On the evening of Tuesday, March 3, in a wood-paneled meeting room at Foxborough Town Hall, the chief of police sat down at the speakers’ table, adjusted the microphone, and publicly pleaded with a pair of corporate lawyers to give his officers what they needed.
Public begging is not exactly part of Michael Grace’s job description. He has run the Foxborough Police Department since 2019, and in that time, he has overseen everything from Patriots home games to sold-out Taylor Swift concerts at Gillette Stadium, a mere 2 miles from his headquarters. Crowds, logistics, VIPs, bomb sweeps—he knows the drill.
But the World Cup was something else entirely. Seven matches. Just over 100 days away. A venue FIFA would rename “Boston Stadium” just for the occasion. Heads of state. Prime ministers. Royals. The best-known athletes on the planet. A Department of Homeland Security designation—SEAR 1—reserved for events of “national and/or international importance” requiring “extensive federal interagency support.” And, in a region forever scarred by the marathon bombings, the standing possibility that someone would try to do something terrible on live television to a worldwide audience.
Grace had been in the planning meetings for nearly two years. Fourteen working groups. Thousands of hours. Federal agents from every three-letter agency one could name. The plan existed. What didn’t exist, with just over 100 days left on the clock, was the money to pull it off.
So on that Tuesday night, in front of television cameras broadcasting live, Grace did something a police chief almost never does in public. He pleaded.
Seated next to him at the speakers’ table were two attorneys from Goulston & Storrs, the Boston law firm representing Boston Soccer 2026, the host committee that was meant to deliver the tournament to New England. Beside them sat Mike Loynd, the committee’s president and a veteran sporting event executive who had spent the past several years inside Robert Kraft’s sports and entertainment empire—Kraft being not just the owner of Gillette Stadium and the Patriots but also a good deal of the state’s soft political capital. Across from them, the five members of the Foxborough Select Board. No one was smiling.
The town had figured out that the best answer to “trust us, you’ll get the money” is usually “show me.”
The board’s chair, Bill Yukna—a soft-spoken retiree who had spent 18 years as the CFO of a children’s clothing store in downtown Foxborough, then a stint in private equity, and then a decade running the business office of the Foxborough Public Schools—had been clear for weeks, though the attorneys in front of him appeared to be the last people in the room to accept it. The town had not seen the $7.8 million it had been told it would receive to cover World Cup security costs, and until it did, Foxborough would not be issuing the entertainment license that FIFA needed to stage the tournament at Gillette. No money, no games.
When the attorneys proposed that the funds could materialize by June 1—roughly 12 days before the first match, between Scotland and Haiti—Grace had heard enough.
He walked to the microphone in uniform. “We do not wait until the week before and then force the board or public safety to cancel an event,” Grace said. “We are 99 or 100 days away from hosting the largest sporting event in the world and we can’t seem to find necessary funding for necessary equipment that’s been identified over a year and a half of planning and thousands of hours and 14 working groups. Waiting until June 1 is unacceptable.” He added: “Please don’t do that to me.”
What the chief was asking for was not, by the standards of a tournament expected to generate $13 billion in revenue globally, a lot of money. At the same time, a town of roughly 19,000 people with an annual budget of $100 million does not have a spare $7.8 million sitting in a drawer, and what Foxborough needed it for was, in the chief’s telling, not extravagant: increased staffing costs and the tactical equipment—anti-drone technology, gunshot detectors, armored vehicles, sophisticated communications equipment—that a SEAR 1 event requires and that his officers needed time to train with.
The state had offered to loan some of the equipment from the Massachusetts State Police. Grace had declined. His people needed to own and operate their own gear, and they needed to be trained on it before June, not during. “The solution is very simple,” Grace said. “Fund what we need funded, and this issue is over tomorrow.”
Until the money arrived, there would be no license. Until there was a license, there would be no World Cup at Gillette.
Until the money arrived, there would be no license. Until there was a license, there would be no World Cup at Gillette.
If it sounds impossible that a town of 19,000 could credibly threaten to derail the world’s largest sporting event over a municipal invoice—it is worth remembering what happened the last time Massachusetts tried this.
In 2015, Boston was, improbably, the United States Olympic Committee’s choice to bid for the 2024 Summer Games, selected over Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. What followed was one of the most efficient civic demolitions in recent American history. A loose coalition of transit wonks, cost skeptics, and neighborhood organizers—operating mostly on social media and a shoestring—pressed the case that the bid was a sweetheart deal for developers, a transportation disaster in waiting, and a multibillion-dollar taxpayer exposure hiding behind pageantry. Within seven months, the United States Olympic Committee pulled the bid and handed the Games to Los Angeles.
It was, depending on one’s view, a textbook exercise in small-d democratic accountability or a quintessentially Boston act of civic self-sabotage—a golden opportunity talked to death in public meetings.
A decade later, in a town 30 miles south of Boston that most of the world had never heard of, something similar was about to happen—this time against the largest sporting event on earth.
Except this time, the “David” was not a pack of Internet crusaders with spreadsheets and a Twitter account. It was a town of 19,000 people. A five-member Select Board paid $90 a month. A retired CFO who had spent much of his career balancing books. And a police chief who refused to gamble with his officers’ lives.
The trouble, as it often does, began in a moment of triumph. At Rockefeller Center in June 2022, FIFA president Gianni Infantino announced the list of East Coast cities that would host the 2026 men’s tournament. Wearing a dark suit and a white shirt with no tie, the streets of New York on display through the studio window behind him, he called Toronto first. Then he said, “The second one…Boston.”
Sports reporter Ana Jurka chimed in: “Bennifer might make an appearance.”
“Maybe, let’s see,” Infantino answered. “Great city, Boston. Fantastic.”
In Boston, the announcement landed as vindication—nearly a decade after the Olympics had collapsed, the city was back on the global marquee. “This part of the world doesn’t realize what will happen here in 2026,” Infantino later told reporters. “These three countries will be upside down and flipped back again. The world will be invading Canada, Mexico, and the United States, and they will be invaded by a big wave of joy and happiness, because that’s what football is about.”
For the next three years, the planning plowed forward. The money did not.
In the fall of 2023, hundreds of people—federal, state, and local law enforcement, military brass, and town officials—gathered at Gillette for a “tabletop” exercise for the Army-Navy football game that December. Chief Grace was there. So was Foxborough Fire Chief Michael Kelleher. So were the FBI, the DEA, and several other agencies, according to a former state official who was in the room. “It was absolutely fascinating,” the former official recalled. “It was a preview of what was to come.”
By the fall of 2025, the planning had acquired a specifically Boston-flavored complication: The president of the United States was angry at the mayor. In October, Donald Trump, upset over Michelle Wu’s public defiance of his immigration policies, floated the idea of moving the games somewhere else. “I think she is hurting Boston,” Trump said during a meeting with the president of Argentina. “If somebody is doing a bad job, and if I feel there’s unsafe conditions, I would call Gianni, the head of FIFA, who’s phenomenal, and I would say, let’s move it to another location.”
The threat was hollow—FIFA would not move tournament venues eight months out on a presidential grievance—but it did something useful: It reminded everyone involved that a tournament of this size sits on top of an unstable stack of politics, money, and civic goodwill, any one of which can buckle. Inside Foxborough Town Hall, where the Select Board had been watching the money that was supposed to pay for its security costs fail to arrive, that stack was already buckling.
On February 17, in the same meeting room at Foxborough Town Hall, Loynd sat across from the Select Board and attempted to explain where the money was. He could not, in the end, say where the money was. “I gotta be honest with you,” board member Mark Elfman told him. “It baffles my mind that you guys are sitting here in front of me right now and we still have no idea where this money’s coming from.” Vice chair Stephanie McGowan put it plainly: “I’ve seen people saying, ‘Oh, there’s no way, they won’t [issue the license].’ I’m going to tell you, this board will not issue this license.”
A few weeks earlier after a similar meeting, Yukna had said the same. “We made it clear to Boston 2026,” he told a reporter from the Sun Chronicle. “The license won’t be granted. This is a national, international event. It’s not up to the town to pay for this.”
The threat traveled across the Atlantic. In England, whose national team was slated to play a group match in Foxborough, it landed in the Sun. “YOU’RE GROUNDED,” the tabloid screamed. “England World Cup chaos as officials threaten to CANCEL matches.”
In Boston, the reaction was quieter but no less sharp: just over 100 days to kickoff, and no one in the multibillion-dollar apparatus could say who was going to pay for security.
A few weeks later, Governor Maura Healey—during her reelection campaign—was interviewed by the Sun Chronicle at the Attleboro Public Library, while attending an event for the city’s Democratic committee. A reporter caught her on the way in and asked her about the World Cup standoff.
She blamed Washington. “Funding is important,” Healey said. “We’re still awaiting some federal funding that has been allocated for security and transportation. We’re told that’s going to come, that needs to come, and of course, there’s private fundraising as well.”
It was, as far as an answer goes, not exactly an answer.
Through late February and into March, the phones did not stop. Town manager Paige Duncan, Yukna, the Kraft group, Boston Soccer 2026, Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll, U.S. Representative Jake Auchincloss, and state Senator Paul Feeney—now playing translator between the town, the Healey administration, and the host committee—were on the line at all hours. The headlines kept coming. The town did not budge.
If any of this looked like posturing, history said otherwise. In 1981, after a series of notoriously raucous Monday Night Football games at Gillette—including one in 1976 that ended in at least 60 arrests and two fans dead of heart attacks—the town banned night games at the stadium. The ban held for 14 seasons and came down in 1995, a year after Robert Kraft bought the Patriots. The town was, in other words, fully capable of canceling the World Cup.
Feeney, who is also a former chair of the Select Board, was on the phone nonstop throughout early March, at one point taking part in 58 phone calls over 14 hours trying to get a deal done. “It was pretty intense,” Feeney says. “We’d make a little progress, and you’d have to go back and get a further explanation. It was constant phone calls trying to get it done.”
The negotiation was strange because the usual hierarchy was inverted. Foxborough’s relationship with the Krafts was, by 2026, decades old and largely functional—a working accommodation between a small town and the billionaire next door. But this wasn’t a Kraft event. The licensee was FIFA, operating with Boston Soccer 2026, and FIFA is an organization accustomed to issuing instructions, not making cases. It found itself, this spring, having to make a case to a five-member board in a small town in Massachusetts.
The sticking point was timing. The town needed $1.5 million in hand to cover the first wave of overtime and equipment costs. FIFA was not contributing to security. Boston Soccer 2026’s resources were limited. Federal reimbursement was weeks, possibly months, away. Foxborough was not prepared to front the gap.
What broke the logjam was a phone call. On March 10, Kraft picked up the phone and called Yukna, and Yukna relayed why the timing of the payments mattered. “I explained to him why we needed it the way we needed it, and he understood,” Yukna later recounted to the Boston Globe. “He said he would direct his people to make the adjustments.”
Kraft’s commitment ended the standoff—amicably, and without the town having to capitulate to FIFA. “The Kraft organization has a long-standing track record in the town of Foxborough. They’ve shown a commitment to the town. Ultimately, it was on them to get this to a resolution, and they did that. They rose to the occasion,” Feeney says.
Within 24 hours, the outline of a deal was in place. On March 12, the Select Board held a 60-second open session and unanimously approved the security-funding portion of the entertainment license. On March 17, in a packed Town Hall hearing room, it unanimously approved the license itself. The Kraft Group, through Boston Soccer 2026, would front the town’s $7.8 million. Soon after the March 1o call between Kraft and Yukna, the first $1.5 million had already landed in the town’s account. “[We] have reached an understanding,” a joint statement from the town, the Kraft Sports + Entertainment group, and Boston Soccer 2026 read. “The Town of Foxborough will not incur any cost or financial burden related to the FIFA World Cup…. We look forward to moving forward together positively.”
For the town, it felt like a small civic vindication. “I think our town handled it very well,” said Amie Owens, a 24-year resident, standing outside the Cumberland Farms by the town common. “We shouldn’t have come to an agreement with FIFA to come in without the funding in place.”
Boston Soccer 2026 maintained it had always intended to cover Foxborough’s costs through federal funding—Massachusetts had applied for a portion of the $625 million Congress had set aside for the 11 host cities, later winning $46 million—and that the delay was driven by the government shutdown, which had frozen the Department of Homeland Security’s disbursement. “The distribution of those funds is a complicated process,” Loynd said in a statement. “Prior to the federal funds being released, host cities like Boston were unable to advance those funds to local partners, including Foxborough. In the interim, we are grateful to the Kraft Sports + Entertainment group for backstopping the necessary financial support.”
Which is to say: The $7.8 million could have been available all along. The question was only how long it would’ve taken to reach Foxborough.
Foxborough, meanwhile, seems to have learned a trick or two. In the weeks after the World Cup license cleared, the Select Board began holding up other Gillette Stadium event licenses on the same grounds: ambiguity about who was paying for security. The town had figured out, over the course of six weeks and several million dollars, that the best answer to “trust us, you’ll get the money” is usually “show me.”
The town’s namesake was Charles James Fox, the 18th-century British statesman who spent a good portion of his career arguing, unpopularly, that the American colonies had a case. The name traveled with the town for two and a half centuries before anyone much noticed. This spring, a five-member board named after him made a multibillion-dollar sporting apparatus listen to a small town on its own terms and got a $1.5 million check by return mail.
The first match, between Scotland and Haiti, kicks off at “Boston Stadium” on June 13. Bidding for the 2036 Summer Olympics is now open.
First published in the print edition of the June 2026 issue, with the headline,“Foxborough vs. Goliath”
