If you’re into soccer, you might consider watching the world’s greatest teams play live in a nearby stadium sometime in the next month and a half. Or you could just watch the matches at a craft brewery like Varitage Brew Works in Bloomfield, N.J., where co-owner Mark Costa and his partners have been making plans around the 2026 FIFA World Cup for months now.
“We’re seven miles from where the finals are being played,” Costa says. “We’re the soccer-centric brewery and we pack out for matches. We open up early for the Premier League. It’s basically our business model.”
Located a short ride from MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., Varitage is one of a number of craft breweries that are looking to capitalize on this year’s World Cup, regularly estimated to be the most widely watched sporting event in the world. (Sorry not sorry, American concussionball!) This year, the majority of the matches will be played in 11 cities across the U.S., which is hosting the tournament for the first time since 1994. Just under a quarter of the events will also take place in Mexico and Canada during the tournament’s initial stages.
At the far end of the volume scale, the biggest breweries clearly see this year’s World Cup as a major opportunity: AB InBev has ponied up to be one of the event’s official sponsors, ensuring Budweiser’s spot on tap in stadiums. Away from the field, Molson Coors North America CMO Sofia Colucci told Business Insider earlier this month that the company has targeted the quadrennial soccer world championship for its largest sports-related advertising campaign in a decade. Meanwhile, Heineken plans to launch multipacks in soccer-themed packaging, host its own watch parties in select cities, and increase its soccer advertising budget by 189 percent, according to one recent report.
Clearly, many people like to drink beer while watching what the rest of the world calls “football,” and the big brands are moving to sell oceans of it between the first match on June 11 and the final on July 19. But across the country, craft brewers are seeing opportunities with the tournament as well, aided in part by how FIFA, the international football association, has set things up.
A Regional Game
Varitage isn’t alone in making plans close to the stadium in East Rutherford. Just a few miles away, beer lovers will also find limited-release cans, special brews, and live matches on the screens at Montclair Brewery, whose co-founder Leo Sawadogo played as a goalkeeper growing up in Ivory Coast.
Like most sports, soccer tends to be more popular in some areas than others, including northern New Jersey. Kansas City, Mo., might be known as the city of the Chiefs and the Royals, but it is also a major soccer city and the host of some of the most anticipated matches of the tournament, serving as the base for three top-ranked national teams, all of which have very devoted fanbases: England, Argentina, and the Netherlands.
“We’re seven miles from where the finals are being played. We’re the soccer-centric brewery and we pack out for matches. We open up early for the Premier League. It’s basically our business model.”
At the Bavarian-inspired KC Bier Co. in the city’s Waldo neighborhood, marketing manager Katie Camlin notes that the World Cup is a natural fit for the brewery, which regularly opens early for German Bundesliga matches and functions as the local home for fans of FC Bayern München. To prepare for the tournament, the brewery has upped its advertising near several major hotels, including one where a team is staying.
“I think we really lucked out, especially with those three,” she says. “We brew traditional German-style beer, European-style beer, and we have a large connection to soccer already. We’re definitely going to be open for most matches.”
Increasing advertising and showing matches is one thing, but FIFA’s rules for businesses are pretty strict, as the CBC recently reported. Having too many attendees could accidentally turn your event into an “official” FIFA event, Costa notes, requiring the payment of a FIFA licensing fee and limiting the ability to have any branding visible to your customers, including that of your own brewery, even on your own cans. Certain terms — think “World Cup” and “FIFA” — are not allowed to be used.
That rule caused Kansas City’s Strange Days Brewing Co. to pick the name “Soccerpalooza” for what it calls its “big tournament” schedule this summer, during which attendees can enter drawings to win hand-stitched soccer balls while cheering on their favorite teams. For brewery manager Chris Beier, soccer is a big part of the brewery’s identity.
“We’re a soccer bar or a soccer brewery,” he says. “For us, it is literally just celebrating the sport itself and being an option for anybody that can come in and watch soccer at any point in time during the course of this World Cup.”
With 104 matches in the tournament, including six held at Kansas City’s Arrowhead Stadium, “anybody” could end up being thousands of extra customers. To make sure everything works smoothly, management is planning to more than double staffing numbers. In addition, the food menu will be streamlined for faster service, and some of the brewery’s most popular beers are being brewed under contract in much larger batches at another facility.
Beier says those decisions have been based on the brewery’s past experience hosting watch parties for both the English Premier League and the Kansas City Current, for previous men’s and women’s World Cups, and the UEFA European Championship, known as the Euros, as well as some research into customer behavior.
“We’ve read all the case studies from the Euros, where they drank a month’s worth of supply in Hamburg, Germany, in one night,” he says. “We’re going to be open for every game. We’ll be open for all the F1 watch parties that are going on, too. So there’ll be days when we’re open from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m.”
Problems as Opportunities
It’s not just breweries in stadium cities that are getting in on the action, as soccer-focused craft producers like 1852 Brew Co. in Visalia, Calif., are also planning to host watch events, despite being located in Central California, some 200 miles from the nearest matches in both Southern California and the Bay Area. Still, brewers in the 11 big cities in the U.S. with games — Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Seattle — have one advantage, in that many of those cities have problems.
Headlines have highlighted the exorbitant ticket prices set by FIFA for many of the matches, complicated by FIFA’s first-time use of dynamic pricing, with even many early group-stage matches initially starting over $1,200. Similarly, public transportation tickets on NJ Transit for matches at MetLife Stadium were originally set to cost $150, compared to the standard price of $12.90, though outrage over the obvious price-gouging led to a decrease to “just” $98 — still more than seven times as expensive as what people are used to.
“We’re a soccer bar or a soccer brewery. For us, it is literally just celebrating the sport itself and being an option for anybody that can come in and watch soccer at any point in time during the course of this World Cup.”
While cities like Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Kansas City are being praised for maintaining a fan-friendly approach to ticket prices and public transportation, the steep entry fees in New York, Los Angeles, and other regions might keep fans away from the stadium.
“It’s embarrassing,” Costa says. “It’s gross and it’s a headache. You can’t drive there. You can’t tailgate.” Initially, Varitage planned to offer its own bus service from the brewery to the stadium for fans, but that got nixed when officials decided that third party transportation services would not be allowed.
That might be a good thing, as fans who don’t want to splurge on four-digit ticket prices could just watch from local breweries. In some places, that could end up being six weeks with a full house, night after night. In other locations, it will be more of a “feast or famine” situation, according to Josh Waldman, brewer at Lowlander Brewing, one block from Lumen Field in Seattle.
“We’re trying to get people out for non-game days,” he says. “The real goal is getting hands full of beer when they’re here, and then trying to get people in the door when times are slower.”
The population of Seattle is being predicted to basically double during the tournament, he says, with much of that centralized near the stadium. In particular, the brewery is hoping to see fans from Down Under when their team faces off against the U.S. on Friday, June 19.
“We’re definitely looking forward to the Australian crowd,” he says.
For a brewery like Lowlander that only opened last fall, the potential upside is enormous. It could be a welcome lift for the entire industry, in an era when the beer market in general is seeing sales decline.
That’s not to say that everyone is super gung-ho about the 104 upcoming matches. A manager at one well-known craft brewery in Toronto told me that the World Cup is “rather polarizing” for locals, and that a lot of people are clearly not into it. In Seattle, another craft brewery marketing manager said that he was genuinely surprised at what seemed to be a lack of interest for the events among small breweries.
Still, for a lot of craft makers, the World Cup might end up being a really big deal. At Varitage, Costa recalls that his eyes lit up when he saw the schedule, which fits between the final match of the Champions League in May and the return of Premier League play in mid-August, leaving his soccer-focused brewery with almost no summer downtime.
At Strange Days, Beier makes it sound like his team is bracing for impact.
“We expect to go through more beer than we’ve ever seen in six weeks.”
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