Thousands of Australians are converging on Vancouver before the Socceroos open their World Cup campaign against Turkey, turning the British Columbia city into a familiar stop for fans far from home. On Friday, yellow shirts were already visible at the World Cup fan festival, and one supporter said the place felt more like Australia than a foreign host city.

Colby List traveled North America with five friends for the tournament and said Vancouver felt much closer to home than New York, where the group had spent a week before arriving. “It reminds us a little bit of Australia,” he said, adding that the city was “like a hilly Melbourne.” The feeling is shared by many Australians in British Columbia, where the local Australian-born community is large enough to make the city feel less like an outpost and more like a gathering point.

Football Australia expected about 10,000 Australians to attend the opening match, using country-of-origin information supplied when tickets were bought. That estimate helps explain why the city has filled so quickly with green and gold: the tournament opener is not just drawing travelers, but also Australians already living in the region. Roughly 25,000 people in Canada claimed Australia as their birthplace in the 2021 census, and almost half of them live in British Columbia.

For Alojz Cuk, who has lived in Vancouver for 12 years, the easy familiarity is part of daily life. He said that almost every Canadian he meets has some link to Australia, and he pointed to a chiropractor he saw that day who had studied near Ballarat. Cuk also wore a Wallabies jersey on Friday, another sign of how deeply the country’s sporting identity has taken hold in the city.

That ease can obscure a sharper reality. Many of the Australians filling Vancouver, and especially the nearby alpine town of Whistler, are not settled there for good. Some are there on working holiday stays that can last two years, while others have come only for the tournament, drawn by the mountains, skiing culture and a local scene that has long made the region feel unusually Australian. Whistler sits 120 km from Vancouver and has earned the nickname Whistralia for that reason.

Australian-owned businesses have helped reinforce the sense of familiarity. Peaked Pies and Moose’s Down Under are part of the local backdrop, and Moose’s even puts a kangaroo burger on the menu. Farther east, the Calgary Kangaroos show how far the Australian sporting footprint reaches across Canada. For Vancouver, though, the immediate focus is simpler: a city that already feels a little Australian is about to host one of the country’s biggest travelling crowds of the tournament, and the next checkpoint is the Socceroos’ opener against Turkey.