All of these World Cup friendlies are telling one thing: they messed up by not making Penn State a host site.
The eyes of the biggest sport in the world descend upon North America for the next three weeks as the World Cup travels all throughout the lower 48.
The entire idea of the World Cup in America has felt like a pie-in-the-sky aspiration until the teams began to touch American soil. In doing it, they have pretty much infiltrated SEC country.
Friendly matchups and practice have taken place at Texas A&M, Auburn, and Kansas. The environments in just those friendly games have been nothing short of incredible, and have taken the visitors by major surprise.
The size of the stadiums in America, at least the major ones, all rival the best soccer stadiums in Europe. Camp Nou, FC Barcelona's home base, is the biggest stadium in Europe as it seats 105,000 people.
While that is a massive facility, that is just the status quo in America. Camp Nou would definitely be in the top-10 in terms of stadium size, but Wembley Stadium, 80,000 capacity, would hardly crack the top 20 largest college stadiums in America.
Beaver Stadium would check in at 106,000, which would be the biggest stadium in Europe by a little of Camp Nou, but massively over the rest of the stadiums.
All of this is to say, the World Cup missed out on an incredible opportunity to put a game, or a team, in Happy Valley.
Talk about Rural America coming to life? Put one of the games in the Philadelphia group in Happy Valley to give those fans a perfect experience of an American city and an American countryside in State College.
It would have been fun but it is all for not.
We, as American football fans, are so used to weekly dates in the biggest stadiums in the world, packed to the brim with the craziest fans in the world, cheering on their college teams.
It's one of the greatest things that we have, and it would have been really cool to have some of these World Cup Games taking place in Big Ten country, specifically, in Happy Valley inside Beaver Stadium.
It is going to be a very cool couple of weeks as the sport of soccer takes over the country; it just could have been a whole lot cooler in front of a Penn State white-out crowd.
Maybe next time.
Penn State Roundtable also offers a fan community and message board. We’d love to have you join us to talk all things Penn State Nittany Lions. Click the “Join” button at the top of the page to join our community for free.
