The World Cup has exploded in North America as the host country, and the energy has been nationally palpable.

The United States Men’s National Team just went down to Belgium on Monday, and those who were anywhere near the ArtsQuest lawn adjacent to the SteelStacks in Bethlehem when it happened, felt it.

But here’s the thing about SoccerFest — the action isn’t stopping just because the Americans are.

ArtsQuest’s free World Cup viewing parties have quietly become one of the most magical gatherings in the Lehigh Valley this summer, throwing every single matchup on giant screens against the backdrop of those historic Bethlehem Steel blast furnaces.

Curt Mosel, ArtsQuest’s Chief Operating Officer, said it became pretty clear that what’s happening on that lawn isn’t an accident. It’s a vision that took more than a decade to sell.

“I grew up playing the sport,” Mosel said. “I was fortunate enough as a teenager to spend some time in Germany with the club team and play over there.”

Mosel isn’t your typical nonprofit executive. He spent 10 years working in the NBA, and a couple more in Major League Soccer, including time with the Chicago Fire — which is also home base for U.S. Soccer.

Back in 2006, a group of his friends decided to chase the World Cup to Germany, and that trip planted the seed for everything happening at SteelStacks today.

“We went over, stayed on a houseboat in Amsterdam and watched games in the pubs there and were kind of amazed by the culture,” he said. “We rented a van and drove down into Germany, and we were fortunate enough that we got to see two U.S. matches, USA-Czech Republic and USA-Italy that year.”

That was the tournament Italy ended up winning. But the moment that actually stuck with Mosel wasn’t inside a stadium.

“Where the dots got connected for here at ArtsQuest was in Frankfurt at their fan fest,” he said. “They probably had a hundred-foot-wide screen in the middle of the river in the center of town and thousands of people on both sides and bars and restaurants packed with people from all over the world. And it was that magical experience that was like, ‘wow, this is special.’”

There’s a personal footnote to that trip that’s too good to leave out.

When Mosel and his friends drove down into southwestern Germany and stayed with a local family, he discovered his own last name plastered up and down the street. The Mosel River runs through that wine region.

“Literally every winery had my name plastered on it as you’re walking down the street,” he laughed, “and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.”

But it wasn’t the wine or the screens that hooked him. It was the feeling.

“Every step of that experience,” Mosel said. “From staying with a family and having people, their friends, come over for dinners, it was so communal. It was so inviting. People were so excited to meet us.

“And that’s what ArtsQuest does every day. We bring people together that have a common interest for music, for visual arts, youth education. It is literally the backbone of what we do.”

A Hard Sell

Here’s where the story gets fun, because the SoccerFest we know today almost never happened.

Mosel started at ArtsQuest in 2010. SteelStacks opened its doors in 2011. And by 2012, he was already in his boss’s office pitching a wild idea.

“I started asking my boss and our founder, ‘Hey, what do you think about a World Cup viewing party here? It’ll attract people from different backgrounds, and we can show the games here,’” Mosel said. “And they were like, ‘That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard.’”

You have to appreciate the honesty.

The pushback, as Mosel tells it, was fair enough — sure, you worked in sports, but what does soccer have to do with what we do here? It’s a reasonable question for an organization whose whole identity was built around Musikfest, the flagship festival born when Bethlehem Steel’s layoffs left the town searching for a reason to bring people back downtown.

But Mosel kept running into other believers, and he knew it had to happen.

“That was the impetus for the conversation that I went back and said, ‘Hey, I know you guys said this isn’t really the best idea, but people keep telling me it is, and I just want to revisit this,’” Mosel said. “And I want to articulate that our event should be different than what I saw in Europe, and it should really embrace what ArtsQuest does.”

That last part is the key that unlocked everything. SoccerFest wasn’t going to be a European fan fest transplanted to Bethlehem. It was going to be an ArtsQuest event that happened to have soccer in it.

Beans, Bands and Buy-In

The first SoccerFest launched in 2014, and even from the jump, the ArtsQuest fingerprints were all over it. The event didn’t show every match that year, but it showed plenty — and the staff leaned all the way into the idea.

When England took the pitch, ArtsQuest booked a The Who tribute band to play afterward, inviting a little English culture onto the campus.

When the tournament in Brazil handed the world the caxirola — a bead-filled noisemaker that got so rowdy it was eventually banned as a projectile inside Brazilian stadiums — the ArtsQuest visual arts and education team turned it into a kids’ craft with a paper plate and a handful of beans.

“So we were inviting soccer fans into SoccerFest, and they were experiencing visual arts, and maybe that would lead to kids taking art classes,” Mosel said.

Then came the youth soccer clinic, followed by a clinic for children with disabilities, because accessibility runs through everything ArtsQuest touches. Local club players pitched in to help coach.

“Now you’ve got kids that don’t sit at the same lunch table participating in a clinic together and then doing a craft together afterwards,” Mosel said. “There were only 30 kids or so that participated in that first clinic, and it’s never been that enormous in size, but the parents and others that see this were just magically affected by that environment.”

The World Shows Up

Fast forward to this summer, and the turnout has blown past expectations.

Yes, the U.S. matches drew the loudest crowds. But some of the most unforgettable moments have belonged to fans of countries one might not expect to find on a lawn in Bethlehem.

Take Egypt, for example. Its opening match drew maybe 40 or 50 fans scattered across the grass on a hot Thursday afternoon.

By Egypt’s second match, the crowd had doubled to about 100. And the third match is where it turned into a full-blown legend.

It was scheduled for 11 o’clock at night, going head-to-head with three other games at the same time, which meant ArtsQuest had to make a call on which match got the sound.

They’d initially picked New Zealand and Belgium. Then the messages started rolling in.

“Our social media manager sent me a message and said, ‘Curt, we’re getting messages from Egyptian fans asking if we would show the sound for their match instead because their match is more important and they’re coming,’” Mosel said. “And I’m like, ‘I’m not saying no to this.’ We made the change. Two hundred and fifty Egyptian people came out at 11 o’clock at night to watch that match.”

Two hundred and fifty people. At 11 p.m. On a work night. In Bethlehem.

“That’s the part you can’t plan for,” Mosel said. “And I think that’s what we’re looking for here.”

He noted that ArtsQuest isn’t chasing the numbers you’d see at a big-city fan fest — Philadelphia’s setup can pull 50,000 for a single match. SoccerFest is going for something different, something more personal. And the feedback keeps confirming they’ve found it.

“What we’ve heard over and over, whether it was the Egyptian folks or some folks from Germany or the Netherlands or a gentleman from Curaçao who was here, they’re like, ‘I can’t believe you’re showing every match and it’s so cool that we can come here,’” Mosel said.

The reach is genuinely staggering when you frame it the ArtsQuest way. Musikfest, Mosel notes, draws people from 48 states and 10 countries every year. SoccerFest flips the math: for this World Cup, it’s pulling fans from 48 countries.

Accessibility is the Goal

Part of what makes SoccerFest work is that none of it costs a dime to walk in — a real selling point when families are watching every dollar.

Just bring yourself and a lawn chair. The property sits close to major highways, with the ambiance of the Steel Stacks lighting up the South Side Bethlehem sky.

That free-admission model isn’t a soccer thing. It’s an ArtsQuest thing.

“Forty percent of the programs we do are free to attend, and with good reason,” Mosel said. “If a child walks into the new ArtsQuest Creative Factory that’ll be opening this fall and can’t afford to take a class, they can register right there on the spot and take the class. The goal is really accessibility of arts for everybody in the Lehigh Valley.”

The ticketed events, he explained, help fund the free ones — a symbiotic relationship that ArtsQuest has been fine-tuning for decades. And SoccerFest is deliberately wired into the rest of the summer lineup, throwing a spotlight on Sabor Latin Festival, ReggaeFest, and the Levitt Pavilion concert series – often with several events packed into the same given day.

“All of those programs that are taking place down here will benefit from SoccerFest and vice versa,” Mosel said. “That’s what we try to create and plan out programmatically so that the sum of the parts is greater. We’ve been doing that every day for 43 years. It just looks a little different now with the twist of adding that on top.”

If You Go

SoccerFest runs through the end of the World Cup, with every match shown free on the giant screens at SteelStacks. Food and drink are available for purchase on site, and vendors — including local youth soccer clubs and the Soccer Post merchandise booth — pop up throughout the event, with more expected for the semifinals and final.

The U.S. may be out, but the party at SteelStacks is just getting started. On deck is MusikFest 2026, which kicks off on July 31 and covers the ArtsQuest grounds as well as parts of Bethlehem’s North Side.

For anyone looking to learn more, get involved, or dig into everything ArtsQuest offers beyond soccer, visit artsquest.org.