How Suffolk Students Are Winning at the FIFA World Cup 2026

Since the FIFA World Cup 2026 began on June 11, well over a million soccer fans have descended on Boston.

And on peak days, it felt like most of them could be found within a midfield kick of the Suffolk campus.

Fans rallied for their home teams on Boston Common. They poured into the FIFA Fan Festival Boston on City Hall Plaza to watch matches on the giant screen. Scottish fans happily shoe-horned themselves, their kilts and bagpipes into The Dubliner pub and every other neighborhood bar with a TV screen.

Amid all that joyful pandemonium, more than two dozen Suffolk students have been serving on the front lines, staffing the FIFA World Cup 2026 merchandise trailer at the FIFA Fan Festival Boston and a cavernous FIFA Store in Quincy Market.

“The World Cup coming to Boston has been huge,” marvels one of those students, Nolan Drew, a finance major from Pelham, New Hampshire, and member of Suffolk’s DIII baseball team. “People are coming together, celebrating and enjoying life, all because of a soccer tournament.” Witnessing it, he says, is “a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

In April, Drew and the other students—a mix of sports management, marketing, business, and finance majors, many of them student-athletes—were hired as retail operations associates by Fanatics, the official on-site retail licensee for the 2026 World Cup. Suffolk alumnus Michael Krezwick, BSBA ’10—who during his own student days worked as a game-day sales assistant at TD Garden—is now Fanatics senior director of retail event planning and operations.

Since early June, the students put in 40- to 50-hour work weeks, setting up and stocking the store floor-to-ceiling with dozens of different team jerseys, as well as officially licensed FIFA World Cup 2026 T-shirts and hoodies, hats, soccer balls, lapel and hat pins, and racks of Boston memorabilia. When the doors opened on June 12, they were flooded with fans at both locations. To the surprise of no one, Scottish team jerseys sold out in less than three hours.

“It’s incredible to see how busy and successful our store has been,” says Fan Festival Supervisor Colin Sheehan, BSBA ’25. A lifelong soccer player from Cape Cod, Sheehan is also one of the first graduates of Suffolk’s Sports Management Program. “The Suffolk students put so much effort into building the store, so there’s a feeling of great accomplishment to see it all come together. Their work ethic is something you can’t teach, but it seems like something they picked up from their time at Suffolk.”

Putting the world in the FIFA World Cup

For Clemence Carlino, the past few weeks have been “crazy”— in the best sense of the word.

“Being able to talk with fans from so many different countries has been an incredible experience,” she says. A native of Toulouse, France, Carlino grew up on the World Cup. Since arriving at Suffolk in 2024 to study sports management and international business, she’s also worked part time with the Boston Legacy, the women’s pro soccer team. Working at the FIFA Store, she’s “learned a lot about different cultures, while also practicing my language skills by constantly switching between English, French, and Spanish.”

As a member of the Suffolk men’s DIII soccer team and the semi-pro Boston City Football Club, finance major Tinashe Muhlauri is used to thinking on his feet. That skill served him well working at the FIFA Fan Festival Boston merchandise trailer, where both the action and sales were pretty much nonstop up until June 27, when the FIFA Fan Festival wrapped.

“Each match day brought us different people of all nations, which was very unique,” says Muhlauri, who’s originally from Zimbabwe but now lives in White River Junction, Vermont. He expected jerseys for FIFA World Cup powerhouses like Spain, Brazil, and France to be big sellers. What surprised and moved him, he says, was how strong demand was for merchandise for smaller teams like Cape Verde and Haiti, whose fans turned out in force.

And as a soccer player, he’s loved watching non-soccer fans discover the pleasures of the beautiful game. “It really unites everyone,” he says, “and seeing it in a perfect Boston summer has been amazing.”

For Imani Chanka, an international business and marketing major from Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, working the FIFA World Cup has been a series of on-the-ground lessons about the power of branding and what goes into staging an event of this magnitude across three different countries. It’s also taught her every single word of the Tartan Army’s hymn of praise for Scotland midfielder John McGinn.

“Getting out of the store at 9:30 at night, I’d hear the bagpipes coming around the corner and the Scottish fans chanting,” she says with a laugh. “Now it’s playing in my head on repeat.”

Location, location, location

It’s just these kinds of professional and personal experiences that Skip Perham—founding director of Suffolk’s Sports Management Program and a senior instructor in marketing at the Sawyer Business School—had in mind when he helped arrange the partnership with the Fanatics organization.

Being part of the FIFA World Cup “is another example of how Suffolk’s location creates opportunity,” he says. “For our sports management students, it’s been a chance to get the FIFA World Cup 2026 and Fanatics on their résumés. They’re gaining a ton of logistics expertise, while honing their soft skills and building their networks.”

In addition to her FIFA Store responsibilities, Chanka is also holding down a sports-diplomacy fellowship at WorldBoston, an NGO that fosters partnerships between Boston-area institutions and the global community. Both jobs have, she says, taught her how powerfully “sports connect people and bring them together.”

Sports also drive the Boston-area economy, and both Chanka and Drew point to the impact that increased foot traffic and international travelers are having on businesses from Boston to Providence. And not just big business: “Places like the Dubliner have inadvertently gotten this huge marketing push,” says Chanka. “People around the world have seen who they are and what they’re like.”

When a T-shirt is so much more than a T-shirt

It’s the passion of fans that will stay with Chanka for a long time—from the Iraqi fans who broke into an impromptu celebration as she was leaving work one night to the group of local Colombian fans who thronged an East Boston bar near her apartment for a group-stage match. Shaking her head, Chanka calls it “one of the most exciting things I’ve ever seen. I had no skin in the game whatsoever, and it was still so thrilling to see how much pride they had for Colombia and for their team.”

That, she says, is part of the FIFA World Cup’s power: In a world beset by conflict, where countries struggle with problems large and small, it gives people something to cheer for. Standing in a long line at the FIFA World Cup 2026 merchandise trailer just to buy your team’s official World Cup jersey is a way to be part of that, a way to hold onto that pride, those feelings of joy.

“As a global business major, I love to travel, I love to get to see the world,” Chanka says. “This summer I haven’t felt the need to go anywhere else at all. It’s all right here in my backyard.”