Acapulco to host FootGolf World Cup as sport’s premier stage

Acapulco put FootGolf’s biggest prize on its largest stage yet, with the 2026 FIFG FootGolf World Championship drawing 1,240 players and 64 teams across Turtle Dunes and Tres Vidas. The 12-day event ran from May 27 to June 7, with the Individual World Championship staged from May 27 to June 1 and the Team World Championship following from June 2 to June 7.

At the center of it was the Federation for International FootGolf, the sport’s global governing body, which oversees the game’s rules, standards and push for worldwide recognition. In Acapulco, that structure was visible in the scale of the field and the breadth of the entry list, with more than 60 countries represented at what FIFG described as the fifth edition of the World Championship.

The World Cup has become FootGolf’s clearest scoreboard of legitimacy because each edition has outgrown the last. Hungary hosted the first championship in June 2012 with 79 players from 8 countries. Argentina followed in January 2016 with 227 players from 26 countries, Morocco staged the 2018 edition with 503 players from 33 countries, and the United States hosted the 2023 championship with 972 players from 39 countries. Acapulco’s roster pushed the event into a new tier, and the championship wrap-up later described the field as more than 1,200 players from over 60 countries.

Mexico gave the event added continuity. FIFG identifies the country as one of FootGolf’s founding nations, and Mexico has played in every FIFG FootGolf World Cup since the first championship in Hungary. The host-member page also says Mexico has about 280 golf courses, with more than 50 already used for official FootGolf tournaments, showing how the sport has been folded into existing golf infrastructure instead of building from scratch.

The championship’s reach matched its size. FIFG said media coverage stretched across local, regional, national and international platforms, giving the Acapulco event a level of visibility no routine tour stop can match. In FootGolf, the World Cup has become the benchmark, because it is where the sport’s field size, national reach and competition structure are all measured at once.