Boston

Boston is the capital of Massachusetts and one of the oldest cities in the United States, founded in 1630 by Puritan settlers. It sits at the centre of a metropolitan area of roughly 4.9 million people and ranks among the world's leading concentrations of higher education and medical research, home to Harvard University, MIT, and a cluster of teaching hospitals that form a global centre for biomedical innovation. The city's economy is anchored by education, healthcare, finance, and technology, and it remains politically influential as a founding city of the American republic, site of the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, and the Battle of Bunker Hill.

World Cup matches in the Boston area were played at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, roughly 40km south of the city centre, shared ground for the NFL's Patriots and MLS's Revolution, reconfigured from its roughly 65,000 NFL capacity to meet FIFA requirements. Securing the region's matches was expensive: Massachusetts drew more than $46m from FEMA's city-grant programme plus $21.2m in counter-drone funding, while Foxborough itself needed $7.8m for 39 days of policing, fire and EMS overtime, a sum close to 10% of the town's annual operating budget that the Kraft Group and Boston Soccer 2026 ultimately covered in full .