The World Championship of 2026 will not play in New York, but just outside: the New York area matches will be at MetLife Stadium, East Rutherford, New Jersey. For the city, however, the tournament will still be a great event and the arrival of fans, tourists and initiatives related to the World Cup will concern the five districts, not only those who can buy a ticket for the stadium. This is why Mayor Zohran Mamdani, together with NYC Tourism + Conventions and Team Wonder, announced a program to move a part of the attention from major official events to neighborhoods, libraries, small activities and cultural places in the city.
The initiative is called NYC Neighborhood Passport. From 11 June, the beginning of the tournament, you can collect a paper booklet in the public libraries of the five districts and in some selected events. The operation is similar to the most “ludic” of ordinary passports: who participates can collect stamps designed by artists in hundreds of places and appointments scattered around the city, a bit like when visiting new places in the world. It is obviously not an official passport, but more a physical guide to cross New York during the Mondial month, using football as a pretext to discover places that often remain outside the tourist circuits.
The program focuses on the neighbourhoods of immigrant communities and national cultures that will participate in the tournament. Corona, Flatbush, Astoria and Sunset Park are cited in materials from the city, as well as areas famous for the presence of specific communities, such as Little Senegal, Little India and Little Caribbean. The idea is that the worlds are not only told through stadiums, sponsors and fan areas, but also through restaurants, cultural centers, neighborhood parties, projections, dance shows and local initiatives. It is a very New Yorker choice, since several nationals will have fans already present in the city, often for generations.
There will also be some well-known institutions including the American Museum of Natural History, the Brooklyn Public Library, the Queens Museum, the New York Botanical Garden and the Barrio Museum. Next to the passport there will also be Already Home, a national storytelling campaign that will collect audio and video stories about the relationship between people and the World Championship. It is not only for fans: it also serves to document how a sports event is experienced by people living in cities very different from each other, from New York to Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Seattle, Albuquerque and El Paso.
From May 27, NYC Tourism will also put online a calendar of events and an interactive digital map, designed to guide residents and visitors between free or low-cost appointments. It is probably the most useful part of the project, because the risk of such initiatives is always to become a sum of difficult events to find. Here instead, those who will not go to the stadium will still be able to follow the tournament in public spaces, discover local activities and move between neighborhoods that during the World Cup will be a part of the story.
L’articolo There will be some kind of passport to follow the World Cup in New York neighborhoods proviene da IlNewyorkese.
