Just days after the 2026 World Cup host cities were confirmed, Fifa faces a fresh accusation. Not corruption, not worker exploitation, but something more clinical: herding fans onto concourses like cattle. A safety warning issued by a group of stadium architects and human behaviour experts suggests that the tournament's design priorities may be putting profit before people.
The report, seen by this paper, warns that the planned layouts for several US venues could create dangerous bottlenecks, with fans forced into narrow, windowless corridors while the pitch remains visible only on screens. It is a vision of the World Cup as an airport transfer lounge: sanitised, controlled and utterly devoid of the spontaneous joy that defines the game. 'Fans are being treated as throughput, not participants,' says Dr.
Eleanor Marsh, a social psychologist at the University of Manchester who contributed to the study. 'The concourse is where the communal experience happens. You bump into strangers, sing songs, share a beer.
If you design that space to be a passage rather than a place, you kill the very atmosphere that makes the World Cup special.' The report comes amid growing unease about the 2026 tournament, which will be co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico. With 48 teams and 104 matches, it is the largest World Cup ever.
But size does not always equal spectacle. Ask any fan who attended the 2014 World Cup in Brazil: the magic was not in the stadiums but in the streets, the bars, the impromptu samba circles. The fear now is that the American model of sports entertainment, with its premium seating and corporate hospitality, will turn the tournament into a theme park.
'You can't herd passion,' says a Fifa spokesperson, in a defensive statement. 'Safety is our priority. The concourse layouts are designed to ensure swift egress and maximum security.
' But the critics are not buying it. They point to the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, where fans were frequently funnelled through sterile corridors, only to emerge into a sea of grey concrete. This was not a safety measure, they argue.
It was a strategy to control the crowd, to filter out the rowdy and the spontaneous. The human cost is harder to measure but no less real: the loss of the shared ritual. The 2026 tournament is still three years away, but the battle for its soul has already begun.
The question is not whether the stadiums will be safe. They will. The question is whether they will be alive.
