The 2026 FIFA World Cup, hosted in North America this summer, has been fascinating to watch from different angles — from the matches themselves to community celebrations to the controversies.
The tournament has brought hundreds of thousands of visitors to major cities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. It’s been directing new and returning news consumers to local news outlets for vital information about how to make the most of the World Cup and the tournament’s impact on their lives.
Over the last six months, local news publications have taken several different approaches to serving their audiences during the World Cup, from newsletters and library exhibits to videos and interactive maps. I spoke to a few of them about their initiatives and how they’re making the most of the world’s biggest sporting event.
Here in Boston, the biggest World Cup story has been about how Scotland’s fanbase, the Tartan Army, filled the city’s streets with joy while drinking the bars dry.
But much of what makes the World Cup so much fun in a major city is the passion that immigrant communities share for the sport, their teams, and their cultures. The city of Chelsea — a majority-Hispanic suburb across the Mystic River from Boston — received state grants and a donated projector screen to host Fiesta Futbol, near-daily showings of World Cup matches in the city’s main square.
With hundreds of people stopping by to catch matches, El Planeta, Boston’s largest Spanish-language newspaper, partnered with radio station WBUR to help the community partake in a longtime World Cup tradition: completing the Panini FIFA World Cup sticker album.
During each World Cup, Italian collectibles company Panini prints stickers of all the players from each country participating in the tournament. In the U.S., the album costs $5, and stickers come in $2 packs of seven. Given the tournament’s expanded format with 48 teams, this year’s album requires nearly 1,000 stickers to be completed.
I can say firsthand that this is a costly hobby, but one that’s rooted in first-time excitement for children and seasoned nostalgia for adults. El Planeta has long had a distribution partnership for albums and stickers with Panini, and when WBUR’s managing editor for audience, Meagan McGinnes-Bessey, got in touch about collaborating on a World Cup initiative, El Planeta executive chairman Javier Marin pitched the idea of giving away stickers and albums.
“It’s kind of like Pokémon cards,” McGinnes-Bessey said. “It’s approachable. It’s just a good time.”
WBUR and El Planeta first teamed up on COVID-19 coverage in 2020 on a story about Chelsea’s high rate of Covid infections amid a lack of resources to combat the pandemic. More recently, the two publications have republished and translated each other’s reporting on ICE raids in the city.
On June 27, Marin, McGinnes-Bessey, and a few reporters spent the afternoon in the Chelsea Square area handing out stickers and albums, getting to know community members, and letting community members get to know their journalism. Marin estimated that hundreds of families stopped by their table, and they gave out more than 600 sticker packs and 150 albums.
They gave out another 1,300 sticker packs on July 11. They also raffled off four boxes of stickers, each containing 50 packs, and distributed another 160 albums. While the original plan was to give out stickers and albums after people signed up for a WBUR or El Planeta newsletter, Marin and McGinnes-Bessey ended up loosening that requirement. That helped foster more natural conversations and engagement with the community, they said.
“This is an amazing opportunity to demonstrate to the community that both WBUR and El Planeta are celebrating this tradition,” Marin said. “It brings happiness in the toughest moments.”
KCUR Kansas City
KCUR’s managing producer for podcasts, Suzanne Hogan, has a special relationship with soccer.
Her grandfather, Jose Portuguez, came from Costa Rica in the 1950s to study at the University of Kansas. He was a soccer fanatic, Hogan said, and found community with other immigrant groups in the city playing pickup soccer. He helped referee games and advocate for some of the city’s first dedicated soccer fields.
Hogan played soccer herself and grew up hearing his stories. As she got older, she came to understand how the game was intertwined with the fabric of the city. Throughout her career, she wanted to tell Kansas City’s soccer story but never found the right avenue.
Until the World Cup.
Hogan pitched the idea for a podcast, How We Became a Soccer City, to explore Kansas City’s relationship to the sport. The pitch was accepted into Arizona State University’s Great Game Lab — a fellowship program to “chronicle how some of the U.S. host cities became World Cup cities.”
“It seemed like a great opportunity to do the deep dive, in-depth enterprise reporting that we get to do in our podcast all the time, but really focus it on Kansas City’s soccer story,” Hogan said, “which I knew was rich in stories of immigrant groups and lots of efforts by different people who had never been given the spotlight.”
The podcast is a four-part mini-series within KCUR’s monthly podcast The People’s History of Kansas City.
As the episodes were released, Hogan received tips from listeners who had their own family histories and anecdotes to share. She accumulated so much research over the course of reporting that it couldn’t all be included in the final episodes. So KCUR partnered with the Kansas City Public Library to host an interactive exhibit about KC’s soccer history, based on the podcast. The exhibit is free to visit throughout the tournament.
“You create podcasts or a story digitally and [they] just so quickly get lost in the feed, or buried,” Hogan said. “With something like this, if we were going to do it so in-depth and have all this never-before-seen archival footage, it [was] really nice [that] it was something that could be shared and celebrated during the actual event.”
Kansas City Beacon
Elsewhere in Kansas City, the nonprofit Kansas City Beacon leveraged its partnership with the Documenters program to find stories about the World Cup’s impact on the smallest host city. Documenters, run by the nonprofit City Bureau, trains and pays people to attend and cover public meetings.
The Beacon has been working with Documenters since August 2025 and has trained more than 60 notetakers so far, interim editor-in-chief Chris Lester said. In their weekly meetings, staffers discuss potential story ideas from the public meetings.
During one Mid-America Regional Council meeting, for instance, a few local mayors expressed concerns about low World Cup-related hotel reservations and wondered if fans camping outdoors might cause problems. Workforce and economic impact reporter Tom White saw that in the Documenters notes and ended up reporting on it.
Extended hours for bars during the tournament have also been a topic of debate in public meetings. When Kansas City granted 16 bars the ability to stay open until 5:00 a.m., White hung out at one for 10 hours to watch the Argentina vs Algeria match and immerse readers in the experience of World Cup nightlife.
“That’s not a typical story for us, to do a first-person observational narrative,” Lester said. “That was outside our usual boundaries, and it turned out really well.”
The Beacon is also experimenting with including more notetakers in the newsroom’s work. Lester recently deployed a few alongside staff reporters to interview small business owners in neighborhoods beyond the main Fan Fest area about how the World Cup has impacted them economically.
“I am really concerned about helping develop the next generation of potential journalists,” Lester said. “While it’s not the core priority of Documenters, my hope is that by getting involved in this program, a few people may become inspired to really pursue journalism as a career.”
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution launched a pop-up newsletter called “Kick It” to explore soccer culture in Atlanta communities. (The city, which hosted eight World Cup matches, is no stranger to major sporting events; it hosted the Super Bowl in 2019 and is set to do so again in 2028.)
“We’ve taken a look at the residents who live here and how they are activating the pride and celebration that they have as their countries are in the World Cup,” managing editor Janel Davis said. “We’ve been able to embed with those folks and tell those stories. We’ve [also] been able to provide a vast amount of utility content for folks who are coming here for the first time… What are ticket prices looking like here in Atlanta compared to other cities? Can I still get one last minute? What do I need to know before I take your public transportation?”
AJC video producer Fraser Jones briefly played soccer as a child, but didn’t keep it up. Before the start of the World Cup, he set out to learn the rules of the game and documented the process in a vertical video series titled “Soccer 101,” in which he enlists the help of high school soccer players to teach him the basics. The three-part series was sponsored by a local car dealership and the videos were posted to Instagram and Facebook, garnering 136,000 views on the former.
“Once the World Cup is over, we can pivot this audience to stick with us,” Davis said. “We’re already doing that work on the front end, putting out surveys to these folks, asking if they’re interested in this kind of content beyond the World Cup.”
Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles hosted eight World Cup matches in 2026, will host the 2027 Super Bowl, and will be the hub for the 2028 summer Olympics. The city is used to tourists (and traffic), but the Los Angeles Times wanted to find a way to engage and retain newer and younger audiences. One way to do that? Being useful.
The L.A. Times reimagined its local restaurant and activities guides to let locals and tourists design their own Los Angeles adventures. After creating L.A. Times accounts, users can save places from Times guides to curate their own itineraries and plan routes through the city. They can also view bus and train schedules and monitor real-time transit updates.
“We are not trying to compete with Google Maps,” senior product manager Jeff Poirier said. “We don’t have the resources to compete with them on a technical front. [But] we are local experts. Our reporters actually go to and eat at these restaurants, and do these hikes, and personally vouch for these recommendations. People trust that the L.A. Times knows what’s going on in L.A. The real value of the product is the content itself and the expertise of our reporters.”
The personalized dashboard launched ahead of the World Cup and will remain available after the tournament is over. The team has seen thousands of saves of locations since its launch last month. Some of its most saved guides so far have been ideas for things to do with teenagers and an essentials dining guide for L.A.
“Our guides content has historically been really great at converting subscribers,” Poirier said. “The goal of this project is to bring new people into the fold as registered users and to introduce them in a deeper way to the content that we offer in this area. The hope is that they see the value and want to be able to take greater advantage of this feature, see more of our guides content, which would ultimately bring them down the funnel to a paid subscription.”
