Toronto, in early May, smells of lake water and construction dust. BMO Field, on the city’s western waterfront, sits between a rail corridor and the Canadian National Exhibition grounds, a site that has, for most of its history, hosted a 30,000-seat football stadium with the modest, purpose-built feel of a ground designed for Major League Soccer. For the 2026 World Cup, FIFA required something larger. What Toronto has built, in response, is a temporary expansion that has begun to raise questions about the experience of watching football inside it.
The Athletic’s reporting this week documented what spectators have described as a visible and physical swaying in the upper tiers of the temporary stands erected to bring BMO Field’s capacity closer to the 45,000 FIFA threshold for World Cup group-stage venuesT2, The Athletic. The stands, constructed from modular steel scaffolding, are bolted to the existing concrete bowl but extend above it, adding rows that rise into the open sky. Fans who have attended Toronto FC matches from these sections since the expansion opened in the spring have reported a sensation of the structure moving underfoot, a lateral give that some described as disconcerting and others as alarming. One spectator, quoted by The Athletic, said: “You feel it shaking when people celebrate a goal. It’s not subtle.”T2, The Athletic
The engineering logic of temporary stands is well established in tournament football. FIFA’s requirement that host venues meet specific capacity thresholds has, since at least the 2006 World Cup in Germany, produced a class of infrastructure that is built to be erected, used for thirty days, and then dismantled. The 2022 World Cup in Qatar made the practice into a design philosophy; Stadium 974, in Doha, was constructed entirely from shipping containers and was, after the tournament, taken apart. The structural tolerance for movement in such builds is, according to stadium engineers, a known and managed variable. Scaffolding is designed to flex. The question, in Toronto, is whether the flex is within specification or whether it exceeds what spectators should reasonably expect from a venue carrying FIFA’s imprimatur.
FIFA has not publicly commented on the Toronto expansion’s structural performance. The City of Toronto, which owns BMO Field and commissioned the temporary works, has stated that the stands “meet all applicable building codes and safety standards”T2, The Athletic, a formulation that does not, on its own, address the spectator experience of vertical displacement during a goal celebration. The gap between structural compliance and felt comfort is a gap that tournament organisers in North America will need to close before June 2026, when the eyes of the world arrive.
The context matters. The 2026 World Cup is the first to span three countries, and its infrastructure is being built not in a single national programme but across sixteen cities in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, each with its own building codes, its own contractors, and its own timeline pressures. Toronto is not the only venue relying on temporary expansion. Several American stadiums, including venues in Seattle and Kansas City, will add temporary seating to reach FIFA capacity requirements. The Toronto precedent, whether the shaking stands prove to be an engineering non-event or a genuine safety concern, will colour the expectations of every fan who buys a ticket to a World Cup match in a city that is, in effect, building a piece of its stadium for the first time.
The World Cup is, among other things, a test of a host nation’s capacity to deliver infrastructure under pressure. In 2010, South Africa built stadiums that became white elephants. In 2014, Brazil built stadiums that leaked. In 2022, Qatar built a city. In 2026, three countries are being asked to expand what they already have, and the first spectators in Toronto have reported that the expansion, so far, shakes. Whether that shaking is a footnote or a warning will depend on what the engineers say next, and on whether FIFA is willing to hear it.
