London does not need much of an excuse to turn a pub into a football stadium. Give the city a World Cup and a decent run for one of the teams its residents actually care about, and something shifts. The past few weeks have seen pubs, warehouses, breweries and outdoor spaces across London transformed into places that feel genuinely different to a normal night out. The deeper the tournament goes, the harder it gets to find a spot.
London has over 500 pubs showing the tournament this summer. That number alone tells you something about the scale of it, but it does not tell you about the quality difference between venues at this point in the competition. The casual group stage walk-in is over. Quarterfinals onwards, every match should be treated like an England game for booking purposes, which means if you have not already sorted something, you need to move now. For anyone also keeping an eye on the sports betting side of things, BoyleSports has markets open on all the remaining fixtures in the World Cup, and the two experiences have increasingly converged into one, watching the game on a big screen while tracking the odds in real time on a phone has become part of the matchday rhythm for a significant chunk of the crowd at most venues.
The Venues Actually Worth Going To
The Boxpark sites across Wembley, Camden, Croydon and Shoreditch have become the default answer for people who want scale and atmosphere without much fuss. Between them they are showing every game, they have street food traders throughout, and for England fixtures the atmosphere is exactly what you would expect when you put several hundred football fans in front of a giant screen with unlimited beer. Wembley is the biggest and the most chaotic. Shoreditch tends to attract a younger, louder crowd. Camden is the one to pick if you want to be able to actually have a conversation at half time.
Big Penny Social in Walthamstow deserves a mention specifically because of the numbers. 1,400 capacity. 100 beer taps. Three big screens. If you are in east London and you have not found a spot yet, this is the one to check. The 40ft Brewery in Dalston has gone in a different direction, putting an LED screen outside and a 20ft projector screen indoors, which sounds excessive until you see it in action.
For something with a bit more production value, the Kick Off Club has set up three fanzones across the city with genuinely different identities. The Outernet in central London is showing games on what they are billing as the largest indoor screen in the capital with surround sound. Electric Brixton is doing a 90s Britpop soundtrack between matches, which is either inspired or deeply annoying depending on your tolerance for Definitely Maybe being played at volume in a football context. Fanzone4D has four venues running across Brixton, Camden, the City and Stratford, and they have gone fully American with cheerleaders, pyrotechnics and t-shirt cannons. It is absurd. Apparently the queues are enormous.
Where the Fans Are Going
This is the bit that makes London unlike anywhere else in the world for a tournament like this. The city has a large enough Norwegian community, and a large enough community of people who just enjoy being in a room with passionate fans of a different nation, that the Nordic Bar in Fitzrovia has become the headquarters for World Cup matches thus far. It is underground on Newman Street, has been running Norwegian community events for years, and by all accounts during Norway’s group stage games it was doing the Viking row in a room that seats about 80 people. Go for the experience rather than the football if you are not a Norway fan. It will be memorable.
Flat Iron Square at London Bridge has become the go-to for Moroccan fans, with a fanzone also running at Egg London in King’s Cross organised by north African events group Les Frontières. Rae’s in Flat Iron Square has been hosting Argentine watch parties run by collective La Malafamera, which apparently continues with cumbia and reggaeton regardless of the result.
None of this was really possible ten years ago in the same way. The infrastructure for watching a major tournament in London has transformed in a remarkably short period of time, partly driven by the food and drink venues that opened in the 2010s and partly by the simple fact that England qualifying for things more regularly than they used to has made investing in big screens a less depressing commercial proposition. Each time a match comes around, the city does something it has been practising for a month: turn itself into the largest football pub in Europe for a couple of hours.
