The ROAR Podcast: Lauren Adams

When the final whistle blew at World Cup matches this summer, fans weren't ready to go home. Where the stadium gave them a place to gather, they stayed. Where it didn't, the party moved elsewhere, sometimes miles away. Adam sits down with Lauren Adams, Global Director of Lifestyle Research at Gensler and lead author of The Fandom Effect: Sports Urbanism 2026. It's a three-part study from the Gensler Research Institute, Oxford Economics, and ROAR, and the research tracked fans before, during, and after the 2026 FIFA World Cup. It combined a baseline survey of fans across the U.S. and Canada, real-time social listening tied to every host stadium, and a post-tournament survey of host-city residents. Together, those show how a global event shaped the way fans felt about their venues, their districts, and their cities. Lauren and Adam unpack the study's headline finding. Fans used words like "we" and "us" 70% more often when posting from the public spaces outside the stadium than from inside the bowl. When they used awe words like "goosebumps" and "electric," that collective language jumped 189%. They also cover "afterglow," the spontaneous celebrations after a match, and what it means when a stadium ringed with parking sends that energy somewhere else. 00:00 Intro: The afterglow that went to Times Square 01:55 Welcome, Lauren Adams 02:17 Inside The Fandom Effect: before, during, and after the World Cup 04:41 The loneliness crisis and the stadium as the new town square 06:45 The scale of the study 08:09 Voice of the Fan and AI-powered language analysis 10:00 "We" vs. "I": collective language outside the bowl 11:41 Designing for awe: lessons from Rockefeller Center 13:52 From crowd to community: access and programming 16:21 The "awe-free zone": entry, ingress, and safety 18:50 Inside the bowl: whistle-to-whistle documentarians 20:59 What is afterglow? 23:07 How ROAR measured afterglow 24:50 New York / New Jersey and the afterglow catcher's mitt 28:26 Families, locals, and superfans 32:45 A catcher's mitt for everything: zoned programming 33:30 Collective effervescence explained 35:09 What's next for Gensler and host cities 37:52 Lessons for everyday game days 40:22 Expanding the fan base beyond the core 41:34 Designing for the next 5–10 years 43:36 Wrap-up