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XP Dispatch: June 2026

Welcome to XP Dispatch — our monthly look ahead at the events, gatherings and cultural moments shaping the experiential industry. Each issue, we go deeper on three. We talk to the people building them, participating in them and watching them closely. Consider it your field briefing for the month ahead. The FIFA World Cup is back in North America for the first time since 1994: three countries, 16 cities, 48 teams, 104 matches and, somewhere in all of that, the sport itself. With brands, media companies and hospitality groups all scrambling to build their own version of a World Cup experience before the first whistle even blows, another event is taking shape around the actual tournament. We're zeroing in on three host cities — New York/New Jersey, Los Angeles and Kansas City — three places throwing the same party and arriving at very different answers to a question the whole industry keeps circling back to: when an experience gets this big, who is it actually built for? NEW YORK / NEW JERSEY June 13 – July 19, 2026 | MetLife Stadium, East Rutherford, NJ New York/New Jersey made the stadium so hard to reach that the most interesting experience moved...