The governor of New Jersey leaped from his chair and raised his hands high above his head as if he had just scored the winning goal in a World Cup final. In a way, he had.
Gathered around a TV in a lounge at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., with a group of colleagues, family and friends on Sunday, Gov. Phil Murphy watched as Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, announced that MetLife Stadium would be the site of the 2026 World Cup final.
Mr. Murphy and his team had spent years working to land the coveted event, and they already knew that the stadium in the New Jersey Meadowlands would host at least seven matches in the next men’s World Cup. But the championship game of the largest sporting event in the world is the ultimate prize for any would-be host.
“It’s a dream come true,” Mr. Murphy said in a telephone interview on Monday. “The significance of a World Cup final dwarfs anything else in global sports. I am just beyond thrilled that we were honored with the final game.”
New York New Jersey — as the host city has been designated by FIFA — was selected over Dallas to host the final, even though AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Tex., is considered an architectural jewel and Dallas’s host committee made a very strong bid. But the New York area, with its cosmopolitan profile, hospitality infrastructure and tourist sites, won out.
The last World Cup final, between Argentina and France in Qatar in 2022, was viewed by an estimated 1.5 billion people globally. This World Cup will be held in 16 cities across the United States, Canada and Mexico and is the first to expand to 48 participating nations, so even more people could reasonably be expected to watch the next final. MetLife stadium holds about 80,000 people, but for a month leading up to the grand finale on July 19, 2026, the world’s eyes will be focused on the New York metropolitan region.
“New York City has been on the world stage for the wrong reasons, being ground zero for the pandemic and other challenges,” Eric Adams, the city’s mayor, said in an interview Wednesday. “This is going to show how we are the comeback story and how well we are doing.”
Now comes the hard part.
Over the next two and a half years, organizers must ensure that MetLife Stadium has been properly modified and prepared, and that the surrounding area can be locked down for security purposes and converted into a kind of miniature autonomous state — with FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, at the helm of a vast commercial enterprise.
The stadium will host five group-stage games beginning June 13, 2026, another match in the knockout round of 32, a quarterfinal and then the final. Both Mr. Adams and Mr. Murphy cited estimates that the World Cup will bring roughly $2 billion in economic activity to the region, and 14,000 jobs.
Mr. Adams, who attended World Cup games in Qatar in 2022, noticed then how thousands of people did not even attend the games but still went to soak up the atmosphere and participate in outdoor watch parties and other events.
Many, if not most, of the fans in 2026 will stay in New York hotels and perhaps visit tourist attractions, theaters, bars and restaurants. Mr. Adams envisions city buses and subways wrapped in World Cup designs, large public watch parties with giant television screens and he said the city will encourage visitors to fan out across all five boroughs to spread the wealth.
“We will make sure it’s safe, make sure the city is clean and we’ll make sure people will be able to get around with some real instructions on how to explore this great city.”
The nonprofit New York New Jersey 2026 World Cup Host Committee was established to help put together the bid and then coordinate with FIFA and all the relevant local, state and national agencies. Its founding members, Lauren LaRusso from New Jersey and Bruce Revman from New York, have been working on the project for years.
The greatest logistical problem the committee faces is determining how the region can best accommodate as many as one million visitors during the month of the tournament and see them safely to and from the games. Access to the Meadowlands can be tricky. There are no direct trains from New York City to the stadium. The nearest transit hub is Secaucus Junction, miles from MetLife.
The stadium is home to the Giants and Jets N.F.L. teams, and it also hosted the Super Bowl in 2014, when overcrowding and long delays created a transportation fiasco.
“It is considered a rite of passage in New Jersey to sit in traffic for two hours after an event at MetLife,” said Alex Ambrose, a policy analyst at New Jersey Policy Perspective and a lifelong New Jersey resident. “MetLife car traffic is a disaster waiting to happen.”
State legislators have allocated $35 million just to design and plan a dedicated transit system, loosely based on Disney World’s bus system, that they believe will alleviate the problems. On game days, buses would travel along a back road that is currently closed, and in dedicated lanes on the New Jersey Turnpike. If successful, the system could become a lasting legacy of the World Cup.
Governor Murphy pointed to a successful series of concerts at MetLife Stadium last year as evidence that major events can go off smoothly at the Meadowlands.
“N.J. Transit is a dramatically different organization than it was in 2014,” Mr. Murphy said, referring to the chaos after the Super Bowl. “We’ve proven that with three Taylor Swift concerts in a row that went off flawlessly. We saw Bruce three nights. Flawless. We are just better than we used to be.”
At Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan last week, commuters had differing views of how transportation would be affected by the World Cup.
“It’s going to be miserable,” a hospital security guard, who gave his name as Muit M., said as he waited for the No. 160 bus, which stops at the stadium.
But Jenna DeNinno, an editor at the television show “Inside Edition,” said she has been taking the No. 190 bus along a similar route for about 20 years and rarely encounters problems.
“Even when there’s a Monday night football game or a concert, it’s not too bad,” she said.
Some residents have bristled at the name “New York New Jersey,” saying it does not represent where the games will actually be played. But among the hosts of a World Cup that will be played in stadiums all over North America, New Jersey is not alone. The “San Francisco Bay Area” games will be held in Santa Clara, Calif.; the “Boston” venue is in Foxborough, 30 miles outside the city; “Dallas” is really Arlington, Tex.
“I’m not upset for one second,” Mr. Murphy said of the name. “We don’t get this without Jersey, but we don’t get this without New York City, either. As good as we are, New York is a world city, and it’s a big part of this.”
Tariq Panja and Tracey Tully contributed reporting.
