It's great to see you all.
Good morning, Marshall Foster.
I'm the director of Seattle Center, and I couldn't be happier to welcome
you all here for our official kickoff of the one year countdown to
World Cup 2026 in Seattle and Seattle fans celebration here at Seattle Center,
we are going to start off with the really good part.
I would like to introduce Steve Zakuani from the Sounders,
who's going to give us a countdown for the mayor and Peter Tomozawa to introduce you
to our newest part of Seattle Center.
All right.
This is exciting. So I'm going to give the countdown.
Then we'll have the clock.
So five, four, three, two, one.
Nicely done.
All right, nicely done.
Mayor and, Peter, you got your exercise first thing in the morning.
We weren't sure how that would work out.
It might have turned into a little tug of war there.
So thank you all again for being here.
I'll just say very briefly how,
how privileged and honored we are at Seattle Center
to have the opportunity to host the fan celebration.
We are so excited to have this countdown clock,
along with 15 other cities in North America, to celebrate this moment,
I do briefly just want to recognize,
the incredible work of our Seattle Center team.
This came together very quickly.
And one thing that I've learned here is that this team is capable of
just about anything.
So I just want to give a hand to our Seattle Center team for pulling this off.
I also want to thank our partners at the
Office of Economic Development in the city who helped us make this happen
with some funding and our collaborators at the local
organizing committee, Peter and his team have been great partners.
And without further ado, to tell you a little bit more
about everything to come in terms of,
World Cup and fan celebration, I'd like to introduce our mayor, Bruce Harrell.
Mayor Harrell.
Thank you.
Marshall.
Really, really happy to be here
with the team, with Marshall and Steve and.
And Peter, of course, who I'll introduce after this.
I want to ground us in a quote, if I may.
“Sport has the power to change the world.
It has the power to inspire.
It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does.”
And that comes from Nelson Mandela, who you all know
is a former president of South Africa.
So I want to give my thanks to my team here, Peter, Steve and Marshall,
you know that today the countdown begins
and it's a good thing to celebrate
as we welcome visitors from every corner of the globe.
And you're not hearing that
these days. We are welcoming.
Let me repeat that.
We are welcoming visitors from every corner of the globe,
sharing what makes Seattle so unique,
so inclusive, so passionate about the game of soccer.
Healthy competition among athletes.
Yesterday I stood with our governor and our Attorney General and our
Port Commissioner and OIRA director Hamdi Muhammad, along with
OneAmerica and countless other elected officials and community members
to speak out against the travel bans being pushed by our federal government.
Today,
with this countdown, we are sending a completely different message
that we are welcoming and showing this country
what welcoming looks like.
So we are proud to say a very simple
and clear message Seattle is ready.
We are ready. Right, Peter?
I make sure I'm ...
- We are ready.
- I'm starting to,
one year is getting a little closer.
When I started this couple of years ago, I had a little more confidence.
But I know we're ready and I want to.
In all seriousness, when I've talked to other
mayors of other cities, hosting cities,
I'm very proud to see your leadership working with the other cities as well.
So whether you
purchase a ticket, ticket for a match, or come to Seattle Centers campus
where all of the fan celebration activities are, will be be here.
In terms of,
I don't say all of them are going to be here,
but we're going to host a lot of them.
And Marshall, I know you guys are really working hard on this.
Pretty excited to participate in it.
I want to thank Peter, and his team at Seattle,
FWC 26 and all of our partners at FIFA
for their trust and their vision,
putting Seattle on the global stage in such a powerful way
where we can shine with our values and who we are.
So now to share more about the journey ahead, I'm very proud to introduce
someone who's been leading this effort in, just a standard of excellence.
I think is unprecedented with heart and purpose, our CEO,
Seattle FWC 26, Peter Tomozawa
Thank you, mayor.
And you may have noticed the mayor, putting on our vest.
I think he looks extremely handsome today, putting on that vest.
And, I remember standing next to the mayor
when we were announced as a host city,
recipient.
This was two and a half years ago and thinking,
gosh, we have three and a half years to figure this all out.
And here we are with one year to go,
I now get to share with the city
my stress of having this getting ready and be done.
But, mayor, yes, we will be ready.
Mayor. Yes.
This is going to be a fabulous event.
I do want to give a shout out to Marshall Foster,
his team at Seattle Center.
They're so fantastic to work with, and it was such the right decision
when we decided to have the fan festival here at Seattle Center to extend
that wonderful legacy of the 1962 World's Fair.
Couldn't be a more perfect place.
We couldn't have a more perfect partner.
The city has been just a tremendous partner in every step of the way.
Bruce, your your leadership is phenomenal.
The city is coming together.
We are coalescing around the recovery from Covid.
We are working to help revitalize our great city.
But we're bringing the event, across the state.
So this is an event of statewide significance.
We're talking about the Seattle Center, Seattle.
We're in front of this beautiful, iconic, Museum
of Modern art, popular art mopop.
And we invite all citizens and every visitor to come here.
And, of course, take your selfie in front of our beautiful new countdown clock.
In fact, the actual ideal spot to stand so you get the beautiful mopop,
in the picture, the clock and the Space Needle
is right there behind Denise Whitaker over there.
Right there to stand.
And please do not stand in the street to take your picture.
I know people will, but let's not do that.
It's a fabulous week for us for one year to go,
but we are also celebrating a special event that's happening
starting on Sunday, which is the Club World Cup.
The Sounders will be playing, in three matches here in Seattle.
There'll be a total of six club world match, Club
World Cup matches that sort of a tune up or a taster
for what's about to come, in 2026, when we have 48 nations
all vying to become world champions, of of football.
But most importantly, a celebration of bringing the community together.
I love what Bruce said.
This is an event that unites people
of whatever, wherever you're from.
We welcome all people to come here to enjoy, to celebrate.
And I can't wait to celebrate that with our children,
our grandchildren, to see what a world can look like United.
And so with that, we're so excited about that.
I do want to say please come to the Waterfront Park on June 15th.
June 15th is where we'll have a celebration.
We're going to break the Guinness
Book of World Records for the largest soccer clinic ever.
And furthermore, putting Seattle on the global map.
It's a grand. It's a celebration.
The grand opening of the waterfront park.
It's a celebration of the RAVE Foundation's commitment
to build fields for underserved children and underserved communities.
They've already built 26.
We're going to build 14 more in 2025 on our quest to build a total of 52.
By the time the World Cup comes,
it'll be a celebration
of of the, of the one year to go.
And we'll have a soccer clinic that'll be hosted by former
Sounders players as well as Seattle Rain players.
And we already have 1500 registrants, 400 on the waitlist.
So assuredly we're going to smash the record and own it, and rightly so.
So we can't wait to welcome the world,
in, 2026.
But really more importantly,
we're going to bring Washington in Seattle to the world in 2026.
With that, I want to introduce my dear friend Steve Zakuani.
He'll give you a better perspective on what it's like to be on the pitch,
what it means, for the players from a player's perspective,
but also from a fan perspective.
Steve is a tremendous resource for us at the Sounders
as he's extended his career beyond the playing days that he had,
which was an illustrious career with the Seattle Sounders.
And amongst others.
But, he's he's the voice of the Sounders today.
And we are so, so pleased that he's one of our World Cup ambassadors.
So with that I'm going to introduce Steve, Zakuani.
Thank you Peter I'll be brief.
And I just want to say for me, one of my earliest memories
in my whole life was watching the 1994 World Cup, which was in this country.
I was on vacation with my family, and I just happened to catch a game on TV,
and I was hooked.
I was glued, you know, I'd been playing the sport for about a year at that point.
I was very young, but that's what made me say, I want to do this for a living.
This is the sport, the passion, the different cultures, seeing all the fans.
It was an amazing experience and I realized right there,
that's why they call it the Beautiful Game.
So to think that that's going to be coming here
to Seattle, a place that is home to me now that I love so much
that I was fortunate to play from some of the best fans in the world,
some of the best fans, the passion soccer community we have here is really,
really amazing and we get a chance to put that on display for the whole world.
So all the partners here Seattle Center, know the mayor,
the local committee, I think for all of us is very excited
because we know how special this is when it comes to this sport.
And we get a chance and I'll show that to the whole world.
Embrace everyone coming and prove that, you know,
there's a reason why we were chosen as one of the host cities.
So I speak from experience, having played here, having being now a fan here,
it's definitely one of the absolute best places you can display the sport.
And I'm excited we get to do that.
So that clock behind, just a reminder, it's coming very quickly.
lets all be ready to put on a show for the whole world.
I'm excited for the next World Cup and we're very excited to be here.
Thank you Peter.
I think I already thanked everyone that could be thanked,
but we do have some colleagues from FIFA that are here.
Dan Popp is in the audience.
Jennifer (indecipherable) , who is also from Miami.
This is a total collaborative.
It takes a village mentality effort.
We've had such great cooperation from all of our partners,
from the local level to the state level and even the national level.
So I will tell you that we couldn't be more proud, more excited,
to bring the World Cup in 2026.
And it's really, really going to be an amazing celebration.
One of the things that we talk about often
is that there'll be 360,000 fans in our filling our stadium,
but there'll be 750,000 fans that will come through the Seattle Center.
We get that with 24 activation days, of the
fan festival, 30,000 people a day coming through here.
You'll fact, you'll find that we'll have driving so much value to our communities.
And so for that, we're grateful for the opportunity.
And with that, I'm going to say one more thank you to our great
mayor who's done an amazing job in supporting this.
He's been with us every step of the way,
from the turnover from Jenny Durkan, where we started the bid
to actually getting the host city rights and to completing the task.
And so he is.
He's a man of getting stuff done.
Marshall is an amazing partner for us.
And we couldn't be more proud to be standing here side by side,
to bring you this momentous event of the one year to go.
I still remember when it was 800 days to go.
And so now we are at 365,
and it causes me no stress.
And to that end, my wife is here,
and she knows and shares my daily stress, with that.
And, I appreciate her and my family's support
of all of our effort, but this is going to be
the greatest event that it will ever hit and grace our state in our generation.
So with that, thank you.