Montclair now doesn’t have one World Cup final watch party this Sunday. It has two.
This Sunday, July 19, downtown Montclair gets its second watch party for the World Cup final, and it lands almost across the street from the one that has been running for weeks already. The Montclair Center BID, the downtown business improvement district that funds and manages promotion for Montclair’s commercial corridor, is teaming up with Latinos of Montclair and the township’s arts advisory committee to host a free watch party at the Wellmont Arts Plaza from 1 to 7 p.m. A few blocks away, at Lackawanna Plaza, Lackawanna Station has hosted watch parties since June 11 as part of its Summer of Soccer series, and the final is no exception.
Two big, free, outdoor gatherings, same day, same match, blocks apart. The question locals are already asking is whether that helps Montclair or just splits it in half.
Inside the Wellmont Arts Plaza World Cup Watch Party
The watch party at the Wellmont Arts Plaza is free, with a 16-foot LED wall, a DJ, a kids fan zone, vendors and a full bar, running the full six hours before kickoff through the final whistle.
It also came together fast. Three organizations are sharing the work and the event landed on the calendar barely a week before the final itself.
That speed is the point. A little over a week ago, some Montclair residents and business owners were asking why the town had no real World Cup presence at all, no banner, no downtown event, nothing to mark that the tournament’s biggest weekend runs right through Montclair’s backyard. Now the town has a second watch party to schedule around instead, and that raises a question the first one never had to answer.
Was scheduling two watch parties downtown a good call?
The case for doing it this way is simple. An outdoor party at the Wellmont Arts Plaza and an indoor-outdoor setup a few blocks away at Lackawanna Plaza give people two different vibes to choose between. Nothing stops anyone from checking out one, then walking over to the other before the final whistle. If Montclair becomes a place people associate with big communal watch parties, that kind of bouncing between venues could be worth repeating for other events too.
The case against it is just as simple. Two watch parties within a couple blocks of each other split one audience instead of building one bigger crowd. A little more lead time might have let the Lackawanna Plaza party grow into something bigger on its own, or let a second event land somewhere in town that does not already have one built in, Upper Montclair or the Fourth Ward.
There is also a structural reason the BID chose downtown. A business improvement district’s funding and mandate cover a defined commercial zone, and Montclair Center’s zone stops at downtown’s edge. It has no real mechanism to plant a watch party somewhere else in town, even if that is where the town’s soccer fans actually need one.
That mandate answers one question and raises another. If downtown is covered twice over, who is planning something for the rest of Montclair? That question connects to a bigger one the Pod has been asking for weeks.
What this says about Montclair’s World Cup moment, weeks later
None of this happened by accident. Last week, the Pod reported on the sense among many in town that Montclair had missed a real business opportunity by not doing more to mark the World Cup while it still had months of lead time.
A new watch party assembled with about a week’s notice does not undo that. The real planning, the kind that would have made Montclair an actual World Cup destination, needed to start months or even years before the tournament arrived, not once the final was already on the calendar. What Sunday’s two watch parties prove is that the appetite for a moment was always there. What was missing was the lead time to build one big event instead of two smaller ones two blocks apart.
The watch party at Wellmont Arts Plaza runs Sunday, July 19, from 1 to 7 p.m., free and open to the public. Lackawanna Plaza’s Summer of Soccer finale runs the same day, a short walk away.
If you want the fuller picture before you pick one, read our earlier report on what Montclair missed by waiting this long to plan. And if a third watch party turns up somewhere in town before Sunday, tell us.
Image credit: Pexels
