By New York Post (Opinion) | Created at 2026-06-16 12:15:45 | Updated at 2026-06-16 22:05:04
11 hours ago
Thousands of soccer fans were left stranded in Jersey marshes after a Brazil-Morocco game at MetLife Stadium, thanks to a logistics nightmare.
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Soccer fans stranded in the Jersey marshes wasn’t the image the World Cup organizers were going for, but it’s their own fault that’s what they got.
Put a notoriously corrupt global sports federation (FIFA) together with a famously inefficient local transit system (NJ Transit) and, surprise, you get logistics disaster, with thousands struggling to get home from MetLife Stadium hours after Saturday’s Brazil-Morocco match ended.
FIFA, Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill and Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s decision to close the stadium’s massive parking lots may have satisfied their collective fetish for public transit and slaked their obsessive car hatred, but it totally ignored the traffic infrastructure and culture of the metropolitan area.
MetLife Stadium hosts major events all the time: Between the Jets, Giants, college football games, occasional exhibitions and 15 or 20 huge summer concerts, it handles 40 or 50 massive audiences every year.
And this being America, a lot of people — roughly 60% to 70% — usually drive to MetLife, which was designed to accommodate tens of thousands of cars.
Yes, the trains worked OK Saturday . . . partly because fairly few people relied on them, as charging 98 bucks to ride a commuter train three miles wasn’t a great selling point.
Try to make public transit the only option, and then to gouge the captive ridership . . well, the exploitation is hard to miss.
Nor was it hard to foresee that people dropping a couple thou on tickets might not care to take public transit, but instead snag a rideshare or even pay hundreds of dollars for the privilege of parking a mile away at the American Dream mall.
As of mid-Monday, 80,000 fans are due for Tuesday’s game, but only 24,000 have bought bus or train tickets . . . and the genius planners left only 3,500 parking spots available.
Uh-oh: Kickoff is at 3 pm, and the game will end in the middle of rush hour.
Sure, trains and buses have a place in the MetLife FIFA transit mix; they always do, in conjunction with cars.
Local planners had no need to try reinventing the wheel, let alone to experiment with square ones.
