Spain’s team was not supposed to come back. That was what the word reaching the crowd Sunday night was, hours after the team beat Argentina 1-0 in extra time at MetLife Stadium: straight to Newark, straight home. Instead, close to 10:15 p.m., the bus turned back onto Bloomfield Avenue, and the several hundred – maybe over 1,000 – people who had waited outside the MC Hotel got the ending they wanted. Players filed in to collect their belongings and clear TSA screening before reboarding around 12:30 a.m. Monday.
Did Montclair Miss Its Own World Cup Moment?
By the time Spain’s bus doubled back that night, the MC Hotel had already hosted four World Cup teams over the tournament, more than any single hotel in the state. England, Germany and Norway all passed through before Spain, and Jeff Sica, who owns the property, said even he was still catching up to how big it had gotten.
But while the MC Hotel was tending to four national teams, the rest of downtown carried on largely unaware anything was happening a few blocks away. Neither the township nor the Montclair Center Business Improvement District, the group responsible for promoting the town’s commercial corridor, ever built a coordinated plan to meet the demand landing on its doorstep. The Pod covered that gap last month in The World Cup Came to New Jersey. Montclair Didn’t Own It. No signage. No map telling visiting fans that a town with four national teams sleeping nearby also had a downtown worth walking. Leo Sawadogo, owner of Montclair Brewery, put his own frustration on the record. He brewed a rotating lineup of nation-themed beers for the tournament, hoping to catch a wave of business that mostly never came.
Sica’s version of the same complaint reached past Montclair. “I feel like the state could have done more,” he said. “New Jersey wrote the check and New York cashed it. I don’t want to say hindsight is twenty-twenty, but you have the biggest sporting event of the century here in New Jersey. I would have fought New York tooth and nail, not given up as much as we did to them. They spent hardly any money and got most of the benefit. We paid for all the logistics, all the security, everything, and they cashed in. They should send us a fruit basket.”
How Did Montclair Finally Show Up for the World Cup Final?
Some of that energy had actually been building for weeks. Lackawanna Station had hosted watch parties since June 11 as part of its own running Summer of Soccer series, proof that the appetite Sawadogo and Sica described was real, it just had not come from downtown’s official corridor. It took until the tournament’s final week for the Montclair Center BID to add a watch party of its own, teaming with Latinos of Montclair and the township’s arts advisory committee for a free event at Wellmont Arts Plaza. Two big, free parties landed the same day, blocks apart, as the Pod covered.
That same last-minute scramble showed up in a riskier form at three local restaurants. Sometime that week, De Novo, Kai Yang and Qahwah House each posted AI-generated images to Instagram, and in De Novo’s case, an image implying Lamine Yamal himself had personally stopped by for takeout.
Fabricating photos of a real, named athlete’s supposed endorsement raises legal risks, including right of publicity claims and what’s known as ambush marketing, creating the appearance of an official tie to a tournament without ever paying for one. FIFA doesn’t treat that kind of thing as harmless either. Earlier this year, a small business near Fort Worth had its entire Facebook account banned for a month after FIFA flagged a single post using the hashtag #WorldCup for trademark infringement, nothing more than the hashtag itself. The Pod broke down the specifics in Did Spain’s Lamine Yamal Visit De Novo in Montclair? The answer, for the record, is no, he did not.
The Last Chapter of Montclair’s World Cup Recap: How a Local Podcast Ended Up in The New York Times
It started the Wednesday night Spain’s team arrived in town, close to 10 p.m. A video some friends shot outside the MC Hotel, shared by the Pod, passed 1 million views on Instagram within days. It set the tone for everything after: this was a story people wanted told from the ground.
Farnoosh got her own piece of that access that Saturday, standing outside the hotel with her 12-year-old son and a Sharpie, hoping for a shot at Lamine Yamal’s autograph. When the wait turned into more than an hour of downpour, they stayed anyway, until a state trooper at the barricade warned the crowd that lightning loves metal and sent everyone home. At breakfast afterward, she ended up seated next to a mother and daughter who had gotten to the barricades at 6 a.m. and had unobstructed footage of the players boarding the team bus. They handed it over without being asked.
Mike had his own version of that trust the night of the final. Livestreaming outside the MC Hotel for hours as the crowd waited to find out if Spain’s bus was really coming back, he had people walking up to thank him for the stream itself, including a family from Trinidad who had driven over from West Orange after watching him online. When Mike realized late that night he had no ride home, that same family drove him.
Hours before, somewhere in that same long wait, Mike found himself talking with two friends from Congo, there to watch for opposing teams for reasons that came down to the same club: Mariam Bongomakaya, who has lived in New Jersey for over 10 years and has followed Barcelona long enough to back Spain because of the Barcelona players on its roster, and Benedict, who backs Argentina’s Lionel Messi first but said the same club ties kept her just as invested.
“I’m so proud because it’s a new generation winning the game right now,” Bongomakaya said. “And I’m proud because Americans know now where the Congo is, who Congolese people are…That was the main point for us.”
“Messi is Barcelona. Even though we lose today, we still win, because yeah, it’s still Barcelona,” Benedict said.
That kind of openness, strangers sharing their stories and handing over footage, was what let The Montclair Pod cover the World Cup as thoroughly as it did, and it’s what other outlets ended up drawing on too.
That’s what Fox 5 and WABC were requesting footage for, and what The New York Times ended up citing in its own coverage of the MC Hotel’s run as World Cup lodging: reporting that could only exist because it was already standing there.
None of that would have happened if the town hadn’t cared this much to begin with. Six weeks earlier, Farnoosh was not sure she counted herself as a soccer fan. By the final, she was riding the same wave as neighbors who spent hours outside a hotel just to watch a bus. That’s the part that outlasts any single headline: for one summer, Montclair’s appetite for this game ran deeper than almost anyone expected, coordinated plan or not.
