How Colleges Are Helping World Cup Teams Prepare

When Bobby Muuss, head coach of the Wake Forest men’s soccer team, drove to work Monday morning, he passed by Campus Gas, a historic gas-station-turned-bar-and-grill just off campus. Business was booming and a line wrapped around the building, but it wasn’t a new menu item or the award-winning cider that drew crowds: It was merchandise for the German men’s soccer team.

Over the course of the next month, the German team will practice at the university’s soccer stadium, train in its adjacent training facilities; and stay overnight at the nearby Graylyn Estate—a university-owned luxury hotel—as they prepare to compete in the 2026 FIFA World Cup, according to a Wake Forest news release. Meanwhile, more than 100 correspondents from German media outlets will work from the university’s business school and a nearby dining hall. 

Wake Forest’s Demon Deacons and residents of the surrounding Winston Salem community in North Carolina aren’t the only ones serving as hosts this summer. From now until July 19, at least 11 other colleges across the country are also hosting World Cup teams. Games begin Thursday.

Aside from one free public practice—which each college puts on in collaboration with their guests—most of the teams’ time on campus will be private. Still, their presence alone is sparking immense excitement and pride, college athletics experts say.

A sold-out crowd of 3,000 people watched the German team train Monday, Muuss said, and another 4,000 on top of that had filled out the university’s interest form.

“I got made fun of the other day at a meeting saying it’s the most sought after sports ticket in Winston Salem sports history,” Muuss said. “If you’re the people of Winston Salem, this is a great opportunity to bring people from all over the world, and basically put a microscope on the city and Wake Forest.” 

Beyond that, “it’s also just a great opportunity, from the student athletics perspective, to say that there are world class athletes and four-time World Cup champions training right here,” he explained. “It’s just going to bring more notoriety to the program, and that’s a special thing.”

Throughout the 23rd edition of FIFA’s quadrennial tournament, 48 nations will play in a series of 104 matches across 16 cities in the U.S., Mexico and Canada as part of one of the largest sporting events in the world. The 2022 World Cup Final reached an estimated 1.42 billion whereas this year’s Superbowl was watched by about 125.6 million people.

And though colleges’ critical role as base camps or training grounds may take place behind the scenes, more than half a dozen university leaders Inside Higher Ed spoke with say the chance to participate offers a prime opportunity for advertising and recruitment. It can also provide a big financial benefit for the smaller colleges that have high-quality facilities and strong Olympic sports teams but aren’t part of the power conferences for American football.

“I think a lot of times our coaching staff and players feel that these opportunities only come for the big schools like the Penn States,” said Jeff Haines, a former soccer coach, now associate director of athletics and recreation at Stockton University, which is hosting Haiti’s national team. “So for us, little old Stockton, a small public liberal arts school in the pine barrens of southern New Jersey, to be involved with something to this magnitude—that alone helped us get the university buy-in.”

Local and state government officials are also backing these efforts.

“We are thrilled that Brazil, Haiti, Morocco and Senegal have decided to call the Garden State home, bringing the World Cup directly to communities across our state and driving economic activity throughout the region,” New Jersey governor Mikie Sherrill said in a news release. “Their decision underscores what we know to be true: New Jersey is a premier destination for world-class events and tourism.” 

For most, the process of becoming a host started years ago. Soccer coaches, athletic directors and university presidents alike said the application process was tedious and lengthy, as the institutions had to prove they had a sufficient amount of space, quality resources available in their athletic facilities and a sufficient hotel nearby where the team could sleep.

In some cases, colleges invested in maintenance projects, infrastructure and building partnerships with third-party groups like local law enforcement to improve their facilities and prove that they had the staffing and technical capacity to meet FIFA’s housekeeping, privacy and security standards.

“We’re hosting a FIFA team, but it comes down to the fact that someone has to be available to clean the bathrooms and do things that are out of the normal for this time of year, when our campus is fairly empty,” said Jeff Raymond, associate athletic director at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California, which is hosting Team Qatar. “There’s probably at least 50 people on our campus that have some type of hand in the process.”

Once colleges were approved as potential base camps, coaches and management staff from up to a dozen national teams would tour each training camp—including ones based on the grounds of private high schools, Major League Soccer teams and other sports complexes—to find the best fit.

Muuss from Wake Forest said the German coaches were attracted to the revived European medieval architecture of the estate where they’d be housed that “felt like home.” Other college representatives Inside Higher Ed spoke with said key deciding factors for their guests included similarities in climate to their home country and proximity to where they would play their first games.

Truls Dæhli, project manager for Team Norway, visited eight host sites before choosing the University of North Carolina Greensboro, largely because of its connection to “nature and fresh air.”

“We wanted a hotel with nature and fresh air. We didn’t want a city hotel; we wanted to be a little bit outside,” he said in a news release. At the same time, “it’s only 20 minutes to the airport [and] only 20 minutes to the training facilities. So, it was an easy choice.” 

Paying for the Pitch

A key part of the colleges’ pitches to the national teams was the quality of the grass or turf on the training fields—or in soccer terms, the pitch.

For example, Rutgers University, which is hosting Team Senegal, says that it will use a special type of “cool-season natural turfgrasses” bred in-house by the university’s team of plant biology experts to do so. That same turfgrass, the university adds, will be used at 10 of the 16 World Cup stadiums and has been used in years past at the Masters golf tournament, Yankee Stadium and the White House.

Nick Romanenko / Rutgers University

And while not all colleges have engineered their own kind of grass, they all are among the relative few that meet FIFA’s high standards. 

In a few cases, athletics officials say they had to make small tweaks after their college was selected, like setting up temporary saunas, buying specific equipment for the field, or putting final touches on the pitch itself. But most upgrades made, whether financed by FIFA or the college itself, will remain after the international teams depart.

Each college Inside Higher Ed spoke with declined to say exactly how much they would earn for renting out their facilities, and FIFA, the organization responsible for paying each base camp, did not respond to the request for comment. But Raymond at Westmont noted for his college the property upgrades—combined with the paycheck, public exposure and growth in local tourism—make the commitment worthwhile.

“We’ll make a significant amount of profit from this for our size of school. If I’m UCLA, it’s probably not that big a deal, but for us, it will be a significant boost,” he said. “It’s a lot of work and I wouldn’t want to do it every summer, but it’s worth doing from a monetary point of view.” 

Connecting Athletics and Academics

Beyond the financial and promotional benefits, the opportunity to host athletes from another country can also be tied to the college’s core mission.

When Ross Gittell and John Ruppert, president and deputy director of athletics respectively at Bryant University in Smithfield, Rhode Island, found out they would be hosting the World Cup team from Ghana, they soon formed a delegation and traveled to the nation’s capital, Accra. While there, they visited local universities, recruited future students and faculty for exchange programs and full-time enrollment and held the first meeting of a new West Africa Bryant alumni association, which currently has 30 members.

“Broadening international understanding and engagement is part of our core mission and strategy” Gittell said. “We understand the importance of engaging globally to be successful as an entrepreneur, to be successful as a business leader and to be successful in any venture. To understand the broader context, you not only have to look at developed economies, but emerging economies and growing areas of the world. So we look at this as an opportunity for our students, our faculty, and our university.”

For Jeff Konya, athletic director at San José State University, hosting Team Paraguay is also about giving back and bolstering the relationship between the institution and the surrounding community.

“We feel an enormous responsibility to be a good community partner,” he said. “These kinds of marquee events don’t come along every year … So we want to take advantage of this so that our community has access. We just feel this obligation to assist as best we can.”