Dallas Love Field Warns of Major FIFA Traffic Delays Next Month

The largest sporting event in the world is barreling toward Dallas, and residents have two weeks to make their necessary preparations before soccer players and their fans touch down at Dallas Love Field.

“If you can, rent your house out. Go away. Come back,” Arnold Watkins, airport superintendent with the City of Dallas, said facetiously during the latest DAL Connect meeting. “Probably come back and your entire mortgage will be paid for.”

Beginning in June, it is estimated there will be more 100,000 daily visitors to Dallas. That means neighborhoods such as Elm Thicket/Northpark, Devonshire, Love Field West, and Bluffview will need to make adjustments to their driving schedules to accommodate for longer travel times. Dallas Love Field Airport will be a primary arrival point for many domestic visitors coming and leaving the city. 

“It’s no secret that this is the largest sporting event in the world,” Watkins said. “I’m going to double down on that and say this is going to be the most complex sporting event ever held. Ever.”

Dallas will be host to nine soccer matches, including a semifinal round. Residents can begin to see a noticeable increase in traffic and in visitors from roughly June 11 through July 20. 

The Argentinian team, by itself, will bring 100,000 fans to watch their matches and Argentina will play two matches in Dallas, Watkins said. In total, the city is preparing for about 3.8 million visitors during the time frame of the World Cup.

Along with the soccer matches, Dallas will also be the base camp for Team Czechia and the Swedish team. Czech Republic will be based out of Mansfield and Sweden will be based out of Frisco. While neither team is scheduled to play a game in Dallas, they will practice at Southern Methodist University. 

“You are going to see an increase in traffic, I promise you,” Watkins said. “Get ready for it. That’s the best thing I can tell you is just prepare yourself for the increase in traffic.”

For neighborhoods around the airport, they will also need to take current ongoing road construction traffic into account. For instance, sections of Inwood Road from Lovers Lane to Cedar Springs are down to one lane and have heavy steel plates over sections of the roadway. Lovers Lane from Devonshire Drive heading toward University Park goes down to one lane traffic. 

Because this is the first time Dallas has hosted the FIFA 2026 World Cup, Watkins said there has been no institutional knowledge from which to draw upon.

“In 2031, they want to host the Women’s World Cup here,” he said. If that happens “we’ll have a historical perspective on what that looks like.”