68,745 Domains Riding the 2026 FIFA World Cup

The 2026 FIFA World Cup kicked off on 11 June across the USA, Canada, and Mexico. Major tournaments reliably attract waves of opportunistic domain registrations, and this edition is no exception — registration volume climbed month over month since January and peaked in June.

We compiled all current domain registrations containing strings such as worldcup, fifa, wc2026, or world-cup anywhere in the name and profiled them across creation dates, registrars, registrant emails, name servers, and naming intent. This gave us 68,745 domains for our investigation, which yielded these findings:

• 63% of the domains were registered from 1 May onward, peaking around kickoff
• 99% were registered for only one year, suggesting they are disposable by design
• 14,031 domains (20%) traced back to just 10 registrant email addresses, the largest holding 2,093 domains
• 73% were registered through one registrar and 73% used one name-server provider
• 38,430 domains used the .com TLD, followed by 20,789 on .com.cn
• 4,724 domains contained betting or gambling terms; 2,911 streaming, 2,099 app-download, 1,535 prediction, 1,422 news, 1,303 merchandise, 257 ticket, and 153 crypto-related names

These figures should be read as a conservative floor. Expanding the term set to other languages, host cities, and team and player names, along with typo variants and historical WHOIS coverage, would likely push the count well beyond 68,745.

Note(s):

An initial mapping in mid-June identified over 17,000 such names, and as the analysis widened to take in further languages, transliterations and string families the count rose to 68,745 as of 2 July 2026.

This research was cited on:
https://domainnamewire.com/2026/06/18/world-cup-domains/
https://globalgamblingnews.com/world-cup-triggers-surge-in-gambling-domain-registrations/