... Out of curiosity, why did they close the street? Was it to turn it into public walking space? (I'm trying to imagine a reason and coming up short...)
Sometimes places close streets for traffic control.
The 'main' roads end up getting backed up and then people naturally start drifting over to a bunch of side-roads to get to the destination. This then causes further traffic issues as the locations where side-roads intersect the main roads get backed up as people on the side roads try to merge into the main ones.
A solution ends up being closing some side roads to funnel the temporary traffic into the main thoroughfare while still allowing some local traffic through the non-closed side roads at the cost of some side roads being inaccessible.
It's a wide street and they installed a screen. I guess that's not something that you can set-up for every match so they decided to leave it up the whole time.
The problem I have with it is not that my street was closed. It's that soccer always gets all the preferential treatment. Why not set that up for badminton or tennis? We have spectacular players but soccer seems to be the only important sport
Having had this discussion many times, the conclusion we often come to is that part of the popular success of football is the scarcity and simplicity.
In most sports, you have a world championship every year, meanwhile, a World Cup happens only every four years.
When you have screens and stuff setup by the city to follow a World Cup, the crowds are not made of die hard football fans, the majority of people there are normies that don't give a hoot about football during the 47 other months of a WC loop. Here we call them "footix".
If the WC was happening every year, they would be bored and less and less of them would come out to the public events.
Meanwhile, making it only every four years, they have time to forget that they didn't quite enjoyed it, they can believe things are very different from last time, and they agree to reserve part of their mental bandwidth to the event.
They wouldn't do this on a yearly basis because they fundamentally don't care about football.
They want to enjoy sharing a unique experience surrounded by friends, family and random peers.
You can't do this every year because it removes the special character of it.
To illustrate this further: here we have the Tour de France (cycling), that happens every year, so no scarcity.
Unless a stage passes near you. Which is something that happens even less often than a World Cup.
In that case, people with no interest in cycling will go to the side of the road and go crazy.
> the crowds are not made of die hard football fans, the majority of people there are normies that don't give a hoot about football during the 47 other months of a WC loop
I think you heavily underestimate how much normie men care about football here. Most coffee chats with my co-workers devolve into football if they last long enough, and around three out of five of my coworkers under 30 play football with friends every now and then. I'm the only man at my extended family which doesn't care about football, and I need to look amongst my most geek friends to find some men that don't either.
Now, most won't be die hard football fans, but they are definitely into football.
Most popular sports have world cups every four years. Basketball, cricket, rugby, volleyball, field hockey WCs are all held every four years. Some others like handball are held every two years.
Cricket gets the same level of crazy support in South Asia as football does in most of the world. But the reason football gets such support in most of the world is simply because most people consider it the best sport, or the "beautiful game". It is one of the most well designed sports, having the fewest number of unnatural rules - only one in fact (offside). It can also be played with basically any number of players from 2-20 in fields of any size, so it's really popular for normal people. The skills floor is reasonably low, but the skill ceiling is very very high.
So, then it flows naturally into social actions like blocking streets.
And to play you need literally need just a ball. This makes the sport universally accessible (maybe second to dance and martial arts). As a kid we used to play in the middle of the street, with shoes or school bags to mark the goal. In thaat context, owning a soccer ball made you some kind of royalty. (that was Brazil in the 90s btw)
But I think that kids nowadays are less interested in sports generally. Or at least I don't see kids playing in the streets nearly as much.
> As a kid we used to play in the middle of the street, with shoes or school bags to mark the goal.
"Jumpers for goalposts" is the phrase you'd see here in the UK, to the extent that it's essentially the catchphrase for a 90s comedy character "Ron Manager" from the Fast Show.
The 'main' roads end up getting backed up and then people naturally start drifting over to a bunch of side-roads to get to the destination. This then causes further traffic issues as the locations where side-roads intersect the main roads get backed up as people on the side roads try to merge into the main ones.
A solution ends up being closing some side roads to funnel the temporary traffic into the main thoroughfare while still allowing some local traffic through the non-closed side roads at the cost of some side roads being inaccessible.