Organizers of annual Vancouver arts and cultural summer festivals say the World Cup is impacting their events in a number of negative ways.
Competition for volunteers, shortages of supplies ranging from fencing to folding chairs and getting outbid for performers by the international soccer behemoth are just a few of the challenges impacting local legacy arts events.
In a written statement to Postmedia, Vancouver Folk Fest organizers voiced a number of concerns.
“We are all bracing for the economic hit to our budgets with increased costs and supply issues,” they wrote. “Vancouver arts organizations feel totally sidelined by FIFA. This one-time mega event seems to have utter obliviousness and no interest in working with long-standing community and cultural events, which will hopefully survive the ‘tsunami’.”
The World Cup will take place across North America from June 11 to July 19. Seven games will be played at B.C. Place in Vancouver from June 13 to July 7.
Annual arts and cultural events that run up against the World Cup include the Vancouver International Jazz Festival, Vancouver Folk Music Festival, Khatsahlano Street Party, Queer Arts Festival, Vancouver Pride 2026, Indian Summer Festival, Eastside Arts Festival and the Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival.
An exclusion area encompassing a two-km radius around B.C. Place will be enforced from June 1 until the end of July, creating particular challenges for downtown events. The exclusion zone will be in operation even on dates when there are no matches in Vancouver. A number of rotating special events are planned during that time.
An assessment by FIFA, the governing body behind staging the World Cup, forecasts a possible $1.7 billion in economic benefits for the province including a $980-million increase to GDP and $610-million in labour income. Overall, staging and hosting the seven World Cup matches is expected to cost the City of Vancouver and the province between $532 to $624 million, split between several jurisdictions.
Alongside the activities around the arena, FIFA Fan Festival Vancouver is scheduled to run at Hastings Park from June 11 to 19. The free-entry event includes access to the festival site with first-come, first-served seating for 2,600 at the new Freedom Mobile Arch amphitheatre where matches will be screened. Updates will be posted about FIFA Fan Festival events at vancouverfwc26.ca.
Construction at the 10,000-seat amphitheatre at Hastings Park which is scheduled to host the Fan Festival during the FIFA World Cup in June in Vancouver.
“Hosting the World Cup is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for British Columbia,” said Anne Kang, the Minister of Tourism, Arts, Culture and Sport for the province. “By offering free access to the amphitheatre, the FIFA Fan Festival Vancouver will create a welcoming place for people from B.C. and around the world to come together and share in the excitement of the World Cup.”
Coastal Jazz executive director Nina Horvath says this year’s 41st Annual Vancouver International Jazz Festival is being affected by the World Cup plans. The downtown music festival is set to take place June 26-July 5 and has gone through a lot of back-and-forth negotiation to be able to stage its free weekend events around the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Noting that staff at all levels have been excellent in reaching final agreements, the process has been challenging and time-consuming for arts organizations.
“As a whole, destination events such as this are probably a positive, and I retain hope there is still a benefit for us to have a free musical event in the centre of downtown where a majority of hotels are and where FIFA is taking place,” she said of the planned World Cup events. “But if (the city is) going to continue bidding for these events, it would be good to be more cognizant of engaging local partners in the process early on and, possibly, budgeting for the fact that there needs to be some mitigation for the impacts. As an example, we are hosed for hotel space for artists this year.”
Performers entertain the crowd at the Vancouver International Jazz Festival in 2024.
Horvath says bidding for some artist appearances has overlapped, with the jazz festival losing out due to higher offers.
The Concord Pacific Dragon Boat Festival, a part of the Vancouver arts and culture economy since the sport’s introduction to the region during Expo ’86, was one of the first to raise concerns about its event’s dates overlapping with the World Cup. Owing to the global scheduling of dragon boat competitions, the Vancouver event’s dates are not flexible.
“We operate on a two-year planning cycle due to the fleet of other events we run provincially, which have unique requirements for their land and water interface,” said Dragon Boat B.C. spokesperson Dominic Lai. “As there is only one dock that has that capacity with enough space to stage everything, and 100 per cent of that fell in FIFA’s ‘last mile’ zone, we cancelled.”
Lai noted it’s great to see the city host global events, but stressed the importance of maintaining a balance between the large-scale attractions and those that regularly appear on Vancouver’s annual events calendar.
“It is important to balance what’s happening globally with what’s happening locally,” he said. “Making sure that, after these global events come and go, you still have a strong local base is important. It’s only with local events that you can grow your local events and industries and support systems to be able to host these major global events.”
Jessie Adcock, host committee lead and chief delivery officer for World Cup Vancouver, says logistics around planning the event have indeed been challenging.
But she notes that almost all of the arts and cultural events that coincided with the World Cup in Vancouver are still going ahead. She expressed the hope is that the influx of people in town to see matches will spin-off into checking out other arts and cultural events as well.
A Community Activation Playbook has been released for restaurants, community organizers and people who want to host an event or watch party during the World Cup, offering a guide on how to do so without running into trouble with World Cup planning.
“We have been working to avoid too much happening on match days, which are going to be extremely busy, so that working around road closures, public safety and security efforts and so forth is easier,” Adcock says.
As for why a soccer game requires more planning than, say, multiple nights of Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour or a possible playoff run by the Vancouver Canucks, Adcock explained the differences.
“On a regular match or concert, we go into the stadium, watch and go home,” she said. “A World Cup match is on a different level. The stadium will have a surround barrier around it, with activations all around the site, so people with a match ticket can come in a few hours earlier and then stick around afterwards. It becomes an all-day-long event.”
Adcock anticipates that businesses around the activation zone will want to get in on the action.
“We’re anticipating that locals will want to get involved and downtown will be full, so we are working with industry to deploy a theme throughout the city bringing it all together,” she said. “That way, everyone can come together and participate.”
Overall, arts groups noted the benefits of the multi-year lead time of the consultation process with the City Host Committee for the 2010 Winter Olympics’ Vancouver Cultural Olympiad as a far better model for such major events versus the far shorter planning behind the World Cup Vancouver celebrations.
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