Soccer fans brave surcharges, shuttles and the threat of traffic for N.J.’s first World Cup match
· Yahoo Sports
Soccer fans started calling Ubers, catching trains and queuing for shuttle buses hours in advance of New Jersey’s opening World Cup match Saturday.
Despite concerns that nightmarish traffic, $100 NJ transit rides and eye-popping ticket prices would ruin the day, thousands of people traveled to the newly renamed New York New Jersey Stadium in East Rutherford. They braved it all for the love of the game.
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Emma Arrango left early with her boyfriend to catch the 1 p.m. train at NJ Transit’s Bay Street Station in Montclair, which would take them to Secaucus Junction and then the Meadowlands for the 6 p.m. game between Morocco and Brazil.
Arrango, 20, of Wayne, was wearing a generic soccer jersey and she said she wasn’t rooting for either team.
“I’m a soccer fan,” she said, adding, “I’m half-Colombian.”
Among those taking public transit Saturday was Gov. Mikie Sherrill, who posted a video of herself welcoming soccer fans to New Jersey aboard an NJ Transit train to the stadium.
“I want to welcome everyone to New Jersey. I hope you have fantastic day today and have a great game everybody,” Sherrill told travelers.
Fans also arrived via rideshare, like Uber and Lyft, which dropped people at the Meadowlands Racetrack located 1.3 miles away. On Saturday, fans could be seen getting out of Ubers along Paterson Plank Road and walking in droves to the stadium.
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Others took advantage of the shuttle buses being offered by the New York New Jersey host committee.
They came from Bloomfield, Hasbrouck Heights, Old Bridge and countless other towns — in BMWs, Subarus, Toyotas and Teslas — lining up for more than a mile to park in a deck at the Hackensack Meridian Medical School campus in Nutley before boarding shuttle buses to the Meadowlands Sports Complex a few miles up Route 3.
With dad behind the wheel of their white Acura SUV, the four members of the Santa family of Bloomfield were all wearing Brazilian yellow-and-green jerseys as they crept slowly along Kingsland Avenue waiting to pull into the medical school complex.
“I think it’s definitely going to be worth it,” said Matthew Santa, 17, who just graduated from Seton Hall Prep in West Orange, where he was a winger on the soccer team.
His older sister, Jessica, 23, who played soccer when she was younger and now works in marketing in Manhattan, said friends couldn’t believe how casual she was about going to the game.
“It’s actually funny,” she said. “I brought it up at a dinner last night, and everyone was like, ‘You’re saying this so nonchalantly!’ Like, this is a big thing to be going to. I guess I didn’t realize the magnitude of it till right now. But yeah, a lot of people are excited.”
“It’s like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
Pedro Santa, 54, a native of Puerto Rico who works as a manager for PSE&G, said he won a lottery for the opportunity to buy the four tickets at the relatively bargain price of $490 each, agreeing it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and confident it would be worth every penny.
His wife, Lisa Santa, said on the phone later that the family had made it onto the bus and into the stadium without a problem.“We’re here right now and it’s amazing,” Santa said.
“Morocco fans are helping the Brazil fans take pictures, and everybody’s just so excited.”
Lorenzo Blanco, who was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and now who lives in Old Bridge, had rented a van to drive himself, his wife, his brother and sister-in-law, and two nieces up to the park and ride, after his brother had bought the tickets.
“He bought them for everybody as a gift,” said Blanco, 60, an editor for Univision, the Spanish-language media company. “I don’t know how much he paid for them. So I paid for the transportation, food.”
A handful of New Jersey National Guard troops in camo fatigues and civilians in safety vests guided ticket holders into the parking deck and onto the shuttle buses in an orderly fashion for the couple of hours that NJ.com was present at mid-afternoon Saturday.
Just outside the medical school campus, a Nutley Police officer stood under the hot sun in the middle of the intersection of Kingsland Street and Cathedral Avenue, controlling the long line of motorists stopping-and-starting as they headed slowly toward their buses to the big game.
Asked whether everybody was keeping their cool, he said, “Everybody but me.”
While things appeared calm in the Garden State, tensions rose in New York where fans traveling to the game caused mass gridlock in midtown Manhattan, according to the New York Post.
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