The Baltimore Sun called it “the sloppy mess Baltimore avoided.” The fans disagree.
By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
The Baltimore Sun promoted Josh Tolentino’s column this week with a tweet calling the 2026 World Cup “the sloppy mess Baltimore avoided.” Tolentino’s piece argues that FIFA passing over Baltimore was a “blessing in disguise” — that host cities have had to absorb security costs, transportation stress, logistical strain, and FIFA’s notoriously heavy-handed commercial grip. As a concrete illustration, he noted that at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, the 60,000-plus seats bearing the stadium’s name were covered in blue duct tape because FIFA controls the commercial environment around its tournament.
It’s a real point. Hosting the World Cup is genuinely expensive and disruptive in ways that don’t always show up in the post-tournament economic reports. Tolentino isn’t making it up. The Sun’s own tweet puts it plainly: host cities are asked to “provide resources, absorb costs and surrender control before they can even begin counting what they might get back.”
But here’s what that framing misses entirely: the fans aren’t FIFA. And the “sloppy mess” the Sun is describing happened inside the stadium. What happened outside of it was something else altogether.
What the Fans Actually Did
While Baltimore was watching from the sidelines, something was unfolding in the host cities that you can find documented in real time across social media, sports journalism, and travel media: international soccer supporters showed up to America and fell in love with it.
The Tartan Army — Scotland’s traveling fan base, one of the most celebrated supporter cultures in the world — flooded Foxborough for their group stage matches, and their presence was documented in hundreds of posts and articles cataloging exactly the kind of warm, chaotic, genuine cultural exchange that makes a World Cup different from any other sporting event. Japanese fans, as they have at every World Cup for decades, cleaned stadiums after their matches — and American hosts noticed and said so publicly. Dutch, German, and Brazilian supporters walked to stadiums by the tens of thousands, taking over city streets, waterfront areas, and local bars in ways that transformed ordinary American urban spaces into international gathering places.
The 2026 World Cup is running the most effective destination marketing campaign in American history, and it’s running it for free—for the cities that were actually in it.
And then, almost universally, those fans said they wanted to come back.
This is the part of the World Cup calculus that the “blessing in disguise” argument skips. FIFA extracts enormous revenue from host cities. The duct tape is real. The security costs are real. But the fans don’t leave when the tournament ends. They leave as word-of-mouth ambassadors for the cities they visited. They post about it. They recommend it to friends. They book return trips. The 2026 World Cup is running the most effective destination marketing campaign in American history, and it’s running it for free — for the cities that were actually in it.
Picture Baltimore In It
It’s worth slowing down and actually imagining what Tolentino’s “chaos” would have looked like on Baltimore’s specific geography.
Tens of thousands of international supporters marching to M&T Bank Stadium — through the Inner Harbor, past Federal Hill, down Russell Street. European fans who have never seen an American city discovering that Baltimore has a working waterfront and one of the best crab cake traditions on the continent. On off-days, those same fans filling Camden Yards for Orioles games, because they’re in town, they have tickets to one World Cup match, and they want to do something with the rest of their time. Wandering onto the USS Constellation. Discovering Fells Point. Finding out that Canton exists.
And it wouldn’t have stopped at Baltimore’s city limits. WWE Monday Night Raw came to CFG Bank Arena on June 15 — right after the World Cup kicked off — and a city full of international visitors with time between matches would have packed it out. Maryland Live and MGM National Harbor casinos are a short drive away, and these are exactly the kinds of free-spending visitors who fill gaming floors. Philadelphia is 90 minutes up I-95. Washington, D.C. — in the middle of America’s 250th birthday celebrations — is 40 minutes by MARC train. A fan base that documented itself eating local food, cleaning stadiums, and absorbing everything a host city had to offer was never going to sit in a hotel room between matches. They were going to move through the entire regional economy, and Baltimore would have been the hub.
FIFA might have taken the ticket revenue. But it couldn’t take the crab cakes, the casino floor, the Camden Yards upper deck, or the train ride to see the Declaration of Independence. That money stays local. That’s the calculation the “blessing” framing never makes.
And it wouldn’t have stopped at the city line. International fans at this World Cup have been documented going on full tourist hunts — renting cars, taking day trips, seeking out the kind of authentically local experience that doesn’t show up in a FIFA hospitality package. Some of them might have found Ocean City. Some might have driven out to St. Michaels on the Eastern Shore for a quiet afternoon on the Chesapeake. Some would almost certainly have caused a line around the block at Jimmy’s Famous Seafood. The Tartan Army alone would have had Fell’s Point bars calling in extra staff for a month.
None of this is hypothetical in the abstract — it is documented behavior. It is what these fans did in Dallas, in Miami, in Philadelphia. The question is only whether Baltimore was part of it. It wasn’t. Not because Baltimore calculated the duct tape costs and decided to pass, but because FIFA made the call — and based on available reporting, that call was influenced not purely by merit but by the kind of insider leverage that comes from having a well-connected NFL owner in your corner.
The Accountability Gap in the Sun’s Framing
Tolentino’s column, to be fair, is a sports column — it’s not an accountability piece, and it isn’t pretending to be. But the “blessing” framing slides past something worth examining: Baltimore didn’t opt out. The city pursued this aggressively. The bid committee flew to London’s Wembley Stadium to discuss logistics with English Football Association officials. Governor Larry Hogan, Lieutenant Governor Boyd Rutherford, and Mayor Brandon Scott were all publicly committed. The Maryland Sports Commission executive director said afterward that “something else was at play” in the final decision — that the result didn’t pass the sniff test.
Baltimore didn’t opt out. The city pursued this aggressively.
Framing the outcome as a blessing accepts the premise that Baltimore got what it deserved, or at least what was best for it. Neither claim is obviously true. What’s closer to true is that Baltimore was a legitimate finalist, was passed over in the final round of cuts, and never got a straight explanation for why. The duct tape at Gillette Stadium is a real story. So is the fact that Gillette Stadium is a 45-minute drive from downtown Boston. If proximity and civic character were genuinely disqualifying for Baltimore, it’s not immediately clear how a suburban New England parking lot cleared that bar.
And notice what the Sun’s own tweet concedes: that Baltimore’s original bid was built around the city’s “proximity to the nation’s capital” as the country “nears its 250th birthday.” They acknowledge the pitch. Then they call the rejection a sloppy mess avoided. Washington, D.C. is running its 250th anniversary celebrations right now. World Cup fans based in Baltimore would have been 40 minutes away by MARC train. The Sun is arguing that Baltimore was lucky to miss a connection it spent years trying to make.
Framing the outcome as a blessing accepts the premise that Baltimore got what it deserved, or at least what was best for it. Neither claim is obviously true.
What “Blessing” Gets Wrong
The World Cup runs once every four years. It came to North America once in 1994 and returned in 2026 for the first time in 32 years. The next edition is in 2030, split across three continents. The next North American opportunity is 2034, which has already been awarded to Saudi Arabia. There is no obvious second chance on the horizon for an American city to host a World Cup match in the near term.
A blessing is something that goes wrong and turns out fine. What happened to Baltimore is different: a real opportunity — one the city’s leadership actively wanted, prepared for, and came close to winning — was lost under circumstances that have never been fully explained. The fans who would have walked those streets, caused a line around the block at Jimmy’s Famous Seafood, driven out to Annapolis or St. Michaels or Ocean City, and told their friends back home about Charm City, went to other cities instead.
We’ll never know what that would have looked like. And according to the Baltimore Sun, that’s a good thing.
This is the third piece in MDBayNews’s series on Baltimore and the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Read Part 1: “Baltimore Wasn’t Spared — It Was Passed Over.” Read Part 2: “Why FIFA Really Passed Over Baltimore.“
Sources: Baltimore Sun (Josh Tolentino, June 30, 2026); DCist; Sports Destination Management; The Baltimore Banner
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