The 2026 FIFA World Cup has wowed European football fans – and the continent’s clubs and stadium operators are paying close attention…
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The moment that crystallised it came early in the tournament. Oliver Henry, an England supporter attending the Croatia fixture at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, posted a video from the stands that went quietly viral across football Twitter.
“We owe America a huge apology about their stadiums,” he wrote. “They are simply better than ours. This was the AT&T Stadium in Dallas and it is the best venue I’ve been to.” He wasn’t trolling, he meant every word – and in the days that followed, the sentiment was echoed by thousands of European fans who had made the trip stateside for the first time.
The scale question
Part of the reaction is simply about size. The venues hosting the 2026 World Cup – eleven of them NFL stadiums in the United States – operate at a scale that has no equivalent in European club football. AT&T Stadium holds around 80,000 spectators under a retractable roof. SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, which cost over $5 billion to build, is among the most technically sophisticated venues ever constructed. MetLife Stadium, staging the final in East Rutherford, seats 82,000. Even the more modest venues on the list dwarf the average Premier League or Bundesliga ground.
But size alone would not explain the reaction. What has genuinely caught European visitors off guard is the totality of the experience these stadiums deliver. Writing in SoccerBible this week, one observer captured the mood precisely:
“Sweeping roofs. Giant screens. Architectural statements that look more like futuristic landmarks than football grounds. These aren’t just stadiums, they’re experiences. Monuments to sport and entertainment built with a level of ambition that feels almost alien to those of us raised on the likes of Kenilworth Road and Fratton Park.”
Built as entertainment machines
The critical distinction is one of philosophy. These stadiums were designed to impress — to create a sense of occasion from the moment you arrive. They are not simply venues built to host sport; they are entertainment machines built to create an experience.
That manifests in everything from the food and beverage offer – dramatically more varied and higher quality than the average European football ground – to the premium hospitality infrastructure, the LED ribbon boards, the in-seat connectivity, and the sheer theatrical quality of arriving in and moving through a venue.
The infrastructure that made the NFL conversions possible is also instructive. Architect HKS, which designed both AT&T Stadium and SoFi Stadium, describes its approach as building “adaptable ecosystems, versus single-purpose buildings.”
The transformations for the World Cup involved reconfiguring playing surfaces and seating areas, installing systems for growing natural grass turf, and creating dedicated workspace for international media — demonstrating how modern venues must be flexible and capable of evolving to bring people together for the greatest variety of events. The temporary pitch installations alone — grass systems raised two-and-a-half feet above the regular field level, supported by lighting rigs and grow lamps lowered from the rafters — represent an engineering undertaking with few parallels in European venue management.
What the reaction means for European soccer
The question now is whether this World Cup serves merely as a tourism talking point, or whether it catalyses genuine change in how European football thinks about its stadiums. The signs suggest the latter. Several significant renovation projects are already under way across the continent, and in several cases the influence of the American stadium model is explicit.
Manchester City’s ongoing Etihad Stadium renovation – projected to cost $750 million and add 7,000 seats to take capacity beyond 61,000 – explicitly cited modern entertainment complexes in the United States, including SoFi Stadium, as a model for new hospitality features and entertainment areas.
The development includes a 400-room hotel, a covered fan park for 3,000 people, and a premium matchday offer designed to compete with the very best venues in global sport. It is no coincidence that this is happening simultaneously with European fans encountering American sports infrastructure for the first time at scale.
Arsenal, meanwhile, have confirmed they are developing renovation plans for the Emirates Stadium, with a ticket waiting list of more than 100,000 people underlining the scale of demand for additional capacity. In Spain, Real Valladolid has committed €11.8 million to bringing Estadio José Zorrilla closer to UEFA Category 4 standards, with a major focus on the modernisation of hospitality and fan facilities, including new premium areas, improved stadium circulation, upgraded turnstiles and modernised catering services. These are the areas — concessions, circulation, hospitality — in which the World Cup venues have been most eye-opening for European visitors.
The atmosphere question
European stadium operators would be wrong, however, to read this as a straightforward call to replicate the American model wholesale. The atmosphere debate — always present in discussions of US sports venues — has not gone away simply because the food is better. The unique acoustic quality of a packed Anfield or a sold-out Dortmund signal end is not something that can be designed in or purchased. Football culture on this side of the pond has always been more focused on the game itself. The atmosphere comes from the fans. The emotion comes from the ninety minutes. The stadium is just the setting.
That distinction is not lost on the designers working across both markets. HKS’s London office, reflecting on the cross-pollination happening in real time, noted that fan culture also influences design — and that the tradition of singing songs in the stands is driving new acoustic principles into NFL stadium design, including at Huntington Bank Field in Cleveland, where the most exuberant fan section will be angled to create a wall of sound, with standing-rail seats inspired directly by European football grounds. The influence is running in both directions, even if European fans haven’t always noticed.
The real lesson
The honest takeaway from the 2026 World Cup is not that European football needs bigger stadiums or retractable roofs. It is that the gap in the baseline quality of the fan experience — in food, in technology, in circulation, in accessibility, in the simple comfort of attending a match — has grown wider than the game’s governing bodies and club operators have acknowledged. These World Cup venues have put that gap in sharp relief, not because of their scale, but because of their relentless focus on what it feels like to spend four hours inside them.
European football has the atmosphere, the history, and the culture. What it increasingly needs is the infrastructure to match. The World Cup has just provided the starkest possible argument for getting on with it.
