Public safety officials are bracing for the World Cup – first an onslaught of licensing needs and then a possible invasion of hooligans.
The global soccer championship that takes place every four years has Boston as one of its 16 host cities this summer. Boston Stadium in Foxboro – formerly Gillette Stadium – hosts seven games between June 13 and July 9, nearly the length of the full June 11-July 19 tourney in which 48 teams compete in 104 total “fixtures.” Cambridge and Somerville could see a tourism spillover in its hotels, and restaurants and bars are preparing their watch parties.
In Cambridge, police and fire officials are preparing too.
“We know that they’re going to come through here, but just how many, right? How do we make sure that we can manage and keep the city safe through how many thousands of people who are going to come in?” police commissioner Christine Elow asked at a March 24 meeting of the License Commission.
Commission chair Nicole Murati Ferrer said it was hard to tell what the impact would be. Applications for special event permits have begun to come in, but in March only one was handled: that of Central Square’s Phoenix Landing bar, already a home for watch parties among the 750 members of the Liverpool Football Club of Boston.
Because the games take place in time zones around the world, watches could go as late as 3 or 4 a.m. Kevin Treanor, owner of Phoenix Landing (and of a 2014 game ball smuggled out of Maracanã stadium in Brazil) said he wanted to make sure “we have all our licenses correct” for World Cup season, starting with adding two televisions and a speaker outdoors. The bar’s business neighbors are aboard, and might put out patio televisions too – though for the few games going past 11 p.m., Treanor said he would move the parties indoors.
Cambridge itself is a recipient of $65,000 in state grant funding that, with matching city funds, will pay for “Cambridge United – Where the World Comes Together,” a series of free World Cup watch parties, a city spokesperson said March 30. “Each watch party will feature live match screenings, cultural performances, family-friendly activities and food offerings from Cambridge restaurants,” spokesperson Jeremy Warnick said. Events will take place in “some of Cambridge’s most vibrant public spaces,” including Central Square, Harvard Square, Inman Square, Kendall/MIT, East Cambridge and during the annual Citywide Dance Party, held this year on June 26.
Figuring out what to expect
For the monthlong World Cup only, Murati Ferrer proposed creating $50-per-week license changes – sparing businesses that would normally pay $50 for every single-day change while providing flexibility to the commission to allow for immediate revocation at the direction of a board member “should issues arise.” The idea was approved.
Among restaurateurs and bar owners, “most of them are still trying to figure out what they’re going to do. A lot of them are under the impression that they’re able to show [games] through their cable provider, but some of them are now finding out that no, they need a license from Fifa,” the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, Murati Ferrer said. “World Cup is throwing everyone for a loop.”
Shay’s Pub and Wine Bar in Harvard Square is asking Friday for its own outdoor televisions and was expected to seek extended hours, and Elow wondered how many more such requests would come in and how that would play out in the summer.
To Murati Ferrer, it was simple: “If we get a complaint and we think, you know, enough is enough, we revoke the permit, and that’s it.”
“It would get ugly”
Soccer hooliganism is a legendary force, though, and the public safety officials had experience in Cambridge that suggested things might not be so simple. For starters, “you’re going to have a bunch of drunken patrons – and angry, drunken patrons,” Elow said.
The chair of the Somerville Licensing Commission, Joe Lynch, is feeling more optimistic as mayor Jake Wilson and city staff begin work on World Cup preparations. In an email, Lynch said expanding hours for World Cup viewing could be advantageous to the dining and nightlife industry.
“I’ve asked the Wilson administration to take a look at the feasibility of allowing this short-term initiative to take place during the World Cup. There are thousands of residents and visitors in our community who could be infusing much-needed revenue into our entertainment and dining venues, rooting for their home teams, creating cross-cultural connections while doing so in a responsible manner during the expanded hours. We would need guidelines and expectations of those establishments and to make it very clear that this is a privilege granted to, and not a right of their license. I look forward to a recommendation from the mayor in the very near future.”
Cambridge, meanwhile, is girding for something between a frat party and a siege.
“The soccer crowd is something that we’re not very familiar with in the United States, really, and a very different animal, and we need to be prepared,” said acting fire chief and commission board member Thomas F. Cahill. “We may go there at 2 in the morning and say ‘You’re shut down’ and they may say ‘You’re not coming in.’”
Cahill recalled a social club on Tremont Street near Inman Square that perhaps a dozen years ago would “pack people in” for soccer games. “It would get ugly,” he said. “We would respond down there and they wouldn’t let us in.”
There was more than one of those clubs, Elow said.
In the worst case, one approach to take for an unruly party where “we can’t break it up” would be to “put the area in containment” and allow revelers to wear themselves out, slowly getting the area cleared out and then holding the owners accountable, Elow said. It makes more sense to “let people just kind of fizzle out” then to get into a lose-lose physical altercation.
Meanwhile, the first commuter rail tickets to matches at the stadium went on sale Wednesday via mobile app. A trip on the express trains is $80, the MBTA said Monday. The first day saw sales of more than 17,450 tickets, MBTA general manager and chief executive Phillip Eng said later – nearly 11,000 in the first hour and another 5,000 in the first 10 minutes.
This post was updated April 11, 2026, with information about the “Cambridge United – Where the World Comes Together” series.
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