Museums kick off World Cup exhibits as soccer fever grows

The Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas is keeping Soccer: More Than a Game open through Sept. 7 as North Texas braces for nine World Cup matches in Arlington, including a semifinal on July 14. The show is built to catch fans coming for soccer and send them home with something broader: a look at how physics, biology and technology shape the sport.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup runs from June 11 to July 19 and has expanded to 48 teams and 104 matches across 16 host cities in Canada, Mexico and the United States. In that setting, museums are using the tournament as more than a promotional hook. At the Perot, admission to the soccer exhibition costs $12 for adults and $10 for youth on top of general admission, and the museum also hosted a July 9 Thursdays on Tap: Soccer Edition with food, live music and soccer-related activities.

In Arlington, the Museum of Art opened Soccer: The Passion for the World Cup on May 2 and will keep it on view through Aug. 31. Developed for the Qatar 2022 World Cup and expanded for North America, the exhibition retraces the game from its ancient origins to modern international football, using objects from Italian institutions and a historical survey that places the World Cup inside a longer story of global exchange and national identity.

New York has its own World Cup draw at Rockefeller Center, where the FIFA Museum presented by Hyundai is showing Legacies of Champions free through July 19. The exhibition features original objects from every World Cup since 1930, jerseys from all 48 teams and the historic Jules Rimet Trophy, turning one of the city’s busiest public spaces into a temporary archive of the tournament’s history.

In Miami, the FIFA Museum’s Unidad - The World’s Game at the Freedom Tower covers about 7,500 square feet and chronicles the history of soccer in the United States. Thousands of fans visited there in late June to see the FIFA World Cup Original Trophy, a sign that the sport’s biggest event is spilling well beyond stadium gates and into the civic spaces that interpret culture for the public.