It is rare to be envious of the people who couldn’t get a ticket. When you not only couldn’t be there, at the actual event, but also couldn’t be there, at the alternative. The 2006 FIFA World Cup Fan Fest was one of these occasions. When missing out on attending a match at the showpiece tournament in Germany came with the silver lining of seeing it on a big screen at the best party ever.
That sounds like an overstatement, but those 12 official live sites in host cities around the country really were where any fan in front of a television anywhere in the world would rather have been. The epicentre was Berlin, right near the Brandenburg Gate, where a total of about nine million revellers gathered at the Fan Mile across the 31 days of the tournament.
Think live build-up gigs from Right Said Fred (I’m Too Sexy was big in Germany) and Simple Minds, followed by a heaving tournament-time shindig blending football and more music, and a stereotype-challenging showcase of the world’s population as it really was. Where flags and opposing shirts, and hijabs and miniskirts, all happily co-existed inside an enclosure the size of 14 football fields.
Sure, this was a World Cup, which meant it was heavy on corporate sponsorship and FIFA excesses. But there remained a purity about that inaugural Fan Fest, at a World Cup whose slogan was “A time to make friends”. And even with lots of beer involved, fans were treated like adults and behaved like them. Football really did unite, and those first official branded events – major public screening areas and parties had been implemented by host cities since France 1998 – helped establish international football’s widespread ‘fan zone’ tradition.
If you need a local example from the time, look no further than Melbourne’s Federation Square, where wild scenes greeted the Socceroos’ 3-1 defeat of Japan in Kaiserslautern – the team’s first-ever World Cup win.
That late-night, flare-fuelled party cemented Fed Square as Australia’s premier public live site throughout subsequent men’s World Cups, culminating in Qatar 2022, when again the Victorian sky burned red in the dead of night as thousands exploded in euphoria with the swing of Mathew Leckie’s left boot. It was 12,000km away from Doha’s Al Janoub Stadium, where the Socceroos downed Denmark to secure progression to the knockout rounds, and also the holy grail of viewing experiences.
It was once again during the 2023 Women’s World Cup (well, until the semi-finals). And then, for a rage-bolstered 24 hours this week, all of it seemed relegated to history. On Thursday, Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan was widely praised for overturning Wednesday’s win for the killjoys.
As it turned out, the announcement by Melbourne Arts Precinct that it would ban screenings of Socceroos matches for next month’s 2026 World Cup was more flammable than any of the flares or fireworks cited for its decision. “There’s always the risk of bad behaviour from a few dickheads at every public gathering, but police and security will be on-site and there’ll be zero tolerance for it,” Allan said.
If only it was that simple to rescue FIFA’s dying Fan Fest. Actually, we should now call it the ‘FIFA Fan Festival’ – its rebranded name since Qatar 2022. That was the start of the slide. The preceding ‘FIFA Fan Fest’ instalments of South Africa 2010, Brazil 2014 and Russia 2018 – were, for the most part, equally organic supporter experiences.
Then along came Qatar, a single-city tournament with a single venue at Doha’s Al Bidda Park, and a transformation from success built on simplicity and authenticity into a gluttonous revenue-generator for football’s powerful and marketing opportunity for sponsors.
FIFA’s proudest milestones for the 2022 edition were, according to its website, the 146 artists who performed for a total 162 hours of live music, the creation of the first official FIFA Fan Festival anthem, ‘Tukoh Taka’, and the inaugural FIFA Museum presented by Hyundai. Oh, and the 1.86 million fan visits across the duration of the continuous four-week event.
A mid-tournament FIFA media release spruiked the entry of its one millionth fan, a fellow named Haytham Mokhtar, who was gifted match tickets to the final and a signed official match ball and is quoted as exclaiming: “I still cannot believe that I am so lucky to be the one millionth guest at the FIFA Fan Festival.”
None of the public relations correspondence mentions that fans were a bit hard to find in Doha days out from kick-off. Nor that minor controversy at the 11th hour, when Qatar authorities sprung the unprecedented decision to ban alcohol from in and around stadiums. It came as a surprise to FIFA, highlighting the fraught dance between global governing body and host country, and to its major beer sponsor Budweiser, who ended up with a few limited, tightly controlled off-site venues to sell anything apart from Budweiser Zero.
Now here we are, on the eve of the 2026 World Cup in the United States, Canada and Mexico, and fans are seemingly in for a treat no less synthetic and greedy than Qatar’s. Recent headlines include reports that the New York/New Jersey FIFA Fan Festival planned to charge an entrance fee for the first time. In February at Fan Festival, at Liberty State Park in Jersey City, was cancelled altogether and a new location sought with months to spare.
Toronto has just announced its first allotment of 220,000 free tickets were snapped up within four hours through a ticket portal. Initially advertised as a free event, the city reversed a controversial plan to charge $10 per ticket after strong public criticism.
Myriad public live sites across myriad cities and regions are listed as having an entry charge, alongside other free events. Funding is a major problem for organisers, who are tied to FIFA’s edict of setting up these uniform Fan Festivals that are fundamentally ill-aligned to North American sporting culture.
The beloved local tradition of tailgating has been at the centre of a storm following reports last month that FIFA had banned tailgating before matches at major stadiums. FIFA subsequently stated that it “does not have a formal policy that restricts tailgating” and eschewed responsibility by adding that site-specific restrictions may be imposed based on the local regulations of host cities.
It is hard not to conclude that the World Cup supporter experience has been stripped of spontaneity. The beautiful chaos of the old FIFA Fan Fest appears all but dead. What remains is fabricated fun. A forced experience akin to a corporate hack day wherein participants are gifted (nah, they’d probably have to pay for them like everything else) MAGA hats and sit in a circle naming inspiring words beginning with ‘F’ (“FIFA!“).
