England finished their last public Worldcup warm-up with a 3-0 win over Costa Rica on June 10, 2026, but the result was only part of the story. Anthony Gordon scored once and set up another, while Declan Rice and Ollie Watkins also found the net at Inter&Co Stadium.
The match mattered because it was England’s final public fixture before the 2026 World Cup officially gets underway, and the team now moves into the final stretch before June 17, when it opens against Croatia in Dallas, Texas. The next public scoreline came after the first real jolt of the night: kick-off was delayed by an hour because of storms, pushing the game deeper into the evening and turning a routine send-off into a longer wait for both players and supporters.
What grabbed attention online, though, was not the football. In the 15th minute, ITV Sport’s cameras panned to Rice taking a corner, and fans noticed a group of supporters eating at tables in the front row, close to the corner flag. Social media quickly filled with complaints about the setting, with one supporter asking why people were eating at tables by the corner flag, another calling the pitch-side diners a joke, and others mocking the idea of “dinner tables in the front row” and comparing the setup to a Wetherspoons. For many watching, the scene made the atmosphere feel flat even as England were controlling the match.
That disconnect is the part England cannot ignore as the tournament starts. The team has one more behind-closed-doors match against Miami FC before it faces Croatia, then Ghana and Panama in Group L, but the conversation from this dress rehearsal showed how quickly the Worldcup stage can shift from the scoreboard to the surroundings.
