EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — Benjamin Klevge, a soccer fan from Pamiers, France, had the front-facing camera open on his phone and a wide smile on his face. He crouched down, struggling to fit the Statue of Liberty into the frame.
It wasn’t the actual Statue of Liberty, though. It was a 60-foot replica, encrusted with more than 1 million green jelly beans, towering above the entrance to a three-story candy store.
And Klevge wasn’t in New York. He wasn’t even outdoors. He was roaming the gaping halls of the American Dream, a three-million-square-foot megamall in East Rutherford, N.J. He took more pictures in front of an indoor water park a few steps away as a Backstreet Boys song from the previous century played over the loudspeakers.
“C’est magnifique,” he said, before switching to English. “It’s beautiful.”
Fans who attended the opening match of this World Cup this month in Mexico City could wander a warren of neighborhood streets alive with music and the smell of grilled meat on their way to the iconic Estadio Azteca.
Other citadels of soccer — whether Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, which hosted the 1950 and 2014 finals, or Madrid’s Santiago Bernabéu, where the final was played in 1982 — are similarly embedded in dense, urban landscapes, helping to animate the heartbeats of their respective cities.
Then there’s MetLife Stadium — or “New York New Jersey Stadium,” as World Cup officials have poetically rebranded it for the summer — which will host eight matches in this tournament, including the final.
For fans accustomed to ballparks with more of the local flavor outside, it has become a punchline. They deride it as a remote island in a sea of asphalt, an inaccessible behemoth surrounded by swampland and a tangle of highway. And for the most part they’re right.
But there’s another island out there.
On Tuesday, before a match between France and Senegal, Klevge and thousands of others fans flooded the American Dream mall, which is connected to the stadium by an elevated footpath, and tried to make the best of an odd situation.
“Exit?” Klevge asked a reporter after taking his selfies and apologizing for his limited English. He tapped two fingers on his lips. “For smoking?”
Erected in 2021, the American Dream is the second-largest shopping mall in the country. It has hundreds of stores, several dozen eateries and a host of attractions not commonly found indoors: a go-kart track, a water park, a ski slope and five roller coasters.
This month, the air-conditioned cathedral to commerce represents the only public gathering space — besides the generic official “fan zones” immediately outside the stadium — accessible to the 82,500-capacity stadium by foot.
“It’s kind of confusing. We’re just in a mall,” said Dawda Daye, 30, a Senegalese fan from Houston, who arrived there by taxi with his wife. “But it’s convenient, and everyone seems to be enjoying it and having fun.”
Indeed, fans of both teams on Tuesday — just like the crowds supporting Brazil and Morocco over the weekend — seemed open to embracing the weirdness of the setting. The resulting rowdy energy was similar to the atmosphere at any major soccer match around the world — just entirely different.
Three hours before kickoff, four men in French jerseys juggled a plush soccer ball, purchased moments earlier from an Ikea kiosk, outside a Verizon store.
A Senegalese drum troupe rapped out a mesmerizing beat for a swaying group of soccer fans marching near the cash register of a Mrs. Field’s cookie stand.
The sunlit space normally containing the mall’s NHL regulation-size ice rink had been converted into a sort of simulation of a beer garden, filled with picnic tables where scores of fans clapped and sang. Above them towered a screen roughly the size of the penalty area on a soccer field that displayed a video feed of the very same picnic zone they were in — meaning the fans were cheering real-time images of themselves cheering.
“In the U.S., everything is bigger,” said Benoit Berthier, 39, a Frenchman working in Montreal, who was eating a pastry at a cafe a few steps away. “But what they did inside is good. If you have one thing you know how to do in America, it’s entertain.”
In a food court connected to H Mart, the Korean American grocery chain, two men wearing the jersey of Rayan Cherki, a young French star, blew into vuvuzelas as they squeezed between groups munching on traditional Korean snacks.
On the third floor — there are five levels to the American Dream — a trio of Frenchman puzzled over a digital map of the shopping center, tapping on the screen to find a place to eat.
“This kind of mall is unusual for French people,” said Gérald Grégoire, 52, one of the fans. “What’s most surprising is the size of the parking lot.”
During American football season, when the New York Jets and the New York Giants share MetLife Stadium, the parking lots there can hold close to 30,000 cars, a perfect setting for that quintessentially American sports tableau: tailgating.
A handful of World Cup stadiums — like Lincoln Financial Field, where opposing fans played drinking games together before a match — are allowing tailgating this summer. MetLife is not one of them.
“We heard there was no tailgating, so we said, ‘OK, we’re not going to the stadium, we’re going to the mall,’ ” said Carlos Orbe, 35, who was visiting from Tampa, Fla., with his fiancée, Julia Szenberg.
Undeterred, the two grabbed a case of hard seltzers, took a cab to the American Dream and found some space between a row of parked cards in the mall’s indoor parking complex.
They stood in a circle with a dozen or so other fans, sipping their drinks and periodically kicking a soccer ball that bounced their way. Asked about the people in the juggling circle, Szenberg, 36, who was born in Paris, shrugged.
“We don’t know them,” she said. “But now they’re our family. This is the real American dream, happening in the mall parking garage.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
