Fifa members voted on the bids at their congress in Moscow
The 2026 World Cup will be held in the United States, Canada and Mexico after their joint bid beat Morocco's proposal to host it.
The 'United 2026' bid was selected by Fifa member nations, winning 134 votes compared to 65 for Morocco.
The 2026 tournament will be the biggest World Cup ever held - with 48 teams playing 80 matches over 34 days.
"Football is the only victor. We are all united in football," US Soccer president Carlos Cordeiro said.
"Thank you so, so much for this incredible honour. Thank you for entrusting us with this privilege."
Of the 211 Fifa member nations, 200 cast a vote at the 68th Fifa Congress in Moscow on Wednesday, with the winning bid needing a majority of 104.
Canada, Mexico, Morocco and the US were exempt, while Ghana was absent after the country's government said it had disbanded its football association amid allegations of "widespread" corruption.
Three US territories - Guam, the US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico - were among the other member nations to not vote.
Both Mexico (1970 and 1986) and the United States (1994) have previously hosted World Cups.
Canada staged the Women's World Cup in 2015.
The bidding process
Since the 2018 and 2022 tournaments were awarded to Russia and Qatar respectively in December 2010, widespread corruption has been exposed in the global game, including allegations of bribery and payment for votes.
A BBC Panorama documentary claimed Qatar spent £117m on their successful bid for the 2022 World Cup - the first to be held in winter - while former Fifa president Sepp Blatter suggested there was an agreement in place for Russia to host the 2018 tournament before the vote took place.
Prominent figures, including Blatter, have since been indicted.
As a result Fifa - under the presidency of Gianni Infantino - promised a "more open and transparent" vote to decide the 2026 World Cup host.
It was decided that Fifa's 22-strong executive committee would no longer vote on behalf of the membership, as had occurred previously,
Instead, the two bids made a final 15-minute presentation in front of congress before the Fifa member nations cast their votes.
Media playback is not supported on this device Three countries react to getting the World Cup 2026 bid
The winning bid
The 'United' World Cup will generate $14bn (£10.3bn) in revenue and make an $11bn (£8.1bn) profit for Fifa, says Cordeiro.
Of the 16 host cities, 10 will be in the United States while the remainder will be split evenly between Canada and Mexico.
Sixty matches will take place in the US, while Canada and Mexico will host 10 games each.
The final will be held at the 84,953-capacity MetLife Stadium, which is home to NFL sides the New York Giants and the New York Jets.
The distance between the most northern host city (Edmonton) and the most southern (Mexico City) is almost 3,000 miles, which compares to 1,900 miles at this month's tournament in Russia.
The tournament will mark the first time a World Cup has been shared by three host nations.
The 1994 World Cup, staged by the US, had the highest average attendance in the tournament's history, while Mexico was the first nation to host the event twice.
In 2017, Fifa said the host nation for the 2026 World Cup would qualify automatically and its slot would be taken from the allocation of its confederation.
However, Fifa president Gianni Infantino said the issue of all three hosts - Canada, USA and Mexico - being given automatic slots is still to be decided, with discussions set to take place in the next few weeks.
The 23 World Cup 2026 venues in Canada, the United States and Mexico - 10 of the 17 USA cities will be used
What they said
US Soccer president Carlos Cordeiro: "Hosting the 2026 Fifa World Cup is a rare and important moment to demonstrate that we are all truly united through sport.
"We are humbled by the trust our colleagues in the Fifa family have put in our bid, strengthened by the unity between our three countries and the Concacaf region and excited by the opportunity we have to put football on a new and sustainable path for generations to come."
Morocco Football Federation president Fouzi Lekjaa: "I wish to congratulate Fifa for the conduct of this process and congratulate the president for what he has done in order to move things towards more transparency and more inclusion.
"I would like to reaffirm the determination of my country to continue to work for football and realise one day our dream to host the World Cup in Morocco."
The Football Association (FA): "We congratulate the USA, Canada and Mexico on winning the bid to host the 2026 Fifa World Cup. Both bids were of a very high quality and we welcome the fact that the bidding process was both open and transparent.
"We cast our vote for the 'United' bid as we believe the independent technical assessment made its advantages very clear. However, it is important to note that both bids were deemed to have met the hosting requirements and a tournament in Morocco, close to Europe and in a country that loves football, had a great deal for English football fans to be excited about."
Fifth time unlucky
Five times they have bid, and five times they have been overlooked - Morocco are perhaps destined to never host a World Cup.
Morocco's bid faced unwanted attention when Fifa secretary general Fatma Samoura was the subject of an investigation into an alleged conflict of interest.
Members of Fifa's World Cup bid evaluation task force said she had an undeclared family link with Morocco 2026 bid ambassador El Hadji Diouf.
She was cleared of any wrongdoing and dismissed the claims as "laughable" and "unfortunate".
The same evaluation task force later expressed concerns over stadiums, the availability of accommodation, and the travel network, despite ratifying their proposals.
Nine of the 14 stadiums included in Morocco's bid were yet to be built, while the remaining five required "significant renovation or upgrading".
But bid chief Hicham el Amrani said he was confident the country's infrastructure "could deliver" and made play of the North African nation's position, nine miles from the southern tip of Spain - dubbing it a "European" World Cup.
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The 2026 tournament will be one of firsts. It will be the first time the World Cup is hosted by three countries, the first time it has a 48-team format, up from 32 teams, and it was the first time the vote was decided by FIFA’s entire membership. Of the tournament’s 80 matches, 10 will be in Canada, 10 in Mexico and 60 in the United States — including the final, at MetLife Stadium in the New York City suburb of East Rutherford, N.J.
The last time the men’s World Cup was held in North America was when the United States hosted in 1994. It was held in Mexico in 1970 and 1986. Canada has never hosted. It was unclear Wednesday if all three nations would be granted automatic bids into the field, as is customary for the host nation; FIFA said there had been no final decision on the matter.
North American bid leaders have been on the road since April, visiting voting nations around the globe. Several top officials and bid staff members even relocated to London for most of May, finding it a better base camp from which to visit federations in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and southern Africa. At one point two weeks ago, Cordeiro and his staff traveled to Bangkok for a single meeting, returning the next day.
The lobbying — bid leaders estimated they had met 150 of FIFA’s 211 federation presidents face to face — paid off. The North Americans rode to victory on a wave of support from the Americas, Europe and Asia, plus a few votes poached from Africa, whose regional soccer president, Ahmed Ahmed, issued a bombastic plea to his members on Tuesday, urging them to vote for Morocco as a symbol of African unity.
“From a few days ago, we always had a clear path to victory,” Cordeiro said. Still, even he could not have believed some of the support that ended up coming the way of the North Americans, notably a vote from Russia.
After the months of meetings and arm-twisting, the hundreds of airline flights and the weeks in ever-changing hotels, a campaign that began last August when Morocco jumped into the race (on the final day countries could do so), ended in an instant: with a 15-second note and a brief announcement by the FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, that the three federations had prevailed.
And just a few hours after Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, welcomed the world to celebrate the 2018 World Cup, the North American soccer leaders took to the same stage to tell the world to celebrate with them in 2026.
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The victory spared U.S. Soccer a second stunning defeat in less than a year; the United States men’s team is missing the World Cup this summer, its first absence since 1986. The American federation spent more than $6 million — out of a combined budget of about $8 million — to bring the World Cup back to North America, the culmination of an idea set in motion in a Vancouver restaurant seven years ago, according to Victor Montagliani, the head of Concacaf, the regional governing body.
As delegates surged to congratulate the winners, Montagliani took a deep breath to consider the journey that secured soccer’s biggest prize. He said he had conceived the plan while he was Canada’s soccer head, and managed to persuade Sunil Gulati, then the U.S. soccer president, to join in a potential joint offer after Canada staged a successful women’s World Cup in 2015. Gulati, who was replaced by Cordeiro in February after declining to run for re-election, first secured the support of the chairman of the influential Mexican television channel Televisa and finally the Mexican soccer federation.
“I was so nervous sitting up there because you don’t have control over anything,” said Montagliani, who was seated on a raised dais with FIFA’s senior membership as the decision was announced. “It’s like your little baby — but it was a great team effort by everyone involved. There’s nothing quite like the World Cup.”
The North Americans had offered FIFA’s member associations a ready-made World Cup; the 23 stadiums they offered as potential hosts are built, as is most of the infrastructure the expanded 48-team tournament will need: training sites, hotels, airports, rail lines.
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And, like Morocco, the North Americans also had the full support of their governments. The nations’ so-called United Bid was a rare topic on which the presidents of the three countries found common cause, and the United States government, including President Trump, had mounted a stealthy shadow campaign to try to win over FIFA and its member federations.
The North American bid’s signature selling point, however, was delivered in a language FIFA members long have understood: revenue. The North Americans promised FIFA an $11 billion profit — a staggering sum that could mean as much as $50 million for each national association.
Morocco, which pledged a profit less than half as large as its rivals, criticized the focus on money over soccer until the bitter end.
“The United Bid is proposing an offer that is mainly a business proposal for football,” one Moroccan official, Moncef Belkhayat, said on Monday. “Their offer is based on dollars, on profit, while Morocco is offering an offer that is based on passion for football, for development of football — not only in Morocco, but also in Africa.”
After the defeat, African officials gathered around their president, Ahmed, as he scanned the list of countries that did not vote for Morocco.
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“We are hurting: You look at the countries from your continent that didn’t vote and you have blood Arab countries that supported a different nation, that’s where it hurts more,” said Daniel Amokachi, a Nigerian former soccer player.
Yet there were serious concerns about Morocco’s candidacy from the beginning, notably how the North African nation could cope with the massive undertaking of hosting the first 48-team World Cup. It would have needed to spend billions of dollars to build nine stadiums and to significantly renovate five others, and do it all in eight years — four fewer than the 12 FIFA gave to Qatar, which still has not finished the job of getting ready for the 2022 World Cup.
Then there were the hotels, the highways, the rail links and the facilities to host a tournament set to bring more than 1,100 players and millions of fans to North Africa; all would have needed to be built, at a cost of billions more.
Morocco, which has now lost five efforts to stage the tournament, vowed to press ahead and build the projects it presented to voters. “We managed this bid with a sporting spirit and we will continue our path in the same vein,” said Moulay Hafid Elalamy, its millionaire bid chairman.
The end result was far more emphatic than it may have appeared in the last-gasp votes that played into the early hours of Wednesday morning. At one point, both bid teams arrived at the hotel housing Asian delegates shortly before 1 a.m., as rumors began to spread that the Moroccans might have gained some ground. They were sparked by an announcement by the Netherlands soccer federation that it would back Morocco, contrary to what officials had told the Americans as recently as last week.
The victory will also be celebrated privately by FIFA’s leadership, which had given indications it preferred the surety and likely billions delivered by taking the tournament back to North America. A technical report, which FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, repeatedly told voters to read, scored the winning bid far higher than Morocco’s offer, which FIFA inspectors said had several risk factors. Infantino’s No. 2, Fatma Samoura, issued the same reminder just before voting got underway.
Infantino, who announced his plans to stand for a second term at an election next year, has been on a drive to raise the funds he needs to make good on promises to drastically increase the amount of funding he can deliver to national soccer federations, the only voting constituency in the presidential election.
Cordeiro said the Americans also spoke to members about how a World Cup hosted by the North Americans would lead to a cash windfall for everyone. In Scandinavia last month, he said each federation could get as much as an extra $50 million should the 2026 World Cup meet its $11 billion profit target. “Let that sink in,” he told them.
By Wednesday, it was clear the message had been heard loud and clear.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Three countries react to getting the World Cup 2026 bid
The US, Canada, and Mexico will be co-hosting a massive three-country football extravaganza in 2026 - the Fifa World Cup tournament. Can the beautiful game be a unifying force for the North American nations?
There was some doubt that the United Bid could pull it off, but in the end, it finished with aplomb, winning 134 votes on Wednesday from Fifa member nations compared to 65 for Morocco, the other potential host.
This will mark the first time three nations have been picked to co-host the massive international sporting event.
It's a show of North American unity that comes at a tough time for the hosts.
Canada and Mexico's relationship with the United States has hit a rough patch but the three nations will host the biggest World Cup in history.
There will be 48 teams and 80 matches, and the North American event is projected to make an $11bn (£8.1bn) profit for world governing body Fifa.
But while things look rosy on the football front, here's a glimpse at how the three countries are currently getting along at the political level.
The US and Mexico
Mexico was a favourite punching bag for Donald Trump throughout his 2016 presidential bid.
In his campaign launch speech, he warned that Mexico was sending its "drug-dealers, criminals and rapists" into the US.
He derided a US-born federal judge's Mexican heritage.
Image copyright AFP Image caption The Mexico and US relationship is frosty
The highlight of his political rallies often came when he would promise to build an impenetrable wall along the 3,000-mile US-Mexico border - paid for by Mexico.
With this as a backdrop, US-Mexico relations were poised for a rocky time during the Trump presidency - and, by and large, that's the way things have played out.
A planned meeting between Mr Trump and Mexican President Enrique Pena-Nieto shortly after the US president's inauguration was scuttled after Mr Trump suggested a tax on Mexican imports. Another planned Washington visit in early 2018 was scrapped because of disputes over the proposed wall.
At this point, Mr Trump's mere mention of Mexico and the wall prompts an angry response from Mr Nieto or his government.
Skip Twitter post by @realDonaldTrump The U.S., together with Mexico and Canada, just got the World Cup. Congratulations - a great deal of hard work! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 13, 2018 Report
These ongoing heated exchanges, in addition to recently imposed US tariffs on Mexican steel and aluminium imports, have complicated the ongoing attempts by the US, Canada and Mexico to renegotiate the North America Free Trade Agreement (Nafta).
Administration officials have hinted that they may eventually decide to scrap the deal entirely and push for a one-on-one trade arrangement directly with Mexico.
Meanwhile, Mexico's presidential election looms a few weeks away.
Left-wing populist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is the favourite, and his election could be an opportunity for a reset in US-Mexico relations - or for trade negotiations to grow further acrimonious as economic nationalists on both sides of the border escalate the dispute.
Canada and the US
Canada considers itself one of America's greatest friends and allies - a North American teammate.
They share the world's longest undefended border, business and trade are highly integrated, and they have a long-standing defence relationship.
But the friendship is feeling frayed these days amid angry exchanges and trade tiffs.
Skip Twitter post by @JustinTrudeau Good news this morning: The 2026 FIFA World Cup is coming to Canada, the US and Mexico. Congratulations to everyone who worked hard on this bid – it’s going to be a great tournament! 🇨🇦🇲🇽🇺🇸 #United2026 — Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) June 13, 2018 Report
After a contentious G7 summit hosted by Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned the country wouldn't "be pushed around" by the US on trade. For US President Donald Trump, that comment was offside.
He snapped back, calling Mr Trudeau "meek and mild" and "dishonest and weak" and saying Mr Trudeau's words would cost Canadians.
Meanwhile, the two nations are locked in a trade dispute over the US steel and aluminium tariffs, over the Nafta renegotiations, and over levies on softwood lumber and newsprint.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Canada and the US are currently arguing over trade
Canada has filed complaints with the World Trade Organisation and has announced retaliatory tariffs against the US.
After the US imposed metals tariffs on key allies, Mr Trudeau reminded the US that Canadian soldiers had been fighting and dying alongside their American counterparts "from the beaches of Normandy to the mountains of Afghanistan".
And Mr Trudeau scrapped a recent US visit over Nafta demands from the US his government found unacceptable.
There are more storm clouds on the horizon, with the US weighing potential car and car parts tariffs.
Mexico and Canada
This is a North American relationship that's working.
Image copyright Handout via Reuters Image caption Canada-Mexico relations are on an upswing
At the end of 2016, Canada lifted a visa requirement for Mexican visitors as part of an effort to improve bilateral relations.
The visas, first imposed in 2009 after Canada saw a spike in refugee claims from Mexico, was an irritant between the two Nafta members.
Mexico, which was among the US allies to be hit with US metals tariffs on 1 June, joined Canada in retaliating against the US - with $3bn worth of tariffs.
Last October, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto said the two nations "are going through one of the best moments of our relationship".
