Politics

What does it cost to air-condition a World Cup?

Published

1 hour ago

June 21, 2026

DALLAS — The electric bill for FIFA’s World Cup matches in the U.S. will come to $860,000, according to data compiled by a power company.

Dallas Stadium – known to locals at AT&T Stadium – will use the most electricity, the equivalent of powering 1,035 homes for a month, followed by Atlanta (equivalent to 884 homes) and Houston (784 homes). All three cities are known for their blistering summertime heat and feature giant, air-conditioned stadiums.

At the other end of the spectrum, San Francisco and Seattle will use far less electricity, the equivalent of less than 400 homes, in large part because of their outdoor stadiums and cooler climates.

One other big difference among the cities: the power bill for Dallas’s air-conditioned dome will be $77,000 roughly half the $152,000 bill for Los Angeles’s open-air stadium, despite the LA venue’s lower power use. That’s largely due to Texas’s dirt-cheap electric rates for industrial customers.

The data, provided by Texas-based utility Payless Power, only covers the 11 stadiums in the United States. The company calculated the bills based on each stadium’s size, roof type, local climate and regional electric rates.

Sadly, the company didn’t tally the cost of other big power draws during the Cup, such as the five-story mall next to New Jersey/New York stadium, or chilling the Scottish delegation’s beer.

Politics

FIFA plays flag football against Iranian protesters

Published

13 minutes ago

June 21, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

LOS ANGELES — Iran’s players arrived back in the United States yesterday to play Belgium. For supporters of Team Melli, a cat-and-mouse game with FIFA over political expression continues.

Soccer’s global governing body has included Iran’s pre-revolutionary Lion and Sun flag — a favorite symbol of those protesting the régime in Tehran — on its list of “materials, including but not limited to banners, flags, fliers, apparel and other paraphernalia, that are of a political, offensive and/or discriminatory nature” banned under its stadium code of conduct.

A Los Angeles County Superior Court court judge upheld the ban last week after a challenge from the Southern California-based Institute for Voice of Liberty, which argued that FIFA was targeting “protected symbolic and political speech” in violation of California law.

Actually enforcing the ban against a flood of fans entering the stadium with the emblem on a wide variety of paper and cloth goods has been tougher.

As Iran’s players came out to examine the field about 90 minutes before kickoff of their first match, on Monday night against New Zealand, a stadium official approached a 26-year-old Orange County woman who was holding the flag.

Under FIFA’s rules, he told her, she could wear the Lion and Sun but not “display” it. He lowered his voice to share a loophole: If she wrapped herself in the flag, it would become an item of clothing, exempting it from FIFA’s ban.

“If it’s not supposed to be political, why can you have the post-revolutionary flag and not the pre-revolutionary flag?” the woman remarked after. “And why isn’t like anyone else’s flag banned, like the Venezuelan flag, or whatever?”

The pre-Islamic Revolution flag has become a point of tension reflecting a deeper struggle over Iranian identity, dissent and representation on the world stage. It has has become a common symbol of protest amid the war in Iran, and when the flag of the Islamic Republic was rolled out on the field on Monday night, lots of fans countered with the Lion and Sun.

Fidgeting in his seat moments before kickoff, an Iranian-American man who declined to give his name sported a white T-shirt and black shorts and mulled his fashion choices. Though he supported the Iranian soccer team, he said he couldn’t bring himself to wear any official gear featuring the country’s current flag. He had also decided it was too fraught to show up in any gear emblazoned with the Lion and Sun. But as the Iranian team took the field to an explosion of noise from the mostly pro-Iran crowd, he seemed to second-guess his decidedly neutral sartorial choice.

There were other options. Outside, a man held a tri-country display, blending the flags of Israel, the United States and pre-revolution Iran. Meanwhile, the woman who had been approached by the FIFA official — and who gave her name only as Nicole out of fear she could be identified by the régime in Iran — wore a T-shirt with the pre-revolutionary flag. She had picked up a batch the previous day from a Westwood-based group allied with exiled opposition leader Reza Pahlavi that had organized pre-match protests.

Now each of the six family members in her row, including aunts and uncles who had moved to the U.S. after the 1979 revolution, was decked out in the Iranian flag. Each, said Nicole, was preparing to boo if Iran scored a goal.

“It’s a government team,” she said. “This is bittersweet. It’s the first time that Iran has a chance of making it out of the group stage, because last time they were in the Group of Death. But it’s like: how happy can you really be?”

Politics

What SoFi Stadium traffic is teaching LA politicians about the Olympics

Published

2 hours ago

June 21, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

LOS ANGELES — Paul Krekorian, head of Los Angeles’ Office of Major Events, was driving to SoFi Stadium for the U.S. soccer team’s opening match against Paraguay when he found himself stuck in a traffic jam, trapped behind a mess of unmoving cars on a side street in Inglewood.

The problem: A self-driving Waymo vehicle was at the head of the line, attempting — without success — to make an unprotected left turn onto Manchester Boulevard, a busy thoroughfare.

“It couldn’t figure out that it was never, ever going to be able to make that left turn,” said Krekorian, a former LA City Council member appointed to the newly created major events role by Mayor Karen Bass.

He was annoyed. But what Krekorian actually saw was an opportunity — to correct a problem ahead of the 2028 Summer Olympics, which will use the $5 billion-plus stadium for swimming events and the opening ceremony. It is the way many local officials are watching the World Cup unfold here: monitoring everything from the performance of traffic signals to signs of political unrest as a stress test for the Olympics.

“Instead of just steaming about it, I was thinking: OK, how are we going to geofence Waymos?” Krekorian said. “How are we going to work with the transportation network companies to make sure that we have effective pick-up and drop-off locations? All of that stuff.”

The messy lead-up to the World Cup — marked by weak hotel bookings, high ticket prices and security concerns — left some in LA leadership circles worried about the fate of the tournament, and its implications for the Olympics here. The World Cup’s economic benefit to the region remains a big question mark, and its early run in LA has revealed pressure points. In interviews with Blue Light News, state and federal officials said they were concerned about reports of traffic jams in Inglewood. They also lamented the high cost of parking and tickets to the matches, the latter a longstanding complaint among soccer fans who’ve been priced out of attending the tournament, and a source of frustration among California elected officials who have demanded answers from FIFA.

“We saw three to five hours of congestion just for people to go to SoFi to pay $200 for parking,” said LA City Council member Bob Blumenfield. “Seeing some of those things, obviously, LA28 is a much larger footprint, so … we really are going to have to focus on the transit element of all this. And obviously, with the Olympics, we are thinking about that.”

Los Angeles will host its fourth match of the World Cup today, between Iran and Belgium, the most of any venue thus far. It has avoided the major disruptions some had feared. And after more than a week of competition — including two high-profile games at SoFi Stadium, one of them involving Iran’s team — Los Angeles politicians are more confident than ever that the city can pull off the upcoming global sports gathering that has been in the works for almost a decade.

“Much of what we’ve done in preparation for welcoming the world for the World Cup will be applicable to what we will do in ‘28 for the Olympic and Paralympic Games,” Krekorian said. “There’s a palpable excitement here to be hosting the World Cup, and this is only a fraction of what we’ll see when it comes time for ‘28.”

The stakes are unusually high in Los Angeles — perhaps more so than in any of the other 10 World Cup host cities in the U.S. — because a major misstep would inevitably raise questions about the region’s ability to put on the Olympics. The city has already been the target of criticism from conservative personalities and politicians who questioned Democratic leaders here after the January 2025 firestorms, including the late Charlie Kirk and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), both of whom suggested the Games should be moved elsewhere. If the World Cup is a success — eight games will be played here over several weeks — it would demonstrate that a liberal, blue-state city can still pull off a complex mega-event.

Reynold Hoover, CEO of LA28, the Games’ organizing committee, told Blue Light News he and his team are paying close attention to the soccer tournament — and that once it concludes, they will analyze data ranging from public transportation ridership and fan zone attendance to spectator flows in and around SoFi Stadium.

“This is an opportunity not just for LA, but for the country to show that we can actually do something really big together,” he said. “And when you look at the World Cup and what you’re seeing here in the United States, I think that’s a precursor, and I think both sides of the aisle see the value of having the Summer Olympics here in the United States for the first time since 1996.”

Concerns remain here, including about the cost of attendance. Blumenfield might benefit from attending a World Cup match at SoFi Stadium given that he is on the council’s ad hoc committee involved in preparations for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games. But that’s not in the cards: “It’s too rich for my blood — I can’t afford a ticket,” he said.

Indeed, tickets to local World Cup matches have been climbing: the get-in price for Sunday’s Iran-Belgium contest is nearly $900 on one resale platform.

Transit remains a major issue, too — and one that several elected officials said they are monitoring closely.

Rep. Laura Friedman, who called the World Cup “a great dress rehearsal” for the 2028 Games, said it is paramount that Olympic organizers build on public transit gains from the soccer tournament. According to Los Angeles Metro data, ridership on Metro buses serving SoFi Stadium increased 41 percent from the first World Cup match at the venue to the second. While Friedman praised Metro for “performing very well,” she said that “for the Olympics we can try to increase” use of public transit.

“At SoFi Stadium, we have seen very expensive parking fees, we’ve seen a lot of congestion, long travel times,” said Friedman, a Burbank Democrat. “Especially for foreign visitors who may not be renting a car, they expect to be able to take public transportation — easily and safely.”

For all the comparisons of the two events, the Olympic Games are a vast enterprise many times larger than the World Cup — a fact not lost on local elected officials who caution against an apples-to-apples comparison. “The success of the World Cup at SoFi underscores our ability as a city to be able to manage these types of large-scale events,” said LA City Council member Monica Rodriguez, who also is on the ad hoc 2028 Games committee. “The difference with the Olympics is that we’re going to have multiple venues that are going to be hosting all at the same time. … So my primary concern is about the cost of security.”

On that front, LA has avoided major public security problems during the World Cup. The closest thing to a controversy at LA’s matches has been the uneven enforcement of FIFA’s ban on the display of Iran’s pre-revolution flag inside the stadium during the team’s draw with New Zealand on Monday.

LA City Council member Adrin Nazarian, a former state lawmaker who was born in Iran, attended that game and said “it felt very safe.” He also took public transportation to get there, and gave the trip high marks. “I wanted to experience that myself, just to kind of see how it is,” he said.

“What was happening in the Metro lines, for example, I was blown away,” he said. “Extremely helpful staff, ambassadors all over the place, high-visibility security. So, for folks coming in who may have had a negative impression about Los Angeles and the homelessness or safety concerns, you wouldn’t have experienced it.”

Public transportation helped Nazarian avoid Krekorian’s fate. As for the major events czar, did he ever get to make that left turn onto Manchester?

“I made a six-point turn … and I got out of there and took a different route,” Krekorian said with a laugh.

Politics

Donald Trump’s least favorite country seeks remontada

Published

3 hours ago

June 21, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

When Spain takes the field in Atlanta today against Saudi Arabia, it will have a point to prove: to soccer analysts shocked by the team’s struggle against small Cape Verde, and to the leader of the country in which the match is being played.

No European country has infuriated Donald Trump more than Spain. Now it’s desperate to win his World Cup.

Outspoken socialist leader Pedro Sánchez, a supporter of Atlético Madrid, has clashed spectacularly with Trump over the Iran war, but also regarding NATO spending and Israel’s assault in Gaza. Meanwhile their policies on issues from energy to immigration could hardly be further apart.

“No prime minister previously has had as much acknowledgement [for fighting Trump] on the international stage or taken such an anti-American stance,” said Paco Camas, head of public opinion at polling firm Ipsos. Sánchez, he added, is positioning himself “at the forefront of resistance to the reactionary wave sweeping across Europe and the West.”

A recent poll by a public research institute showed that two-thirds of Spaniards disapprove of Trump’s criticism of Spain, suggesting some cross-party support for Sánchez’s position. Another poll, by independent firm 40db, showed that 82 percent of Spaniards see Trump as a threat to world peace, more than any other global leader.

The trigger for the souring of Washington-Madrid relations was the Spanish government’s refusal last year to increase its defense spending in line with American demands.

While Trump strong-armed NATO partners into accepting a 5 percent of GDP expenditure target, Spain — traditionally one of the military alliance’s lowest defense spenders — insisted on keeping its expenditure at 2.1 percent. Sánchez said the 5-percent target would have meant “eliminating unemployment, sickness and maternity benefits, reducing all pensions by 40 percent, or cutting state investment in education by half.”

In response, Trump called the country “a laggard” and repeatedly referred to it in disparaging terms. “Maybe you should throw them out of NATO, frankly,” he said.

This year’s Middle East conflict only heightened tensions. Spain refused to allow the U.S. to use its joint military bases on Spanish territory for its offensive against Iran, with the prime minister labeling the attacks “unjustified and dangerous.”

Trump then threatened to cut off all trade ties with Spain, although that hasn’t happened so far, given how the country’s commercial relationships are embedded in the EU.

“We have a lot of winners, but Spain is a loser,” the president fumed in March to the New York Post.

He was referring then not to soccer, but that’s how Spain will hope to prove him wrong today.