Baseball Meets World (Cup)
Early Connections Between Baseball and the World Cup Prove Promising
By Sam Wormald
When Scottish football fans streamed into Boston’s iconic Fenway Park to watch the Red Sox take on the Texas Rangers, baseball fans got a taste of a quintessentially European sporting atmosphere. This was a specific “Scottish Celebration”-themed game, designed to attract Europeans who in all likelihood had never been to a baseball match (sorry: game) before. Boston won’t be the only city, though, where baseball and football fans cross paths over the course of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, Oakland included .
Despite Oakland not being a host city, on 12th June, the Ballers’ Raimondi Park hosted a sold-out watch party for the USA’s opening match when they thumped Paraguay 4-1. This is the first of several similar events at the venue, allowing fans to gather on the field to watch the game on a big screen in a carnival atmosphere. The Oakland Sports Group, which coordinated the watch party, has plans for another after the success of the first. Fans can check out the East Bay Soccer Trail for more watch parties for all teams throughout the tournament.
The popularity of football in the Bay Area won’t come as a surprise to many with the city’s men’s team, Oakland Roots, achieving a club-record attendance of 26,000 earlier on in the United Soccer League Championship season. With football fever gripping Oakland, the Roots reduced ticket prices for the recent game against Birmingham Legion for an unlikely reason—to celebrate Australia’s opening 2-0 victory over Turkey—and put together an Aussie-themed matchday complete with a didgeridoo performance, soundtrack of ACDC, INXS and Sia, and the national anthem, plus some kangaroo-themed Roots merch.
Aptly nicknamed the Socceroos, Australia’s team is based for the World Cup at the Oakland Roots and Soul Sports Club facilities, and it already appears to be bringing them luck. A public training session in Oakland was staged in early June (a somewhat controversial concept for many English fans given the recent Spygate scandal), before the Aussies stunned the Turks, widely considered a dark horse for the tournament by journalists, in Vancouver.
The World Cup is already showing the scope of football visibility across Canada and the United States. In the build-up, much of the European discussion centred on whether football would struggle for attention across the pond, given that it coincides with the NBA Finals and the MLB season. Debates over ticket prices and a potential lack of atmosphere also dominated social media. This suggested a less-than-harmonious start to the tournament, but it’s not surprising: there was intense scrutiny of previous tournaments before a ball had been kicked in Russia 2018 and in Qatar in 2022, albeit for different, politically-charged reasons. Connecting with other sports and welcoming new fans is providing early positive results.
Come the Final on 19th July, the results on the pitch will ultimately dominate the headlines, but the World Cup is far more than that. It offers football the opportunity to cement its place in an increasingly packed American sporting landscape. If the events at Fenway and Raimondi are a sign of things to come, football (sorry, soccer) has plenty of room to grow, and not at the expense of other American sports.
Photos and video courtesy of the Oakland Roots, Oakland Ballers, Oakland Sports Group, and football360au
Sam Wormald is passionate about all sports, specifically football (soccer!), baseball, NFL and cricket. He is a student living in the south of England and is about to finish high school before starting university in the autumn/fall. He runs a sports blog, 'The Opinionated Saint'. Find him on Instagram, or at opinionatedsaint.wordpress.com.
