Bread and circuses. Whatever it takes to suppress the instinctual nationalistic ambitions of the people by redirecting their spirits and energy into /dev/null
The problem I have with it is not that my street was closed. It's that soccer always gets all the preferential treatment. Why not set that up for badminton or tennis? We have spectacular players but soccer seems to be the only important sport
In most sports, you have a world championship every year, meanwhile, a World Cup happens only every four years.
When you have screens and stuff setup by the city to follow a World Cup, the crowds are not made of die hard football fans, the majority of people there are normies that don't give a hoot about football during the 47 other months of a WC loop. Here we call them "footix". If the WC was happening every year, they would be bored and less and less of them would come out to the public events. Meanwhile, making it only every four years, they have time to forget that they didn't quite enjoyed it, they can believe things are very different from last time, and they agree to reserve part of their mental bandwidth to the event. They wouldn't do this on a yearly basis because they fundamentally don't care about football. They want to enjoy sharing a unique experience surrounded by friends, family and random peers. You can't do this every year because it removes the special character of it.
To illustrate this further: here we have the Tour de France (cycling), that happens every year, so no scarcity. Unless a stage passes near you. Which is something that happens even less often than a World Cup. In that case, people with no interest in cycling will go to the side of the road and go crazy.
Soccer is the only important sport so it gets all of the attention
Soccer gets all of the attention so it stays the only important sport
The 'main' roads end up getting backed up and then people naturally start drifting over to a bunch of side-roads to get to the destination. This then causes further traffic issues as the locations where side-roads intersect the main roads get backed up as people on the side roads try to merge into the main ones.
A solution ends up being closing some side roads to funnel the temporary traffic into the main thoroughfare while still allowing some local traffic through the non-closed side roads at the cost of some side roads being inaccessible.
I mean Texas can hold a candle there. Nearly 30 high school football stadiums with 10,000+ capacity (and 20,000 in a few cases), built for amounts sometimes exceeding $50M each. Some of the stadiums are shared with track and field etc., but others are "exclusively used by the high school football teams".
30 _high school_ stadiums at 10000+ I can’t even fathom!
That would be the equivalent of having the top 6 teams in England's Premier League -- which based on last season would be Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United, Aston Villa, Liverpool and Bournemouth*
College and High School are more like the equivalent of national teams in England, although in America is seems that the taxpayer pays for these, where in the UK they are private businesses.
* There was a coup attempt a few years ago by a bunch of european teams to leave league football behind and make more money, because in the uk "only those 6 teams win". Chelsea and Tottenham fancied themselves, Tottenham narrowly avoided relegation and finished 17th, and Chelsea were topped by such internationally famous teams as Brentford, Brighton and Bournemouth