The World Cup is out of reach for many. The hope lies outside the stadiums | World Cup 2026

IIn Germany, fans watched matches on screens in crowded squares, their roars echoing off ancient buildings or from river banks, watching large double-sided floating screens on barges. At the next World Cup, in South Africa in 2010, people gathered in parks, open-air markets, hotel lobbies and unlicensed makeshift bars set up in people’s garages. In Brazil, four years later, fans were pouring out of Copacabana bars or watching in restaurants or on streets closed off for the occasion – it’s not like anyone was driving during the Seleção match. games anyway.

At the 2018 World Cup, Russia surprised visitors – and its own citizens – with its friendliness as spontaneous celebrations broke out across the country. The reason the 2022 World Cup in Qatar didn’t really feel like a real World Cup is that these kinds of spontaneous football gatherings just didn’t seem to be happening, or at least not on the same scale. The absence of hordes of fans milling about everywhere contributed to the feeling of being at a Potemkin World Cup.

World Cups are a feeling. The feeling of being at The Thing, a global convention on joy. This is the feeling that the tournament evokes and bottles. It exists in the stadium, where it is carefully curated and ultimately gives every World Cup the same sound and feel. But it also exists outside of the theaters.

This awareness gives hope for the next World Cup. Because there are opportunities in the unprecedented immensity of this edition. During the first World Cup organized in three countries; the first contested by 48 teams. That maybe there is another way, a workaround.

If exorbitant ticket prices for the current World Cup make it exclusive and inaccessible – as is made clear in these pages – something like a ghost World Cup could nevertheless emerge as an alternative.

With a big wall built around the genuine article, scalable only through a large sum of money, a sort of bootleg version can be fashioned from the scraps and flashes of the tournament that have yet to be privatized and premiumified. A lowercase World Cup, so to speak, made up of fan parties, open training sessions and warm-up matches before the tournament. The pieces that haven’t yet been sold to the highest bidder via the Visa pre-sale lottery peddling a once-in-a-lifetime bespoke experience brought to you by Coca-Cola and Aramco and whoever else.

There will still be a lot of World Cup-adjacent programming on offer around the tournament. And that means there is an opportunity to make the World Cup accessible, in some way, to people who can’t afford or access the full experience, financially or geographically.

To start, the 48 participants will train somewhere and probably 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. The Australian Socceroos could be based in Boise. The Netherlands, England and Argentina would all be heading to Kansas City. France will be based in Boston; Croatia in Alexandria, Virginia; and Spain apparently in Chattanooga.

There may still be teams that choose to train in Birmingham, Alabama; Westfield, Ind.; Louisville, Kentucky; Oklahoma City; Tucson; or Stillwater, Oklahoma, depending on which FIFA training center they choose.

Together, they will significantly expand the World Cup footprint.

The same will be true for the numerous tune-up games prior to the tournament. Many teams will choose to play their final friendlies at home or someone else’s, but many will take the opportunity to acclimatize to the United States. (But not exactly in any of the host cities, as Fifa rules prohibit World Cup preparatory matches from being played in any of the venues where the actual tournament will be held, for whatever reason.)

The “Road to ’26” series will pit Brazil, France, Colombia and Croatia against each other along the East Coast in March. Argentina will play two friendlies in the United States in June against Honduras and Mexico, at locations undecided. The United States will face Senegal, new African champions, in Charlotte on May 31 and Germany in Chicago on June 6.

Other games will be announced. And ticket prices can’t be as prohibitive as those for the World Cup itself. (Surely. Right?!)

Meanwhile, fan parties, those old staples of World Cup venue-making, usually attracting tens of thousands of ticketless fans, are planned across the country. And for now, all but those in New York and New Jersey are expected to be free, according to Front Office Sports. They would charge $12.50 to cover their costs of up to $1 million per day. (Given that, as The Independent reported, host cities have virtually no way of recouping their substantial World Cup costs, with Fifa devouring almost all the revenue.) The festival planned at Rockefeller Center during the tournament’s final two weeks, however, will be free. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani already hosts independent watch parties for big football games and promises to host more.

If host cities, federations and American soccer get creative and a concerted effort is made, this can still be a World Cup that many people can participate in. It can still leave a legacy and create memories beyond the lucky few who managed to secure tickets. After all, Fifa cannot monetize everything.

• Leander Schaerlaeckens’ book about the United States men’s national soccer team, The Long Game, is released May 12.. You can pre-order it here. He teaches at Marist University.