Southern Methodist University’s Washburne Soccer and Track Stadium is officially on the World Cup map, with the university announcing Monday that it will serve as a FIFA World Cup 2026 training site for teams playing at Dallas Stadium. The selection follows recent upgrades to the venue and will bring international squads to SMU’s Hilltop in the weeks leading up to the June tournament kickoff. Teams are expected to be in North Texas through June and July, and SMU says training sessions will be closed to the public, turning a usually low-key campus field into a tightly managed piece of a global spectacle.
In a press release via SMU News, the university said Washburne, formally Washburne Soccer and Track Stadium, has been designated a "Venue Specific Training Site." President Jay Hartzell framed the selection as a regional win, saying, "Dallas is one of the world’s most dynamic and globally connected cities, and SMU is proud to help welcome the FIFA World Cup to our region." The release also leaned on SMU’s international footprint, pointing to more than 2,400 international students and roughly 260 international faculty as part of the university’s global profile.
Teams Playing at Dallas Stadium
Eight national teams are set to play group-stage games at the Arlington venue: Argentina, Croatia, England, Japan, Jordan, the Netherlands, Austria, and Sweden. The stadium will host nine matches in all, including a semifinal on July 14, according to NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth. North Texas action kicks off June 14 and runs into early July with a mix of group-play and knockout matches, with official schedules listing local times in Central Time.
Washburne's World Cup Past and Campus Access
SMU noted that this is not Washburne’s first brush with the World Cup spotlight. In 1994, when the venue was known as Westcott Field, it served as a training ground for teams including Germany, Bulgaria, Sweden, and the Netherlands. The university says that its track record helped make the upgraded facilities appealing to FIFA this time around as well. The school has made clear that team training at Washburne will not be open to the public, and its announcement tied the selection to broader momentum on the Hilltop, including recent conference success by the men’s soccer program.
Regional Base Camps and Planning
Beyond SMU, FIFA’s Team Base Camp catalog and local organizers have lined up several other North Texas options for team home bases, including Toyota Stadium in Frisco, TCU in Fort Worth, the University of North Texas in Denton, Dallas Baptist University, and Mansfield Multipurpose Stadium, according to FIFA. Mansfield has already been tabbed as the base camp site for Czechia, and additional pairings are expected to be finalized as more teams lock in their logistics, NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth reported. Organizers say national teams typically arrive in late May or early June and stay at their base camps at least through the end of group play.
What Fans Should Know
During the World Cup, AT&T Stadium will go by the temporary name "Dallas Stadium" in order to comply with FIFA rules on corporate naming, and the venue has already undergone significant field and suite changes ahead of the tournament, according to The Dallas Morning News. State preparedness documents list SMU among the venue-specific training sites and spell out coordination plans for team arrivals, public health readiness, and security, per the Texas Department of State Health Services. For fans, that all translates into plenty of visible changes on the ground, including new signage, heavy game day traffic in the Arlington entertainment district, and fluctuating parking and ticket costs around match days.
