I spent the summer wandering Fort York and The Bentway with my camera, chasing the energy of the FIFA World Cup 2026 Fan Festival in Toronto. This gallery collects my 20 favourite shots from those weeks, a visual love letter to a city that turned itself inside out to prove its "The World in a City" motto. Flags, food, strangers singing together. This is what it looked like.
I have covered many events for this blog over the years, but I cannot remember the last time a single stretch of city land held so many flags, languages and shared heartbeats at once. Between June and July, Fort York National Historic Site and The Bentway became the unofficial living room for anyone in Toronto who loves the beautiful game, and I made it my mission to be there with a camera as often as I could.
What follows is a curated set of my 20 favourite frames from FIFA Fan Festival™ Toronto, the city's official fan destination for the FIFA World Cup 2026™. Every one of these images was shot on the Fan Festival grounds, and every one of them is about the fans themselves: the singing, the flags draped over shoulders, the strangers who become instant friends over a shared celebration, the quiet moments of pure devotion to a national team a person may never get to see play in person.
All images by Meres J. Weche. All rights reserved.
The World in a City, up close
Toronto built its entire World Cup hosting identity around one phrase: "The World in a City." I heard it repeated by city officials, printed on banners and mentioned in nearly every piece of press material leading up to the tournament, and I will admit I went in slightly skeptical of a marketing line that neat. A few visits to the Fan Festival cured me of that skepticism in no time.
This city is home to more than three million people, and on any given match day at Fort York, it felt like a fair chunk of them had shown up representing somewhere else entirely. I photographed a grandmother wrapped in a Portuguese flag standing shoulder to shoulder with a group of teenagers in Ghana jerseys, both parties equally invested in a match that had nothing to do with either of their countries. I caught a father teaching his daughter a chant in Spanish while a stranger behind them picked it up in accented but enthusiastic French. Toronto did not need to manufacture diversity for this tournament. It just had to open its gates and let its neighbourhoods walk in.
A city that lived up to its own slogan
I walked away from this project with more respect for Toronto than I expected to gain from a sporting event. Slogans are easy to write and hard to earn, and "The World in a City" is the kind of line that could have rung hollow against a backdrop of half-empty bleachers and forced enthusiasm. That is not what I found. What I found, camera in hand, was a city that already contained the world within its neighbourhoods long before FIFA arrived, and simply needed a global stage to show it off properly.
If these 20 photographs capture even a fraction of what it felt like to stand in that crowd, singing along to chants in languages I do not speak, surrounded by flags from countries I have visited and plenty I have not, then I consider this gallery a success. Toronto hosted a World Cup Fan Festival this summer and, in doing so, held up a mirror to itself. The reflection was every bit as multicultural, chaotic and joyful as the city has always claimed to be.
