Spain's extra-time victory over Argentina Sunday night at MetLife Stadium was more than just a football match. It also put the final nail in at least temporarily in the most expensive and most profitable World Cup ever the one FIFA has been working to produce for the past four years as a true global commercial enterprise rather than just a football festival for a month.

The 'headline number' is simple enough. The federation of Spain is getting $50 million for winning the tournament, which's up from the $42 million that Argentina received from Spain four years ago when it beat France in Qatar. Argentina, which were defeated this time round, walk away with $33 million. The bottom of the ladder starts at $29 million for the third place team and extends down to $9 million for any of the sixteen teams that've been eliminated in the group stage which is also a higher minimum than those in the semi-finalists a decade ago. With preparation grants thrown in, the total amount FIFA is offering the 48 federations competing is $871 million, easily the biggest ever and about double the amount offered in Russia in 2018.

Of that money, none comes alone. It is built on a commercial cycle that FIFA believes will raise near to $11 billion from 2023 to 2026, up more than a half from the estimated $7 billion collected during Qatar 2022. This cycle, the broadcast rights are worth nearly $3.9 billion, and the hospitality package and ticketing are worth another $3 billion or so. Almost everything about the jump is mathematical: FIFA was forced to sell its forty matches to broadcasters and sponsors, so it expanded from 32 teams to 48, and it did just that; it also added some fancy ticket pricing that generated a lot of grumbling complaints from fans of price changes in ticket costs, depending on demand.

But when the numbers become more tantalizing and more disputed it's the multiplier effect, the argument that a month of football leads to a sustained economic impact on the economies where the games are played. Before the tournament, FIFA and the WTO released a joint report that estimated the global gross output impact at just under $80 billion, of which some 38 per cent would go to the United States, as the principal host together with Canada and Mexico. That is $30.5 billion in gross output for the American economy, $17.2 billion in GDP contribution and 185,000 + full-time equivalent jobs supported throughout the hospitality, transport, retail and related sectors. Estimates in Canada put its share at $3.8 billion.

Such forecasts are nothing new in the world of sports economics, and typically do not get cheered on. The study of mega-event accounting has been a long-running series of sleuthing that has revealed that the figures quoted in such advertisements often do not stand up to the realities of what happens when the circus arrives on the ground: stadiums that are renovated at public expense and left half empty after the circus departs; tourists who would have been visiting anyway but who simply reschedule their trips around the tournament; and locals who don't visit the host city in the first place but then stay away when the circus arrives. For several American host cities, the idea of a wide economic boon accompanies the announcement of fare hikes, which was specifically to pay for World Cup-related expenses. In New Jersey, the transit authority alone reported about $48 million in costs for the tournament, while Boston had to raise the price of game-day transit passes, to $80 for a while.

The other question, concerning the champion's own bounce, is simpler and more well-established, and the optimists here have more to be thankful for. The study in the Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics suggested that it was not celebratory spending at home that saw GDP growth rise by about half a per cent in the two quarters after the World Cup, but the brief export surge, which amounted to a short-term free advertising for the winning nation's products and brands. If applied to the economy of Spain, that would translate to around €4 billion, in which FIFA would have to pay a check of €50 million – a large margin of error? But economists caution that the number of World Cup winners is too small to be certain of such a figure. Meanwhile, Spain's tax authorities will be receiving a much more definite amount, which, applying ordinary income tax, works out to about €6 million from the squad's prize bonuses.

Under all of this, there's also a quieter business story. The tournament was also an opportunity for FIFA to promote connected-ball technology directly onto the ball, which sends real-time data to a video assistant referee about touches, speed and trajectory; a very small but significant indicator of the increasing importance of technology vendors and data licensing in the sport's revenue streams, along with broadcasting and tickets. But European leagues haven't been quiet about their own concerns either, as LaLiga and the European Leagues body have complained about FIFA's calendar of events that it has grown without taking into account the clubs and competitions which provide the football economy over the rest of the year.

The common thread is a familiar one in the economics of global sport. The balance sheet of FIFA itself is growing almost by itself, as more matches are played, more inventory, more countries willing to pay a cut of the attention. Claims that the tournament boosts the wider economy of the host country are much more difficult to substantiate and have been lowered in the years since the games have been held, when independent researchers have access to the actual expenditure figures. In between FIFA's press releases and the economists' spreadsheets is the far less sexy reality a World Cup reshapes attention and money in quantifiable ways at the top of the pyramid, and in a stubbornly hard-to-trace way once the money finally gets to the street.