Brazil and Morocco Set Up World Cup Camps Minutes Apart in New Jersey

Brazil · Sport

Two teams that will open their World Cups against each other have chosen to prepare almost within sight of one another, in the leafy suburbs of northern New Jersey.

When Brazil and Morocco meet at MetLife Stadium on June 13 in one of the group stage’s marquee fixtures, both teams will have travelled only a short distance to get there. The two sides have set up their tournament base camps minutes apart in Morris County, New Jersey — Brazil in Morristown, Morocco in nearby Basking Ridge — turning a quiet stretch of the New York metropolitan area into an unlikely staging ground for a heavyweight World Cup opener.

Two World Cup camps, minutes apart

Brazil will base its campaign at the Columbia Park Training Center in Morristown, the performance facility used by Major League Soccer’s New York Red Bulls. Morocco, meanwhile, settled on The Pingry School in Basking Ridge, a private school whose athletics complex was upgraded with international-standard pitches to win the bid. The two towns are close neighbours in suburban Morris County, meaning the squads will spend the build-up to their meeting training within a few miles of each other before walking out as opponents at MetLife Stadium, the same venue slated to host the tournament’s final.

A site with World Cup history

For Pingry, the assignment is a return rather than a debut. The school served as a training site during the 1994 World Cup, the last time the United States hosted the tournament, and officials have leaned on that heritage in welcoming Morocco’s squad, ranked among the world’s top sides after its run to the semi-finals in 2022. The continuity is a neat thread: a suburban New Jersey campus that prepared teams for a World Cup three decades ago doing so again for a generation of players who were not yet born the first time.

New Jersey as a World Cup hub

The Brazil and Morocco camps are part of a larger concentration. New Jersey will host four national-team base camps in all — adding Senegal, based at Rutgers University, and Haiti, at Stockton University — one of the densest clusters anywhere in the host country. State officials have framed it as a tourism and economic opportunity as much as a sporting one, with eight matches scheduled at MetLife Stadium, the final among them. For Brazil, the most successful nation in World Cup history, the choice of a low-key suburban base mirrors a long-standing preference for controlled, self-contained preparation. The first test of that calm comes quickly: an old-fashioned heavyweight clash with Morocco, staged barely a drive from where both teams will have slept the night before.