Commentary: Why is getting to a World Cup game so hard?

NEW YORK: The Maracana stadium, scene of the 2014 World Cup final, opens on to a neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro. Park paths surround the Moscow site where the 2018 championship was played. Reaching the gates of Lusail stadium in 2022 required a walk under the Qatar sun.

Then there is this year’s venue. If you were considering a saunter to New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, think again: Walking and biking are “illegal”, according to local authorities.

The site sits more than 6km from the nearest Manhattan river ferry at the edge of a densely populated New Jersey county whose finely grained street grid is lined by pavements. But while that grid was laid down in the late 19th century, the sports complex that surrounds the stadium was built in the car-dominated 20th century.

The arena is hemmed in by high-speed freeways. A chain-link fence lines a concrete median to block would-be pedestrians from crossing the road. Signs inside hotels surrounding the stadium warn guests about the dangers of walking there.

MetLife, renamed New York New Jersey Stadium for the duration of the tournament, is located in the Meadowlands, an area of marshland once known for pig farms, mafia hits and rubbish dumps before state officials pushed to develop it in the 1970s.

“It was built as a suburban-style drive-in, park, drive-out stadium,” says Moses Gates, vice-president at the Regional Plan Association, a non-profit policy group. “From a transportation accessibility standpoint, it’s a bit of a relic.” 

Making the area more accessible is not an outlandish proposition. An analysis published in 1978 by the Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission identified an “unprecedented opportunity for development of a comprehensive bikeway network”. When