Faced with the high cost of getting to Gillette Stadium for the 2026 World Cup, a group of Scotland fans have come up with a novel way to save money: hiring “every single yellow school bus” available in the area to cart them to Foxboro for the soccer tournament.
Local transportation officials and FIFA organizers have come under mounting criticism over steep prices for trains and buses to Gillette, temporarily renamed Boston Stadium for the summer event.
The MBTA is charging $80 for a roundtrip train between Boston’s South Station and Foxboro, which is four times larger than the cost of a regular commuter rail trip between the two stations. Boston World Cup officials are also offering $95 bus rides from more than 20 “strategically located” stops around Greater Boston, including Logan Airport and the Rhode Island Convention Center in Providence.
“The prices are crazy,” said Scott Gillan, an organizer of the Providence Tartan Army, a group of thousands of Scotland fans making Providence their unofficial home base for the tournament.
Gillan told GBH News that after realizing the cost of getting to the stadium — nearly $100 per person — he and other organizers began researching every alternative they could think of.
“In our group chat, someone suggested, as a joke, why don’t we just book yellow school buses? And everyone kind of laughed,” he said. But then one of the organizers began reaching out to local bus companies and found that it might be their cheapest option.
“The pricing they gave us was fantastic,” he said. “And we literally booked up every yellow school bus we could get our hands on.”
They secured a total of 21 buses for Scotland’s first match with Haiti on June 13 and 20 more for the team’s second match with Morocco on Jun 19. Tartan Army organizers are charging fans $38 per seat on the buses. The funds will go towards paying for the buses and charitable donations to Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence.
Gillan said through conversations with Providence’s Department of Art, Culture and Tourism, the group was able to secure a local police escort for the bus fleet to help avoid gridlock traffic expected on match days.
“Unfortunately, once we get to Massachusetts, we’re on our own,” Gillan said, adding that he expects the fan group’s school bus caravan to be quite the site for drivers and passers by.
“We’ll be bagged in big beards and kilts, and we maybe look a little scary,” he said. “But mostly, we’re friendly. We just want to have fun, meet the locals and leave a legacy behind where people remember us fondly.”
One drawback of the cost-saving measure? Space.
“From what we’ve been told, if you’re five feet or above, it may be a little bit of a squeeze. Also, there’s no toilets aboard,” Gillan said.
“But it saves a little money for the trip. I’ve spoken to people who have remortgaged their homes to pay for this, people that have been saving since 1998, the last time we qualified. So, anything we can do, I think a little bit of discomfort is going to be forgotten.”
This story was originally published by GBH.
