Let’s be clear from the start: This could be the beer talking. That’s a reality when you talk to English soccer fans about anything around a match.
Ian Storer, a fan from London, said he liked the size of MetLife Stadium, the sight lines — and the ability to take it all in. That’s different than back home, he said.
“What we love about the American stadiums is you can wander about and go up and go down,” he said.
And there was the beer boost: “And you can drink beer in your seats; that’s not allowed at all in England,” he said.
To be sure, Storer and his mates had had a few. But their opinion of New Jersey appears to hold up with others from around the world. At least that’s what a tool designed by NJIT, in conjunction with the consulting firm CGI, found.
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The tool is njit-worldcup.com, a public-facing site built by students in NJIT’s Martin Tuchman School of Management with mentoring from CGI volunteers.
It tracks real-time fan sentiment across the region — and Dean Oya Tukel said the numbers back up what Storer told us at MetLife.
The site has pulled in more than 2,000 visitors from 36 countries over a recent two-week stretch, and more than 70 percent of the sentiment data it scraped was positive — about the trains, about the games, and about the region itself.
“The sentiment the whole time was very positive,” Tukel said. “Positive about the trains, positive about the games, positive about America.”
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The project speaks positively about NJIT, too.
NJIT announced a fan sentiment platform in September 2025 to track reaction to the World Cup in real time. The school was looking for a way to connect research and technology to the event, Tukel said.
Once CGI got involved, it got even bigger.
Douglas Vargo, a CGI vice president and member of the Tuchman School’s advisory board, began mentoring students alongside his colleagues.
The dashboard grew into a public tool, adding transit updates, dining picks and watch party listings for fans passing through.
“This is possible with technology now,” Tukel said. “You don’t need anything very sophisticated or high-tech — you can put something like this together and provide a public service.”
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Of course, old-school reporting works too. That’s what led to a conversation with Oyvind Stubberud, the father in a father-son duo who flew in from Norway to catch a different match at MetLife Stadium.
He was as complimentary about New Jersey as social media has been. And let’s be clear, this could be the excitement of his nation’s surprising run to the quarterfinals talking.
Before what became a victory over Brazil, he told BINJE that he and his son have had nothing but a great time in New Jersey.
“It’s been fantastic,” he said.
The cliche jokes about Jersey having an attitude? He wasn’t familiar — and didn’t see any evidence of it.
“Everyone has been really friendly,” he said.
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The World Cup hasn’t been a total lovefest.
The region’s reputation for high prices? That was a different story. One that didn’t go over well.
The cost of hotels and, especially, NJ Transit tickets, was a sore point with many — though most blamed FIFA and a trend of hitting fans with big fees more than New Jersey.
Patrick Mills, an ex-pat who now lives in Miami, was annoyed when he had to stand in the rain, waiting for gates to open (to be fair, it was more than four hours before first kick).
Mills said he just wanted a rain slicker. That he was willing to pay any price. And that he would be willing to speak well of New Jersey if he could get one.
“I would pay $20 for a rain slicker right now — and it can say New Jersey on it; I don’t care,” he said.
That’s just simple conversation marketing.
