New Jersey's MetLife Stadium to host 2026 World Cup Final

María Paula Mijares Torres, Bloomberg News on Dec 6, 2025

Published in Soccer

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Next year’s World Cup will bring four top-10 teams — France, Germany, Brazil and England — to the New York region for group-stage matches at MetLife Stadium across the Hudson in New Jersey.

Dates and venues were set on Saturday by FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, for the tournament being held between June 11 and July 19, 2026 in the U.S., Mexico and Canada.

Five-time champion Brazil meets Morocco on June 13 for the first game at MetLife, home of the National Football League’s New York Giants and New York Jets, two of the world’s most valuable sports franchises.

Other first-round games at the 82,000-capacity venue are France-Senegal on June 16, Norway-Senegal on June 22, Ecuador-Germany on June 25 and Panama-England on June 27.

Metlife Stadium also will host one match each in the round of 32 and the round of 16. Last but not least, it’ll host the final, the world’s most-viewed sports event, for which the New York-New Jersey host committee beat out Dallas and Los Angeles.

“This final is going to be the biggest sporting event, maybe even the biggest event, in human history,” Alex Lasry, chief executive officer of the New York-New Jersey Host Committee told Bloomberg Television on Friday. “If you think about ... the last World Cup final, it was viewed by the same amount of people as the last 13 Super Bowls combined.”

The World Cup is set to generate $3.3 billion in economic impact for the New York and New Jersey areas through tourism, hospitality and other sectors, according to a study by the local host committee and Oxford Economics.

The stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., was also the site of a 2014 Super Bowl that was briefly the most-watched television event in U.S. history. A previous stadium at the site hosted seven 1994 World Cup games, including a semifinal.

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— With assistance from Matt Townsend.