The beautiful game made an absolute mess of the Big Apple Saturday, as mass gridlock shuttered Midtown streets and left traffic snarled to make it easier for fans to get to MetLife Stadium for the region’s first World Cup match.
Travelers were especially impacted around Penn Station and Madison Square Garden, where streets were closed to speed up shuttle buses for fans heading across the Hudson River to North Jersey to watch Brazil play Morocco. About 1.2 million soccer fans were expected to hit the hosting NYC area for the world’s biggest sporting event.
“It is chaotic,” said soccer fan Tim Bouman, who was wearing a Brazil shirt and visiting from the Netherlands.
“I just got my [World Cup] tickets online yesterday, and I’m just asking the cop, like, right now, where we need to go? One cop told us to go this way, and the other one told us to go the other way, and now we need to walk around again.”
Bouman said he believes NYC is more focused on the New York Knicks and their quest for an NBA titlethan on dealing with the World Cup.
“I think if the [World Cup] was in Europe, it would have been, like, way more organized, for sure,” he said.
NY Transit trains at Penn Station were strictly reserved for World Cup ticketholders for much of Saturday, leaving everyone else seeking to use the service scrambling to find Uber, buses and other alternate means of transportation.
“It’s a little bit annoying right now because I can’t get my home train, … so now I have to make alternate plans on how to get home,” said Jennifer Charles of Lyndhurst, New Jersey, who was stranded for hours at Penn Station after traveling to the Big Apple to pick up her daughter.
Authorities — including NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani — should have done a much better job alerting the public of the anticipated commuter apocalypse, said Charles, 40.
“I just feel that the people in power should be better organized … telling people the trains aren’t running, because now how am I supposed to get home?” she ripped.
To add to the area chaos, the NYPD also set up a “frozen zone” around MSG Saturday to weed out non-ticketholders due to other overlapping events: a Knicks “watch party” outside The Garden for Game 5 of the NBA Finals, and a 5 Seconds of Summer concert inside “The World’s Most Famous Arena.”
Alex Rotali said she was under the impression from various media reports that NJ Transit would run normally until 2 p.m., and was “flabbergasted” to learn it shifted to strictly to World Cup routes 90 minutes earlier.
“It’s really aggravating ‘cause we’re already late” after being redirected numerous times at Penn Station because of the match, said Rotali, who was with her two children and planning to travel to a waterpark in East Hanover, New Jersey, for her son Jamir’s ninth birthday.
“I might just take an Uber, to be honest, as expensive as that might be, … like $90-something dollars, but I have no choice at this point, because it’s gonna take even longer now with everything.”
Soccer fans also found the process confusing.
In many cases, they arrived at the NJ Transit entrance of Penn Station at 32nd and Seventh Avenue, only to be directed across the street to head north to 33rd St — which was closed to vehicle traffic and lined with extra buses—so they then walked east on Sixth Ave and enter the line at 32nd Street.
And then they had to deal with jacked-up prices of $98 for a round-trip from Penn Station to MetLife — rather than the standard $12.90 fare.
“We got our [NJ Transit] tickets ahead of time. Very expensive,” said Anna Crew of Waco, Texas, who was wearing a Brazil jersey. “But then there’s no instructions on how to get [to the trains], but we’ve been able to ask a couple people, and they’ve given us pretty good directions.”
Former Knick Steve Novak welcomed Saturday’s frantic scene, saying it’s “New York City at its finest.”
“You have the Knicks and the NBA Finals,” the ex-sharpshooting forward told The Post outside MSG. “Obviously, the scheduling didn’t anticipate it… And obviously, now that the World Cup is in town, it’s just its sports heaven.”
Mamdani and the city’s Department of Transportation have declared “Gridlock Alert” days for each of the eight days a World Cup game will be played at MetLife, running from Saturday through July 19. Besides the Penn Station restrictions and temporary streets closures and bus-only corridors, truck deliveries will be heavily restricted from 30th to 60th Streets, from noon and 11:00 P.M.
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