Boston spent the summer selling itself to the world. The Scots filled bars and trains. Sail Boston packed the waterfront. The nation's 250th anniversary brought another round of visitors and attention. City officials have begun calling the season a success, and there is evidence for it: spending rose, downtown businesses reported packed rooms, and a temporary loosening of liquor rules helped restaurants capture more of the crowds.

Seven miles from City Hall, the victory lap looks different.

Reporting from Axios found that businesses in Roxbury, Hyde Park and other neighborhoods did not share evenly in the windfall. The sharpest number came from the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts, which said it received no public funding for its summer programming and spent $155,138 of its own money on grants, technology, training and other support for businesses trying to reach the crowds.

That figure raises a question Boston, the Commonwealth, and the private sector should answer before declaring the summer an economic development triumph: who actually got a piece of the pie?

The answer is easier to predict than officials may want to admit, because the underlying numbers have not moved much in a decade.

Boston's own 2020 disparity study reviewed 47,000 contracts awarded between 2014 and 2019 and found that minority-owned firms captured 2.5 percent of discretionary spending. Black-owned businesses received four-tenths of 1 percent. Latino-owned businesses received eight-tenths. The city has made real progress since, reaching as high as 15 percent of contract awards to certified minority and women-owned firms in fiscal 2023, according to a five-year review published this year.

The state's record is thinner than its headline. Massachusetts spent about $4.5 billion with small and diverse businesses in fiscal 2025, a more than 20 percent increase. But when GBH examined an earlier year's report, it found minority-owned firms accounted for roughly 5.4 percent of state contracts, and that the total counted more than $230 million spent with nonprofits governed by predominantly minority boards. The state auditor, reviewing the Massachusetts State College Building Authority, found minority-owned firms received two-tenths of 1 percent of discretionary spending in both fiscal 2023 and 2024, against an 8 percent benchmark.

The private sector has been moving the other direction. In March 2025, State Street Global Advisors removed board diversity targets from its proxy voting guidelines, following BlackRock and Vanguard, and the company later took down diversity pages from its website. And State Street was one of only three announced local sponsors of Boston Soccer 26, the World Cup host committee, alongside Meet Boston and Sanofi. The company Boston watched retreat from a public diversity commitment was a headline underwriter of the city's biggest summer in a generation.

None of the organizing bodies operated in isolation. Boston 26, led by Mike Loynd and stacked with figures close to the Kraft organization, ran the World Cup effort. Sail Boston received a $4 million state award for infrastructure, public safety and transportation. Meet Boston, under Martha Sheridan, drove tourism promotion and sponsored the host committee, making large contributions to boost the success of these events. MA250, coordinated through the Healey administration and the Office of Travel and Tourism, anchored the anniversary programming. Each raised money, awarded contracts and chose vendors. None has published what those decisions produced.

That is the context for what happened when the world showed up. Event sponsorship and vendor selection are exactly the kind of discretionary, high-visibility spending that supplier diversity commitments were designed to reach. In a different climate, a season of this scale would have been an obvious place to demonstrate them.

Instead, the season was organized around putting on a good show, and the show itself was seen by many as unremarkable against what other cities did with the same calendar. The imagination was smaller than the moment.

The city's preliminary numbers suggest businesses across all 23 neighborhoods benefited to some degree, but Boston still has no complete economic impact analysis. Axios reported that nine business owners described capitalizing on watch parties and other World Cup activity, while others said the surge never reached their doors.

That difference matters. Enormous events are justified in part by the money visitors leave behind. Public agencies supply transportation, public safety, permitting and planning. Business organizations spend months preparing entrepreneurs (at least they are supposed to). If the benefit clusters only in the major economic hubs and among firms already connected to organizers, a headline impact number conceals as much as it reveals.

The World Cup added obstacles Boston did not create. FIFA tightly restricted sponsorships and the brands vendors could sell, and local organizers faced complaints about transparency and access. Those constraints were not the city's to set. The distribution of local opportunity was.

Some things worked. Business owners repeatedly praised the temporary relaxation of alcohol rules, which allowed an extra hour of service and public drinking districts. That is evidence Boston's nightlife regulations may be leaving money on the table the rest of the year.

Boston may already be preparing for its 400th anniversary in 2030. That leaves four years to decide whether the next celebration distributes opportunity deliberately or repeats the pattern the city's own disparity study documented.

The City Council and the Legislature should hold hearings before then, and this time the answers should arrive well before the events do. Councilor Ruthzee Louijeune held a hearing in early 2026 pressing stakeholders for a supplier diversity plan. For a follow up hearing, the witness list writes itself: the city and state's procurement and economic opportunity offices, Boston 26, Meet Boston, Sail Boston, MA250 and the Office of Travel and Tourism, and the Supplier Diversity Office. Each should be asked the same questions. What did you spend, with whom, and how much of it reached businesses in the neighborhoods you said would benefit?

Officials may tout the summer of 2026 as one of its best. The numbers will tell us for whom.