In Germany, fans watched the games on screens in crowded town squares, their roars careening off ancient buildings, or from the banks of rivers, peering at floating, double-sided big screens on barges. At the next World Cup, in South Africa in 2010, people gathered in parks and open-air markets and hotel lobbies and unlicensed, makeshift bars in people’s garages. In Brazil, four years later, fans spilled from the bars on the Copacabana or watched in restaurants or in streets closed for the occasion – not as if anybody was driving during the Seleção’s games anyway.
During the 2018 World Cup, Russia surprised visitors – and its own citizens – with its friendliness as spontaneous parties broke out all over the country. The reason the 2022 World Cup in Qatar didn’t entirely feel like a real World Cup is that those sorts of spontaneous soccer gatherings just didn’t seem to be happening, or not at the same scale, at any rate. The absence of hordes of supporters just milling about everywhere contributed to the feeling of being at a Potemkin World Cup.
World Cups are a feeling. A sense that you’re at The Thing, a global convention on joy. That’s the sentiment the tournament evokes and bottles. It exists in the stadium, where it is studiously curated and ultimately makes every World Cup sound and feel largely the same. But it exists outside the venues, too.
This realization offers hope for the upcoming World Cup. Because there is opportunity in this edition’s unprecedented vastness. In the first World Cup staged in three countries; the first one contested by 48 teams. That there may be another way, a workaround.
If the shocking ticket prices for the actual World Cup will make it exclusive and inaccessible – as is well established in these pages – something like a shadow World Cup may nevertheless emerge as an alternative.
With a tall wall built around the genuine article, scalable only by a bundle of money, a kind of bootleg version may be fashioned out of the scraps and flashes of the tournament that have not yet been privatized and premium-ified. A lower-case world cup, as it were, consisting of fan fests and open training sessions and pre-tournament warmup matches. The bits not yet sold off to the highest bidder via the Visa pre-sale lottery peddling a bespoke, once-in-a-lifetime experience brought to you by Coca-Cola and Aramco and whomever else.
There will still be an awful lot of World Cup-adjacent programming on offer around the tournament. And that means there’s opportunity to make the World Cup accessible, in a way, to people who can’t afford or access the full experience, financially or geographically.
For a start, all 48 of those participants will be training somewhere, and will presumably hold a few open training sessions – an easy way for federations to score PR points in a coveted market. Germany will hold its training camp at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Australia’s Socceroos might be based in Boise. The Netherlands, England and Argentina are all rumored to be headed for Kansas City. France will be based in Boston; Croatia in Alexandria, Virginia; and Spain apparently in Chattanooga.
There may yet be teams who choose to train in Birmingham, Alabama; Westfield, Indiana; Louisville, Kentucky; Oklahoma City; Tucson; or Stillwater, Oklahoma, depending on which of Fifa’s proposed training facilities they pick.
Taken together, they will expand the World Cup’s footprint enormously.
So, too, will the many pre-tournament tune-up games. Plenty of teams will choose to play their final friendlies at home, or at someone else’s home, but a great many will use the occasion to acclimate to the US. (Albeit not exactly to any of the host cities, because Fifa rules preclude the pre-World Cup exhibitions from being played at any of the venues where the tournament proper will be played, for some reason.)
The “Road to ’26” series will pit Brazil, France, Colombia and Croatia up and down the East Coast in March. Argentina will play a pair of stateside friendlies in June against Honduras and Mexico, at undecided locations. The US will play newly crowned African champions Senegal in Charlotte on 31 May and Germany in Chicago on 6 June.
More games will be announced. And tickets cannot be priced as prohibitively as the World Cup proper. (Surely. Right?!)
Fan fests, meanwhile, those old staples of World Cup place-making, typically attracting tens of thousands of unticketed fans, are planned all over the country. And right now, all but New York City’s and New Jersey’s are expected to be free, per Front Office Sports. The latter will reportedly charge $12.50 to cover their costs of as much as $1m a day. (Since, as The Independent reported, the host cities have almost no avenues for recuperating their substantial World Cup costs, as Fifa devours almost all the revenue.) The festival planned for Rockefeller Center during the final two weeks of the tournament, however, will be free. New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani already is freelancing watch-parties for major soccer games and promising to host more.
If host cities, federations and US Soccer get creative, and if a concerted effort is made, this can still be a World Cup that a lot of people can touch. It can still leave a legacy and make memories beyond those lucky few who managed to get tickets. After all, Fifa can’t monetize everything.
Leander Schaerlaeckens’ book on the United States men’s national soccer team, The Long Game, is out on 12 May. You can preorder it here. He teaches at Marist University.
