This FIFA summer, every wall in NYC is a screen

New York is on a roll right now. We have a mayor who actually shows up and is liked by everyone (well, almost everyone), which in this city feels borderline suspicious. The Knicks just ended a 50-year drought. The Yankees are quietly having a season. Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce might be getting married in Midtown. And, of course, the biggie: we’re hosting the FIFA World Cup. For a city that runs on controlled chaos, this summer has been something else entirely.

I spent the better part of my night on June 11 (Knicks game 4) standing among 800-plus people packed onto an avenue in the East Village watching a drunk man perched on the edge of a 14-floor building like he’d made a personal promise to the basketball gods. No one knew if he was actually going to jump, but the crowd (juggling between watching the score on their phones and taking videos) wasn’t exactly treating it like a crisis. Some of the younger people were so unserious, screaming things like “They’ll pull it off, come down”, while a couple of wholesome grannies nearby were genuinely in prayer. When the Knicks secured the win last-minute, the man got off the ledge as though nothing had happened, cops and all. Ambulances, a rescue crew, all assembled around what turned out to be one man’s very committed bit. Sport does something to people. It always has.

And when you fold in teams from 48 countries and fans who flew across the world to be here for the FIFA World Cup, the whole city becomes something else entirely.

New York, a city that has always had every country inside it, was built for the football World Cup, and Mayor Mamdani agrees. He has leaned all the way in, announcing over 100 free Soccer Streets watch parties across every borough, turning plazas and pedestrian spaces into open-air viewing spots with live performances, cultural programming, and community organisations tabling alongside. The point, as Mamdani put it, is that you shouldn’t need a ticket to MetLife to feel the energy of the tournament.

The city also launched a Neighborhood Passport, a free booklet available at public libraries, stamped at participating businesses and cultural institutions across the five boroughs. Each stamp was designed by a local artist, each one a small portrait of the communities that make this city what it is. It’s lowkey a brilliant touch: a World Cup souvenir that’s actually about New York.

And if you happened to catch a stranger watching a penalty kick on a sidewalk kiosk this past week, that wasn’t an accident either. Two hundred LinkNYC kiosks across all five boroughs are streaming select matches in partnership with Telemundo, bringing Spanish-language coverage directly to the corners, the commutes, and the bodega runs. The city’s own digital infrastructure has turned into a decentralised watch party.

But where to go if you’re not counting on an accidental run-in with a screen airing a match? Below, our pick of all the places you can gather for football and community if you don’t have a stadium ticket:

Not all heroes wear capes. Some just own projectors

Some of the best setups this summer have had nothing to do with permits or press releases:

The Rio Manhattan Truck: A truck that’s been showing up at different corners across the city with a giant screen, creating spontaneous block parties wherever it lands. The setup moves, which means you don’t find the party, the party finds you.

A little church in Harlem: A small church in Harlem has been quietly hosting World Cup watch parties with food and drinks in their backyard, open to everyone. A house of worship repurposed into a neighborhood living room for the world’s game—if that’s not a New York story, nothing is.

Bar Goyana and the sidewalk crowd

Some bars have taken it a step further and placed screens facing outward so that people walking home from work can stop, lean against a building, and catch twenty minutes of a match without even going inside. On packed match days, when you can’t get through the door anyway, the sidewalk becomes the overflow section. Delis and bodegas fill that gap too, crowds collecting outside any window with a visible TV, watching the score change through the glass.

The iconic venues

For when a brick wall and a projector won’t cut it:

The ice rink at Rockefeller Center is now a soccer pitch. That sentence should not make sense and yet here we are: giant screens surrounding the plaza, the Channel Gardens transformed into a fan village celebrating the eight nations that have ever lifted the trophy. The fact that New Yorkers are watching the World Cup where they usually ice skate under a Christmas tree is peak NYC absurdism.

John’s Pizzeria in Times Square, housed inside a converted 19th Century Gothic church, is running 40-seat intimate match screenings. Think vaulted ceilings, stained glass, pizza, and football.

Alma, a family-owned Mexican restaurant in Red Hook, has turned its third-floor rooftop into a full-tournament headquarters, with a 100-inch screen facing out over the Manhattan skyline. The view behind the game is half the experience.

The city’s museums, never ones to sit anything out, have quietly become some of the most interesting watch party venues of the summer. The American Museum of Natural History is screening matches across its spaces with free admission as part of its ‘World Cup, World Cultures’ programming series. They’ve also built out a Goal Zone, an interactive space where you can test your striking and goalkeeping skills between exhibits. The Guggenheim’s pop-up bar called Frank's inside its Wright restaurant is screening select matches on Friday afternoons. The Whitney is going furthest with it, pairing live screenings with its biennial exhibition, which this year is full of international artists, fitting for a World Cup summer. Free Friday nights run from 5 to 10 pm with DJ sets inspired by competing nations, cocktails, and terrace views over the Hudson. There’s also a citywide scavenger hunt with a limited-edition soccer ball print at the finish line.

And for the ones who contain multitudes and refuse to choose between the World Cup and Love Island, bars like The Red Lion, Ainsworth, and Smithfield Hall run enough screens across enough rooms that you can have both. No compromises, no missing a recoupling, no missing a penalty. Even West Wilson couldn’t escape the consequences of his actions.

The country may be fractured on a lot of things, but there’s something quietly healing about 50,000 strangers losing their minds over the same match. On July 19, that’s exactly what will happen on the Great Lawn in Central Park, where the Final watch party will close out the summer. New York has always held the whole world inside it. This summer, the whole world just came to witness it.