Global football, written sharply
Houston does not blush about its relationship with the automobile. The city sprawls across more than 600 square miles — larger than Los Angeles — and its freeway network is among the most extensive per capita of any major American metro. So when FIFA chose NRG Stadium as one of its four air-conditioned World Cup … Read more
Houston is running a free World Cup 2026 fan festival for 39 days, a 275,000 square-foot build in East Downtown that its host committee expects to draw more than half a million visitors across 34 match days, and which local outlets have reported reaching capacity and pausing entry on busy nights. That makes Houston the … Read more
Atlanta Stadium just collected a title no other World Cup 2026 host venue can claim. USA Today ranked it the best of all 16, ahead of Los Angeles’s SoFi Stadium and Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca. Read the reasoning and one advantage keeps surfacing underneath the roof and the video board: you can get to this … Read more
Getting to Hard Rock Stadium for the World Cup 2026 turned out to be the hardest part of the night. When Uruguay met Saudi Arabia in Miami Gardens on Monday 16 June, a six o’clock kick-off, hundreds of ticket holders were still stuck in a parking lot roughly a mile from the gates as the … Read more
Economists are already calling World Cup 2026 a financial wash for US host cities. Who actually keeps the money — and why a sold-out stadium isn’t enough.
Philadelphia spent months building a way to cash in on the World Cup’s late-night crowds, and then quietly throttled it. The pitch was simple: let bars serve until 4 a.m. instead of the usual 2 a.m. for the duration of the tournament, capturing the spending of fans who, in a normal Philadelphia June, would be … Read more
If you are trying to work out how to get to Gillette Stadium for the World Cup 2026 start with the fact the tournament’s branding would rather you didn’t dwell on: “Boston Stadium” is not in Boston. It sits in Foxborough, roughly 22 miles southwest of the city, ringed by Route 1 and very little … Read more
There is a quiet scandal of arithmetic buried in the build-up to Canada’s first men’s World Cup, and it has nothing to do with what fans pay. It is about what the host cities themselves are doing as sellers. Toronto’s World Cup 2026 ticket resale programme, the city buying its own allocation of seats and … Read more
The World Cup opens on Thursday, and if you want to get to MetLife Stadium for the World Cup 2026, the most important thing to understand is this: almost every way in now requires a match ticket and an advance purchase. In the final week before kickoff, New Jersey and FIFA have locked in an … Read more
Three days before a ball is kicked, one of the most aggressive enforcement build-outs around the tournament is not aimed at ticket touts or hooligans. It is aimed at money. The World Cup 2026 human trafficking crackdown now runs from a White House task force down through the Treasury Department’s financial-intelligence unit to the teller … Read more
