WC2026 Host City Spotlight: Miami, USA

Let’s be honest — if any city on earth was designed by committee to be simultaneously glamorous and ridiculous, it’s Miami. A place where your neighbour might be a Russian oligarch, your barista has a better tan than you’ll achieve in a lifetime, and the iguanas have more rights than the pedestrians. Miami doesn’t just lean into excess — it filed for planning permission on it.

The City That Used to Be a Swamp

Before it became the Miami you see now — pastel Art Deco buildings, beach clubs where the dress code is “show some skin, or don’t bother” — this was literally a swamp. Not metaphorically. A literal swamp. John Collins, who bought 62 acres of mangrove-infested coastline in 1896, could have done with a better real estate pitch.

Instead, Miami became the world’s largest collection of Art Deco architecture — over 800 buildings from 1923-1943 alone, all in pastel colours that make the whole city look like a pastel crayon box exploded. The Miami Beach Art Deco Historic District is the largest collection of its kind anywhere on earth. New York’s Art Deco looks like skyscrapers; Miami’s looks like the place you’d hang out if you were a Bond villain with a taste for pastel.

Then there’s Little Havana, which began in the early 1960s when Cuban exiles arrived after Castro’s revolution and turned a neighbourhood into the most authentic slice of Cuba outside of Cuba. You’ll find old men playing dominoes on the sidewalk, cafés serving café con leche since before most of your readers were born, and a bust of José Martí that has been there since 1959. It’s the kind of place where the accent in the street is louder than the music.

The Stadium: Hard Rock Stadium (a.k.a. Miami Stadium)

For the World Cup, FIFA’s naming rights rules mean the venue goes by “Miami Stadium” — because apparently even a stadium named after a rock band is too commercial for football’s most purist moments. It’s located in nearby Miami Gardens (a suburb so forgettable it was named after the fact that it’s next to Miami and there were gardens once).

Built in 1987 and spending $350 million on renovations, Hard Rock Stadium has a retractable roof (because of course it does — Miami), seats 65,326, and has hosted everything from Super Bowls to Formula 1. It’ll host all seven of Miami’s World Cup matches. The atmosphere is legendary — part football match, part nightclub, part humidity chamber.

A Recipe for the Tropics: Cuban Sandwich (Cubano)

You can’t write about Miami without writing about the Cuban sandwich, and you shouldn’t. The Cuban sandwich — or Cubano — is the single most argued-over item in Cuban-American cuisine. Miami claims it. Tampa claims it. The Cubans themselves are quietly baffled that anyone needs a map for this.

The authentic Miami version has five non-negotiable components: Cuban bread (crispy outside, soft inside), roasted mojo pork (slow-roasted with garlic, citrus, and cumin), honey ham, Swiss cheese, yellow mustard, and dill pickles. All pressed in a plancha until the bread is golden and the cheese has surrendered completely.

Here’s how you make it:

Ingredients

Cuban bread (1 loaf — if you can’t find Cuban bread, ciabatta is the closest substitute, but your Cuban neighbours will know)
200g roasted pork shoulder (marinated in mojo sauce — garlic, orange juice, cumin, oregano — and slow-roasted for at least 4 hours)
4 slices honey ham
4 slices Swiss cheese
Yellow mustard (the real kind, not the mild one you use on hot dogs)
6-8 dill pickle chips
Butter, for toasting

Method

Slice the Cuban bread lengthwise. Butter both cut sides.
Layer the pork first — generous slices of the mojo-roasted pork, covering the entire length of the bread.
Add the ham on top of the pork.
Add the Swiss cheese.
Slather the mustard on the top half of the bread.
Lay the pickle chips across the cheese.
Close the sandwich. Place it in a plancha or a heavy skillet with a weight on top. Press over medium heat for 3-4 minutes per side, until the bread is golden and crisp and the cheese is fully melted.
Cut diagonally. Eat it. Argue about whether Tampa does it better.

The whole thing takes about 30 minutes if you’ve got the pork pre-roasted, and the result is a sandwich so good that three states have had border disputes over it. In the end, the real answer is to just make it and not worry about who “owns” a sandwich.

The Miami World Cup Experience

Imagine watching a World Cup match where the sun is shining, the humidity is at 98%, and the crowd is half the people you’d expect at a Glastonbury afterparty. Miami doesn’t do subtle — and that applies to football as much as anything else. Expect neon, expect noise, and expect the kind of atmosphere that makes a British fan miss the rain almost immediately.

For a city that once was nothing but mangroves and mosquitoes, Miami has certainly arrived. Whether it’s the best football city in North America is debatable. Whether it’s the most entertaining is not.