Mexico City declared Thursday an official holiday and opened a fan zone as the city braced for the World Cup opener between Mexico and South Africa. The move gave fans a place to gather when stadium seats were out of reach for many, and it turned the day into a public event before a ball had been kicked.
Mario Martinez was among the first to enter the fan zone with his girlfriend after deciding stadium tickets were too expensive. He said he had worried the event would be cancelled, then added, with relief, that everything had worked out. For Martinez, the fan zone was the fallback when the match itself had become too costly.
That calculation was echoed by other fans interviewed in Mexico City, who said they had paid $3,000 or more for tickets to the opening match. Fifa defended its pricing as being on a par with other major sporting events, but the response on the ground was blunt: for many supporters, those prices were simply beyond reach. Jonathan Cordoba, standing in a long queue to enter the stadium, said Fifa was only interested in profit, but he still said he had no regrets and called the moment “the passion!”
The holiday declaration was meant in part to ease transport concerns on a day when fans were expected to gather around the square in tents lining the streets. It was an unusual step, but one that matched the scale of the occasion and the pressure around getting supporters to and from the opener. The next test comes with the match itself, while some fans will watch from the fan zone and measure the event less by the seat they could not buy than by the one they were able to claim outside the stadium.
