How Robert Kraft helped bring the World Cup to Boston, twice

Back in 1988, Kraft was a paper and packaging magnate who didn’t yet own the Patriots, and had just bought Sullivan Stadium in Foxborough out of bankruptcy court. The 60,000-seat, Astroturfed stadium didn’t meet the specifications for professional soccer, but Kraft was looking to bring events to his new property. While traveling in Europe he saw soccer’s grip on the world and hoped to bring some of that magic here.

To help, he tapped Steven Gans, a young lawyer and former professional soccer player, who recalled Kraft telling him Boston came in dead last in an early assessment of possible US World Cup venues.

“We don’t want to be embarrassed here in Boston,” Kraft told Gans. “Can you help?”

Thirty-two years later, Kraft is sports royalty, with experience hosting a successful World Cup. This time around, he was a central figure in the bid from the start, serving as honorary chair of the North American bid committee and a key conduit to President Trump, and his Gillette Stadium always had a high chance of hosting games.

But with local planning marred by logistical headaches and needless controversy, some worry that Boston is less up to the task than it proved to be in 1994. Today, the fear isn’t so much that we’d be left out of the party as that the region has forgotten how to throw one.

“Today, nothing is easy,” said Pat Moscaritolo, the former head of the Greater Boston Convention & Visitors Bureau who helped bring the 1994 games here. He blamed FIFA for the new challenges.

“In ‘94, [the Krafts] did it so well, they could have easily just said, ‘We’re done with that, that’s a lot of headache,’ ” he added. “Why would they put their reputation on the line? It’s because they built something special, and they believe in the brand.”

For stadium owners, the appeal of hosting the World Cup is more about reputation than revenue; FIFA reaps most of the payday. And several people who’ve worked with the Krafts describe them as deeply committed to large-scale athletic contests, enough so that top executives such as Jonathan Kraft have personally traveled to compete for events as comparatively modest as the NCAA lacrosse championships.

Robert Kraft declined an interview for this story, but said in a statement that he considered his work bringing soccer to the US — through the World Cup and later Major League Soccer — part of his legacy.

“I’ve been very fortunate in my life that most things I’ve attempted to do professionally have worked out,” he wrote. “But none of them came easily.”

In 1994, the World Cup fundamentally changed Americans’ appetite for soccer and set a new standard for big events in Boston. This year, though, preparations in Boston have been dogged by fund-raising woes and infighting. Add in Kraft’s ties to an unpopular president, a much-loathed international soccer federation, and ticket prices that feel out of reach to most everyday fans, and many in the city seem less eager to celebrate than braced for inconvenience.

“Between Trump and FIFA, they seem pretty determined to squeeze all the joy out of this tournament,” said Victor Matheson, a sports economist at Holy Cross College. Kraft, he said, “just gets sullied for being in the same room.”

For the 1994 bid, Kraft also deputized Andy Wasynczuk, chief operating officer of Sullivan Stadium, to drum up support among Boston’s power brokers.

Wasynczuk recalled a visit by FIFA and US Soccer executives in 1990: Tony Nunziante, the events chief for the city of Boston and a native of Italy who’d long dreamed of bringing the Cup here, found out they were in town and called Wasynczuk to suggest a last-minute meeting with then-mayor Ray Flynn. Wasynczuk agreed, and Nunziante scrambled to find Flynn, who had a habit of running the city’s streets after dark. When the soccer officials arrived at City Hall, they were impressed to find a sweaty Flynn there to greet them.

“He was right out of central casting and still had his running outfit on,” Nunziante recalled. “He looked very sporty.”

Back then, most people here were so unfamiliar with global soccer they pronounced FIFA as “Fye-fa,” Nunziante recalled, but the Boston team “immediately hit the ground running.”

Kraft, meanwhile, worked local politicians to get them on board, and when a Boston delegation attended the 1990 World Cup in Rome, Kraft was instrumental in setting up stadium tours.

“The punchline is, Robert had connections,” said Wasynczuk, who spent two decades working for The Kraft Group. “His pattern often was engaging people to develop a shared vision. . . . He has a way of giving people a sense of ownership.”

It took a broad coalition of Boston’s heavy hitters to land the event: event planner Dusty Rhodes, attorney Bob Caporale, public relations guru George Regan, and a Portuguese concrete executive, Tony Frias, who was a friend of then-lieutenant governor Paul Cellucci.

Kraft stayed behind the scenes, sometimes refusing to cover even tiny costs; one organizer recalled he declined to spend $10,000 to reconfigure the stadium to meet FIFA specifications. And as the deadline approached and Boston’s effort faced a funding shortfall, it was Caporale who helped rally several of the city’s largest hotels to put up money for FIFA’s $250,000 bid fee.

“It was very grass roots when we did it,” Rhodes said. “It was sort of David and Goliath.”

Boston was the last city to submit a bid but was ultimately awarded six games.

1994 was “spectacular,” recalled Francois-Laurent Nivaud, managing director of Boston Harbor Hotel at the time.

“The hotels were full. The restaurants were packed. The bars were jammed. What more could you want?” he said. “An event like the World Cup, it does not only bring your city to the world, it brings a unification of the community that you’ve never seen before.”

The 1994 games made an impression on Kraft and changed American soccer: It helped build enthusiasm for the debut of Major League Soccer in 1996, with Kraft owning one of its founding teams, the New England Revolution.

Before long, he was trying to bring the games back.

“I can still remember Foxboro Stadium packed with fans from across the United States and around the world — people singing, wearing their national colors, waving flags — and it felt unlike anything I had ever experienced before,“ Kraft said in a statement to the Globe. ”That atmosphere made a lasting impression on me.”

After FIFA chose Qatar over the US for the 2022 games, US soccer officials and North American cities including Boston regrouped to make a concerted effort for the next games, this time including representatives from Canada and Mexico, as well as other US cities.

It was 2017, and Donald Trump, a longtime friend of Kraft’s, had just shocked the world by getting elected president. The two were close: After Kraft lost his wife, Myra, in 2011, Trump called him once a week, and Kraft had donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.

Kraft was the honorary chairman for the 2026 bid. One key reason for the pick, said Sunil Gulati, a former head of the United States Soccer Federation and former president of Kraft Soccer: Kraft “was highly respected within the administration.”

Kraft brought the World Cup idea to Trump, introducing him to FIFA president Gianni Infantino over dinner at the White House. Soon, the bid team was meeting with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, who became the administration’s point person on the effort.

“The major impact [Kraft] had was on connecting us to the White House,” Gulati said. “It was critical that the administration was supportive. . . . We didn’t take that for granted.”

Again, Kraft’s power came from bringing people together, said those who worked with him at the time. When Kraft called then-Boston-mayor Martin Walsh to ask for his support in the bid, Walsh didn’t take much convincing.

“Absolutely, 100 percent,” Walsh recently recalled thinking. “It’s huge for the city, it’s huge for the region. It’s just good business.”

Those connections helped North America secure the bid, said Phil Buttafuoco, who worked for the Krafts for nearly 20 years as executive director of special events and was a leading part of Gillette’s pitch in the United Bid.

“There’s a lot of behind-the-scenes conversations. There’s a lot of engaging at events,” he said. “But it’s really just communication, it’s conversations, that’s really what Robert is great at.”

When FIFA selected the bid from the US, Canada, and Mexico, the vote wasn’t close: 134–65. And later that summer, when Trump hosted Infantino in the Oval Office to celebrate, he credited Kraft by name.

“I have to also thank Bob Kraft, who I know that you were working very hard with,” Trump said. “Bob originally called me and he said, ‘What do you think of the idea of trying to get the World Cup to the United States?’ And I said, ‘I think we really like it.’ ”

After North America was selected, the dozens of cities that were involved in the bid now found themselves competing against one another to host games.

Boston and Gillette had some advantages — the biggest possibly Kraft himself. And again, he worked the room, so to speak. In 2021, as FIFA officials weighed sites, Kraft was photographed at a Patriots-New York Jets game in New Jersey with Infantino. When officials arrived to tour Gillette, Kraft himself acted as tour guide. In December 2025, when Trump stood up to dance in celebration of the World Cup schedule draw, Kraft and Infantino each sat just a few seats away.

“Without Robert Kraft, the World Cup is not being played in Boston,” Gulati said. “Full stop.”

Now, though, Boston’s hard-won World Cup has started to feel like a big hassle, with some of the basic planning not settled until right before the start of the games; until last week, for example, the state and city were battling over the closure of Summer Street.

“You’ve got your first match on Saturday,” said Rob Prazmark, a longtime sports sponsorship executive. “This stuff should’ve been worked out a year ago.”

While he was critical to bringing the games to the US, Kraft has remained more behind-the-scenes on the day-to-day preparations locally, stepping into the fray only at key moments.

Some point to his long-fraught relationship with city officials in Boston, where his plans for stadiums, first for the Patriots and then the Revolution, came to nothing. That Kraft’s son Josh challenged, and lost to, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu in her reelection campaign last year complicated matters.

Kraft does have plenty of allies. The Boston 26 host committee is stacked with current and former employees, including Revolution president Brian Bilello and longtime Kraft Group executive Mike Loynd.

But as the stadium’s owner, Matheson believes, Kraft could have done more to make the games more palatable to fans, by negotiating with FIFA and local leaders to lower transportation costs, charge less for parking, and clarify tailgating policies at the outset. Boston’s primary fan fest is the smallest of any US city, and its public transit costs to get to the stadium are among the highest.

“We could have had a much better deal,” Matheson said. “And other cities did get a better deal.”

To some, it now feels as if the World Cup is being foisted upon Boston, without the same buy-in from political leaders and the public that was seen in 1994. Chris Dempsey, who led the “No Boston Olympics” effort to stop the city’s 2024 Olympics bid, said he wonders why Kraft hasn’t done more to rally local support for the tournament.

“To the extent that this was seen as a point of civic pride and an opportunity to show off the region, he could take more ownership of that,” Dempsey said. “But it appears that he may not want to.”

One incident dragged on for weeks, when the Foxborough Select Board threatened to reject a key license for the event unless the host committee fronted $7.8 million to cover security costs. Finally, one Tuesday afternoon, the phone of Foxborough Select Board Chair Bill Yukna rang. It was Kraft.

“He said what he had to, I said what I had to,” Yukna recalled in an interview. Afterward, the Kraft Group agreed to help cover the security costs.

Earlier this month, Kraft took a victory lap at a ribbon-cutting at the newly renovated Foxboro MBTA Station, where fans traveling to World Cup matches and other events at the stadium will now enjoy $33 million worth of improvements. The Krafts chipped in $5 million.

“This station will serve as a critical gateway for tens of thousands of fans,” Kraft said at the event.

It’s the most prominent long-term improvement that will benefit the Krafts after the World Cup; many other changes to the stadium are temporary. Nor is the tournament expected to be a boon for any of the stadium owners. The games present vast logistical challenges, and under the strict lease terms, FIFA keeps most of the revenue, while boxing out concerts and other lucrative events for much of the summer.

For Kraft, the World Cup push is less a short-term payday than a long-term play to boost Major League Soccer, where he holds a major stake. And with a new stadium for the Revs in Everett in the works at last, both the Kraft Group and its local soccer team are poised to soak up the afterglow of the international World Cup spotlight.

“This is not about the Krafts making a ton of money. The Krafts have a lot of ways to make money,” said David D’Alessandro, former chairman and chief executive of John Hancock Financial Services and a former partner in the Red Sox. Instead, he said, “think of it as an investment in the future of professional soccer.”

Indeed from the start, even before he owned the Patriots, people who know Kraft say he has a clear vision for soccer.

“He recognized that it was only a matter of time before soccer would start to take hold,” D’Alessandro said. “He will end up with a second empire.”

Globe correspondent Emily Spatz contributed to this report.

Emma Platoff can be reached at emma.platoff@globe.com. Follow her @emmaplatoff. Janelle Nanos can be reached at janelle.nanos@globe.com. Follow her @janellenanos.