About Me About Me — Goal Guide 2026 Let me start with the embarrassing part. It was June 2014, somewhere in the chaos of a São Paulo metro station, about four hours before Brazil played Croatia in the opening match of the World Cup. I had a ticket. I had a hotel. I did not, however, have any idea which direction I was supposed to be heading. My phone had died somewhere between the airport and my Airbnb. I didn’t speak Portuguese. And the piece of paper I’d printed with my directions — you know, as a backup plan — was sitting on the kitchen counter of my apartment back home, approximately 5,400 miles away. I stood in that station for a solid twenty minutes, turning slowly in circles like a confused compass needle, before a man in a yellow Brazil jersey noticed me, laughed loudly, grabbed my arm, and just… led me to the right platform. No shared language. Just the universal body language of a guy who clearly had no idea what he was doing. I made it to that game. Brazil won 3-1. Neymar scored twice. The crowd was unlike anything I’d ever experienced in my life. And I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since. Who I Am, Actually My name is probably less important than my context, so here’s the context: I’m a soccer fan who got completely consumed by the sport in my early twenties and has spent the better part of the last fifteen years traveling to games, tournaments, and stadiums that most people outside the fan community have never heard of. I’ve been to three World Cups — Brazil in 2014, Russia in 2018, and Qatar in 2022. Each one taught me something different. Each one also cost me something significant, whether that was money, sleep, or what I can only describe as my previous ability to feel satisfied watching games from my couch. I’m also, by trade, someone who thinks a lot about logistics. I spent years working in operations and project management, which means my brain is basically hardwired to make lists, identify bottlenecks, and figure out what’s going to go wrong before it actually does. That’s either a gift or a deeply exhausting personality trait, depending on who you ask. My friends mostly go with the second option. But it turns out that combination — obsessive soccer fan plus logistics nerd — produces something actually useful when you’re talking about navigating an event as sprawling and complicated as the FIFA World Cup. Why 2026 Is Different From Every World Cup Before It I’ve had a lot of conversations over the past couple of years with fans who are planning for 2026, and there’s a recurring moment in almost every one of them. They start asking questions, and then partway through, their eyes go slightly wide and they say some version of: Wait, it’s in three countries? Yes. Three countries. Sixteen host cities. Eleven venues. Matches being played across the United States, Canada, and Mexico simultaneously — connected by international borders, different currencies, different languages, different visa requirements, and wildly different logistics at every stop. This isn’t like going to Germany in 2006, where everything was on one efficient rail network and you could hop between cities almost effortlessly. It’s not like Brazil, where the chaos was at least contained within one border. And it’s not like Qatar, where the entire tournament was, famously, compressed into a space roughly the size of Connecticut. The 2026 World Cup is genuinely unprecedented in its geographic scope. And that means the usual advice — book early, get travel insurance, watch out for pickpockets — barely scratches the surface of what fans actually need to know. That gap is exactly why Goal Guide 2026 exists. What This Blog Is, and What It Isn’t I want to be upfront about something, because I think honesty about this matters: I am not a journalist. I’m not affiliated with FIFA. I don’t have insider access to ticket allocation systems or official sponsorship relationships. I haven’t been given press credentials or flown anywhere on someone else’s budget. What I do have is experience — a lot of it — making exactly the kinds of decisions that World Cup fans face, and making some of them very badly before eventually figuring out the right approach. I’ve bought tickets from resale platforms that turned out to be legitimate and from ones that turned out not to be. I’ve stayed in accommodations that were brilliant choices and some that were genuinely terrible ones that I should have seen coming. I’ve navigated stadium transit systems at peak capacity in the rain, figured out how to eat well on a fan’s budget in expensive cities, and learned the hard way which ticket categories actually give you a good sightline and which ones look fine on a seating map but put you directly behind a structural column. Everything on this site comes from that kind of ground-level, first-person experience, supplemented by serious research — primary sources, official documentation, conversations with other fans who’ve been there. I try to cite things where I can and flag clearly when something is my opinion versus established fact. My goal isn’t to tell you what the World Cup is. You already know what it is. My goal is to tell you how to get there, afford it, navigate it, and actually enjoy it — instead of spending the greatest soccer tournament on earth standing in the wrong metro station, slowly rotating. The Stuff I’ve Specifically Spent Time Figuring Out Since I started building this site, I’ve gone deep on a handful of areas that I think are genuinely underserved by the generic travel content out there. Tickets. The official ticketing process for a FIFA World Cup is more complicated than it should be, and the failure modes are real. I’ve walked through the full registration and application flow, documented the different sale phases and what strategy actually makes sense for each one, broken down what the category pricing differences mean in practice, and spent a lot of time on the resale and fraud question — which is going to be a significant issue for 2026 given the scale of the tournament and the number of international fans who are less familiar with which platforms are legitimate. Venues. Eleven of them, spread across three countries, each with its own personality, its own transit situation, its own strengths and weaknesses as a place to watch a match. AT&T Stadium in Dallas is the largest venue in the tournament and that creates specific tradeoffs. SoFi Stadium is hosting the final and has a design that some fans find spectacular and others find genuinely strange. The Azteca in Mexico City is a pilgrimage site for anyone who takes the history of this sport seriously. I’ve tried to give you honest, specific information about each one — not just the glossy venue profile version, but the real fan-experience version. The city logistics question. This might be the thing I’ve spent the most time on, because it’s the thing that varies most dramatically between locations. Getting to a stadium in Kansas City is a completely different problem from getting to MetLife in New Jersey, which is different again from navigating Mexico City traffic on a match day. Accommodation strategy that makes sense in Seattle doesn’t translate to Miami. The budget math in Vancouver is totally different from the budget math in Dallas. I’ve tried to treat each host city as its own distinct challenge rather than applying generic travel advice uniformly. Cross-border travel. For fans who are planning to watch games across multiple countries — and there are a lot of you — this gets complicated fast. Entry requirements, visa situations, border crossing logistics, currency, SIM cards, the practical realities of moving between the US, Canada, and Mexico on a compressed tournament schedule. I’ve dug into this carefully because I think it’s the category of planning mistake most likely to actually ruin someone’s trip. A Few Things I Believe About World Cup Travel In the spirit of knowing where I’m coming from, a few positions I hold that shape how I write about all of this: Budget constraints are real and they don’t make you a lesser fan. Some of the best World Cup experiences I’ve had were scraped together on genuinely tight budgets. Some of the worst were expensive. I try to write for fans at every price point, and I don’t think premium hospitality packages are the default gold standard — sometimes they are, and sometimes they’re just expensive. Official channels are almost always worth the extra friction. The resale and gray market stuff is seductive because it seems easier, and sometimes it works out fine. But the failure modes are severe — fake tickets, inflated prices for things that turn out to be different from what was advertised, no recourse when something goes wrong. I’ll always tell you the official route first. Small cities often beat big ones for the fan experience. I know everyone wants to go to New York or LA or Mexico City. And those can be incredible. But some of the most memorable experiences from previous World Cups happened in the places nobody was particularly excited about beforehand. I have a genuine soft spot for the underdog host city, and I think Kansas City and Seattle are going to surprise a lot of people. The stadium is only part of it. An hour before a match, sitting at a bar two blocks from the venue with a cold drink and a crowd of people who’ve traveled from four different countries — that’s as much the World Cup as anything that happens on the pitch. The event that surrounds the event matters. Get In Touch This site is, at its core, a resource I’m building because I wish it had existed when I was trying to plan my first World Cup trip. If something is unclear, out of date, or just wrong, I want to know. If you’ve got experience with something I haven’t covered, or a perspective on a venue or city that contradicts what I’ve written, I genuinely want to hear it. The best way to reach me is email: [email protected] I read everything. I don’t promise I’ll respond to everything — the volume when the tournament gets closer tends to become genuinely unmanageable — but I do read it, and it shapes what I write. You can also find everything organized at https://mdzztv.com/ — the ticketing guides, the venue breakdowns, the city logistics pieces, the cross-border travel content. If you’re just starting your 2026 planning process and you’re not sure where to begin, the ticketing section is probably the right first stop, since the early sale phases have windows that close whether you’re ready or not. One Last Thing That guy in the Brazil jersey in the São Paulo metro — I never got his name. He put me on the right train, gave me a thumbs up, and disappeared back into the crowd. He probably forgot about it within five minutes. I’ve thought about it approximately a thousand times since. That’s the World Cup. That’s what it actually is, underneath all the logistics and the ticket categories and the accommodation strategy. It’s the thing that makes strangers put each other on the right train. I hope whatever I’ve written here helps get you to yours. Goal Guide 2026 is an independent fan resource. For questions, corrections, or tips: [email protected]