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The FIFA Fan Festival will serve as a hub for World Cup celebrations and activity in Philadelphia during the tournament's run in 2026.
The organizers of Philadelphia’s World Cup plans have unveiled the location for the free fan activation that will take place during the tournament’s run in 2026.
Philadelphia’s FIFA Fan Festival will be held at Lemon Hill in East Fairmount Park, Philadelphia Soccer 2026 announced Thursday morning. Lemon Hill is located north of the Philadelphia Museum of Art off of Kelly Drive and near Boathouse Row.
Fan Festival will serve as the hub for World Cup activity in Philadelphia outside of Lincoln Financial Field, where the six matches the city is hosting will be played. Philadelphia’s World Cup games, which include a match on July 4, are projected to draw upwards of 450,000 visitors and result in an economic impact of $460 million and a direct spend of $262 million.
The activation at Lemon Hill aims to bring together soccer fans both visiting and living in Greater Philadelphia for large-scale watch parties for some of the tournament’s 104 matches. It will also include a variety of food and beverage options, World Cup gear and memorabilia, and other live entertainment and events for attendees.
Fan Festival is also an opportunity for Philadelphia to highlight its strengths beyond the typical foods and sites associated with the city, said Meg Kane, host city executive for Philadelphia Soccer.
“While cheesesteaks and soft pretzels and water ice are certainly going to be there, this also gives us a chance to think more expansively about bringing in the diversity of our immigrant communities and really playing to the strengths of our neighborhoods and thinking about how to activate a real showcase of Philadelphia within the Fan Fest,” Kane told the Business Journal.
Both FIFA’s sponsors for the overall tournament and Philadelphia Soccer’s 10 host city supporters will have the opportunity to operate their own activations within the Fan Festival.
Kane said the organization chose Lemon Hill as the site of the Fan Festival because of its connectivity to Center City and the surrounding neighborhoods, as well as its accessibility from I-76. The activation will not occupy the park’s entire 104 acres, but will instead be concentrated in the area between Poplar Street and Kelly Drive and from the Lemon Hill Mansion off of Lemon Hill Drive to Girard Avenue, Kane said.
Fan Festival, which will accommodate between 15,000 and 25,000 people, will be open for each of the matches played in Philadelphia and will most likely be open for the majority of the group stage of the tournament as well, Kane said. Philadelphia Soccer is still evaluating how long Fan Festival will run during the World Cup and its daily hours of operation.
Kane declined to share an estimated cost of building the Fan Festival but said it will be a “multimillion-dollar” project.
To prepare Lemon Hill for the influx of visitors it will see that summer, the park will receive infrastructure enhancements that will take place in two phases. The first stage will prepare the area for Fan Festival, including improvements to power, lighting and grading for ADA accessibility. After the World Cup, undetermined “legacy components” will be installed at the park, according to Kane.
New York-based design firm Marvel will head up the landscape architecture design and management of the project.
Kane said the original target location for the Fan Festival was the planned 11.5-acre Park at Penn’s Landing on the I-95 cap being built between Front Street and the Delaware River. Those plans were scrapped after the project’s timeline for completion was pushed back by several years.
Prior to selecting Lemon Hill, Philadelphia Soccer 2026 ruled out two high-profile sites in the city as potential Fan Festival locations. Meg Kane, host city executive for the organization, said in February that the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and Independence National Historical Park would not house the fan zone since they are already booked or likely to host other events for the 250th anniversary of the nation and the MLB All-Star Game in 2026. Additionally, the National Park Service has a restriction on what structures can be built on the grass of Independence National Historical Park.
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