Review: Vancouver's free FIFA Fan Festival kicks off with a full-on Mexican fiesta

Vancouver's Mariachi Los Dorados took to the Fan Festival stage on Thursday. Photo by Stuart Derdeyn /PNG

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The first day of the 2026 FIFA Fan Festival will go down as a full-on fiesta. A sunlit, super fun one.

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After Mexico’s win over the South African side in the opening game of this year’s World Cup, the crowd at the Freedom Mobile Arch started to celebrate. When Vancouver’s crack act Mariachi Los Dorados took to the stage, it played a set of singalong favourites so familiar to the crowd that they must be imprinted on their DNA.

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There couldn’t have been a better choice of band to play the first set on the stage on opening day and the sound in Vancouver’s newest performance space is sweet.

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Grandparents cha-cha-cha’d in the stands with their grandkids. Faithful team followers like Fernando Brito, visiting from Cancún, struck poses in bright Lucha Libre masks. Everyone even did the Macarena. While the hit single baring the signature dance’s name was by a duo from Spain, the dance craze that followed had a decidedly Latin American following.

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Team Mexico fan Fernando Brito, of Cancún, strikes a victory pose. Photo by Stuart Derdeyn /Stuart Derdeyn

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The folks in the venue made the moves look easy.

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Easy describes everything about the set up at Hastings Park for Fan Fest. Entrances are clearly marked and lineups to get into the amphitheatre were moving quickly. While Day 1 wasn’t going to be the busiest of the next 28 days, it bodes well that traffic flows as smoothly through the site as it does at the PNE.

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The similarities don’t end there either.

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The food concourse from the fair features such favourite trucks as Jamaica Mi Crazy and Taco Nori serving up snacks and meals, and you can find a Doritos fully loaded booth about every 100 paces. Served right in the bag with a range of different toppings, these munchies will bring back memories for anyone who has ever noshed on Frito Pie at an NFL game in the U.S.

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Sprinkled throughout are various interactive activity booths ranging from Home Depot’s Beckham’s Backyard skills test to the seemingly unbeatable Robokeeper robot goalie, which boasts a reaction time as fast as a Formula One driver. It shut out five folks in a row as I watched all manner of attempted fake outs fail.

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Further up the site near the whimsical weirdness of the opera walk sculpture garden is one of the hidden gems of the whole event, the Neighbourhood. With a nice big broadcast viewing screen located near multiple washrooms and a literal tour-the-world food court nearby offering tricked out treats ranging from stuffed pretzels and French crepes to Southern BBQ and Vij’s curry, this seemed like the perfect all-around adulting area.

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The Home Depot’s Beckham’s Backyard booth skills game. Photo by Stuart Derdeyn /Stuart Derdeyn

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Although the grass hill by the screen appeared to be extremely popular for rolling down repeatedly for those younger attendees who didn’t care a toss about soccer. There is also a special family hub area across from the Forum for those times when a time out might be required.

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While the new Freedom Mobile Arch is by far the biggest space to take in a match and concert, the Park Stage probably has the best screen array for watching a match. The multiple screens are arranged in such a way that you can get a good view from a number of different vantage points even when the area is quite full. A bonus is the water mist zone for cooling down, which will be quite important as June-uary appears ready to move into actual June now.