Everybody talks about the Dallas World Cup Site, right? They just point at AT&T Stadium in Arlington and say, “That’s it, done.” But let me tell you, that’s just the shiny hood ornament. The real story, the real practice of mapping out where the World Cup actually lives in North Texas, is way messier and required me to dig into some stuff I never expected to touch.
Tracking the Infrastructure and the Bureaucracy
I started this project thinking it would be simple. Google the stadium, check the official FIFA site, and call it a day. Wrong. That’s all PR fluff. The location details they publish are just the obvious stuff. What I wanted to know was the meat: Where are the team base camps? Which fields are getting the multi-million dollar upgrades? Where exactly are they shoving the logistical hubs? That’s the stuff that requires actual sweat.
My first move was to try and pull the public bid documents. That was a dead end. Too heavily redacted, too much legal jargon. So I pivoted. I realized the gold wasn’t in the big stadium contracts, but in the small, hyper-local municipal records. I started scanning the planning commission minutes for three different counties: Dallas, Tarrant, and Collin. I was searching for specific keywords: “FIFA overlay,” “training pitch specifications,” and anything involving “Zone D Infrastructure Uplift.”
This process was brutal. I spent hours clicking through PDFs from obscure zoning meetings. I didn’t care about the noise, I just wanted the addresses. I managed to identify half a dozen permits that were filed under shell companies, but the addresses themselves pointed to existing high school and college sports complexes that were getting insane, top-secret renovations. They weren’t building new stadiums; they were converting already solid fields into military-grade training facilities, and that’s where the real detail was hiding.
The Unexpected Detour That Unlocked Everything
Now, why did I go this deep? It wasn’t just because I was curious about soccer. It was purely accidental, a classic case of chasing one problem and running face-first into another.
My buddy, Rick, who runs a small construction firm, was trying to get a variance approved for a massive concrete mixing plant expansion up near Frisco. Rick had been stuck in permitting hell for months, losing money hand over fist. He was tearing his hair out, saying the city was moving the goalposts every week. He asked me to help him figure out what the hell was causing the logjam at the planning office.
I told Rick, “I’ll sit in on these Zoom calls. I’ll listen to the nonsense.” So I did. I logged into the North Texas Regional Planning Council meetings—the most boring seven hours of my life, initially—just waiting for Rick’s item to come up. But it never did.
Then, about five hours in, I heard this one guy, a senior logistics coordinator named Dale, sound off. Dale was clearly tired and forgot he was supposed to be vague. He wasn’t talking about Rick’s concrete plant. He was complaining that the entire regional planning budget was being diverted and sucked dry by these emergency “World Cup Readiness” infrastructure demands. He flat out said that they were moving critical services around just to accommodate the temporary, high-security team base camps.
- He mentioned three specific parcels of land near DFW airport’s northern perimeter, currently industrial warehousing, that were being seized for massive media overflow centers.
- He referenced the insane FIFA drainage requirements—something about needing a specific type of German-made underlayment for the practice fields that was causing customs delays.
- He spilled the beans that the biggest capital expenditure wasn’t AT&T, but the secretive, total rebuild of a massive municipal park complex in the Richardson area, turning it into a protected training hub.
I was furiously scribbling notes. Rick’s concrete plant was a non-issue. It was collateral damage, completely overshadowed by the massive federal and international maneuvering going on behind the scenes.
The Ground Truth
The next day, I didn’t call Rick. I drove straight out to those addresses Dale had accidentally leaked. I wasn’t looking for signs or logos, I was looking for activity. And I saw it.
At the park complex in Richardson, the place was fenced off tighter than Fort Knox. You could see the construction crews weren’t doing typical park work. They had giant stakes driven into the ground marking drainage trenches that looked deep enough for a river. I talked to a couple of guys working on the site entrance—they wouldn’t say much, but one of them confirmed they were doing a “Level 5 security overhaul” on the perimeter. That’s not for little league.
So, the “Dallas World Cup Site” isn’t a single stadium. I physically traced it. It’s a distributed network. I verified and mapped five primary locations: the main stadium in Arlington (the obvious bit), the media nerve center near DFW, two highly specialized training sites in Frisco and Plano, and the massive, temporary team base overhaul in Richardson. All of them are being handled by different jurisdictions, which explains the bureaucratic mess I witnessed on the Zoom call.
If you want the real location details, forget the big press releases. You have to dig into the noise, look for the little guys getting screwed by bureaucracy, and listen to the exhausted city planners who accidentally tell the truth.