As a data analysis partner on The Fandom Effect: Sports Urbanism 2026, ROAR analyzed fan posts tied to every host stadium to show where crowds became communities, where fans met friction, and where the post-match celebration went.
World Cup fans used collective, first-person plural language (“we,” “our” and “us”) 70% more often when posting from the public realm around stadiums than from inside the bowl, according to the social listening study at the center of The Fandom Effect: Sports Urbanism 2026. The Gensler Research Institute published the study on October 7, 2026, with ROAR, A Seregh Company, as a data analysis partner and Oxford Economics as its partner on the pre-tournament survey.
A three-part study, led by the Gensler Research Institute
The Gensler Research Institute designed the program as “a mixed-methods study before, during, and after the World Cup.” Before the tournament, it partnered with Oxford Economics on a 5,858-person survey in 17 North American markets. During the tournament, it conducted a social listening study with ROAR. After the tournament, it surveyed 2,752 people across all 16 host cities.
How ROAR listened to the fans
ROAR worked with Ripple Analytics to listen to what fans said about the venue and district experience before, during and after matches in the 16 host cities across the U.S., Mexico and Canada. ROAR analyzed publicly available posts across five platforms: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube. It used computer vision and image-based analysis to find posts relevant to the in-venue or district experience, then read the text of those posts along with machine-generated descriptions of their images.
The in-tournament analysis covered 150,000+ posts, of which 14,500+ were matched to a specific, named host stadium. Across the study, the paper reports that Gensler and ROAR analyzed “hundreds of thousands of user-generated posts pertaining to the fan experience.” Fans in that conversation spoke 56 distinct languages.
Where crowds become communities
The collective-language effect “was true across every venue and at every stage of the tournament and held up after controlling for post length and topic.” When a post included words associated with awe and wonder, such as “goosebumps,” “unreal” and “electric,” fans used collective language 189% more often, regardless of where they posted from. The report concludes: “Inspiring public spaces turn a crowd into a community.”
Friction starts at the gate
ROAR’s language analysis identified the arrival, entry and ticketing experience as “the clear epicenter of frustration and anger” and “the one element of the fan journey where a sense of awe is almost entirely absent in fans’ language.” Nineteen percent of posts about arrival, entry and ticketing were negative or critical, compared with 5% for the bowl, seating, sightlines and on-field play. Negative sentiment about access grew across the tournament, “nearly doubling from 10% negative in the group stage to 19% negative at the tournament’s end.” Inside the bowl, by contrast, positive sentiment outweighed negative “by over 12 to 1.”
Design, not weather, drives the afterglow
ROAR’s analysis also examined “afterglow,” the extended party that follows a match. “ROAR’s data analysis found that weather, walkability, match popularity, and score were not factors.” Instead, “Having an open, activatable gathering space, like a plaza or parkland, immediately outside the bowl is the lever that converts a match into a district-wide celebration.” Venues wrapped in a mixed-use, activatable district showed “an approximately 50% relative lift” in post-match celebration.
Where stadiums lacked those spaces, ROAR found that the celebrations “erupted in downtown landmarks miles away,” such as Times Square in New York and the Power & Light District in Kansas City. Those destinations “outperformed the designated fan zones established by FIFA in generating afterglow.”
The two surveys add context. In the Oxford Economics baseline, 87% of recent visitors rated the venue experience positively, compared with 69% for the surrounding district. After the tournament, 89% of respondents said the World Cup was good for their city’s image.
“Using ROAR’s cutting edge, proprietary AI technology to examine massive amounts of organic fan conversation across multiple platforms before, during, and after games enabled Gensler and ROAR to generate tangible insights into fans’ in-venue and district experiences,” said Adam Grossman, President at ROAR, A Seregh Company. “Taking proactive steps in the design process and during the game-day experience to directly mitigate traffic and ingress issues would enable the substantial positive attributes of attending sporting events to resonate more clearly with fans.”
Read the full report, The Fandom Effect: Sports Urbanism 2026, from the Gensler Research Institute: https://www.gensler.com/gri/sports-urbanism-2026
About ROAR, A Seregh Company
ROAR has built purpose-built, AI-native solutions at the intersection of sports, real estate, and revenue. ROAR Intelligence enables sports properties, rights holders, agencies, and corporate partners to generate incremental growth across assets in multiple revenue streams. It is also the engine to more effectively conceptualize, develop, finance, and monetize sports- and entertainment-anchored real estate districts using data-driven analysis. ROAR is a subsidiary of Seregh, the only institutional platform dedicated to mixed-use real estate development in global sports and entertainment.