How I failed to make it to my first World Cup match

I’ve been reporting on the obstacles ticketholders will have navigating America’s balkanized public transit system. But on the way to my first ever FIFA World Cup match in Toronto, extreme weather tripped me up as I tried to leave New York City on Thursday night.

Now I’m missing Canada playing Bosnia and Herzegovina, the first World Cup game ever played in the land my ancestors left France for in the 1600s. POLITICO is also out $627.11 for a nonrefundable hotel room.

For a fan who saved up to attend a match, this would be a devastating setback.

A lot of the coverage about World Cup weather, particularly high heat, has focused on players and fans in the stadiums. But the weather also threatens to keep people away from the matches entirely.

My problem was a wall of thunderstorms marching across the continent. About 250 flights have been canceled leaving New York City’s three major airports since yesterday, according to FlightAware. Most of those nixed flights were at LaGuardia Airport, where I sat on a runway for some two hours last evening before being told to go home. Another flight scheduled for this morning out of Newark Liberty International Airport was canceled before I even went to bed.

Flight problems were not even at the top of the transit worries I’ve been paying attention to.

For several years, officials in New York and New Jersey — which are co-hosting tournament games to be played at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey — have been gearing up for a surge of fans from around the world. Unhelpfully, summer 2024 turned out to be a terrible season for train travel in the region because of electrical problems tied in part to heat but also aging infrastructure.

Now, that same stretch of tracks is being counted on to get tens of thousands of fans to matches. Even before a heat wave hit the city, there was a rash of incidents, including a brush fire in New Jersey in May and several fires and electric problems at New York Penn Station, the nation’s busiest train hall.

New Jersey officials have buses and boats on standby to help move fans to or from matches and some lawmakers from both parties are pressuring the Trump administration to keep an eye on things to make sure they don’t go off the rails.

But there isn’t much he can do to stop a storm from raining on the world’s parade.