buried deep. I spent a good two hours just sifting through dead links and archived PDF summaries that mostly focused on financial projections and sponsorship potential.
I realized I had to use really specific keywords. I stopped searching for “bid plan” and started searching for “stadium site inspection list 2010” and “FIFA technical report USA 2022.” That’s when I finally hit a small, archived sports forum thread from like 2011 where someone had pasted what looked like the final list of cities the US proposed to FIFA before the vote happened. This wasn’t the final 16 cities we have for 2026; this was the massive, original twenty-something list we threw out there just to show we could host the thing tomorrow if we needed to. It blew my mind.
I cross-referenced this list against a couple of old news clips, the kind that were published right before the vote and quickly forgotten. I grabbed a piece of scratch paper and started writing down the proposed stadiums, especially the ones that either never got built or have completely changed names since then. It was a whole logistical nightmare they were planning, far bigger and more spread out than what we are doing for 2026.
The core of the US 2022 strategy was capacity and existing infrastructure. They weren’t pitching a few new, fancy arenas; they were pitching using the biggest football stadiums we already had. Thinking back on it, the sheer size of some of these venues was insane. The list I compiled was way more ambitious than I ever remembered. This isn’t the final cut, but this is the huge initial candidate list I pulled together from the forgotten documentation:
The Proposed 2022 US Bid Candidate Cities and Venues (The Forgotten List)
- Phoenix, Arizona: University of Phoenix Stadium (now State Farm Stadium)
- Dallas, Texas: Cowboys Stadium (now AT&T Stadium)
- Seattle, Washington: Qwest Field (now Lumen Field)
- Denver, Colorado: Invesco Field (now Empower Field)
- Tampa, Florida: Raymond James Stadium
- Baltimore, Maryland: M&T Bank Stadium
- Landover, Maryland: FedEx Field
- New York / New Jersey: New Meadowlands Stadium (now MetLife Stadium)
- Miami, Florida: Land Shark Stadium (now Hard Rock Stadium)
- Atlanta, Georgia: Georgia Dome (This one really hit me—it was demolished in 2017!)
- Boston, Massachusetts: Gillette Stadium
- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Lincoln Financial Field
- Indianapolis, Indiana: Lucas Oil Stadium
- Kansas City, Missouri: Arrowhead Stadium
- Houston, Texas: Reliant Stadium (now NRG Stadium)
- San Diego, California: Qualcomm Stadium (Also demolished!)
- Pasadena, California: Rose Bowl
- Washington D.C.: A proposed new stadium, likely DC United’s eventual Audi Field site, but much bigger.
I stared at the list, especially places like the Georgia Dome and Qualcomm Stadium. These stadiums are gone. They don’t exist anymore. It gave me this weird feeling of historical drift. These massive, multi-million dollar plans, complete with logistics reports and security assessments, were built around buildings that literally don’t stand up today. If the US had won the bid in 2010, the sheer amount of necessary scrambling and renovation and maybe even site changes between 2010 and 2022 would have been enormous.
I spent the rest of the evening comparing the ghost list to the confirmed 2026 list. Some survived, obviously—Dallas, Seattle, Philly. But seeing the full scope of what they threw at FIFA twelve years ago, the scale they were working at, really put things into perspective. They were trying to guarantee huge attendance figures everywhere, from Phoenix to Boston. The proposal was built on existing American football infrastructure, meaning massive seating capacity but maybe less of that cozy, international football feel.
What I learned from this whole dive is how quickly major, detailed proposals are forgotten when the outcome doesn’t go your way. These people spent months, probably years, putting together data points for stadiums that are now either rubble or have entirely new corporate sponsors. All that detailed planning, just vanished. It makes you wonder what kind of specific logistics were proposed for Tampa or Indianapolis that never saw the light of day. It was a fun little detour into forgotten sports history, and it definitely makes me look at the 2026 preparation with a new level of appreciation for the sheer amount of paperwork that precedes the first shovel hitting the dirt.