Brazil’s Team Will Stay in a Quiet New Jersey Town for the World Cup

Brazil · Sport

The five-time world champions could have set up anywhere in the New York area. They chose a hushed commuter town better known for its actress and its golf courses than its football.

When Brazil’s national team arrives for the 2026 World Cup, it will not be in the glare of Manhattan or the bustle of a stadium district. The squad has chosen to base itself in Basking Ridge, a leafy, affluent commuter town in Somerset County, New Jersey, lodging at The Ridge Hotel and travelling to train at a new facility in nearby Morristown. It is a deliberately low-profile choice for one of the most-watched teams in world sport.

Why Brazil chose a quiet New Jersey town

The Brazilian Football Confederation said it picked the location for privacy, comfort, security and proximity to the cities where the team will play. Rodrigo Caetano, the national team’s general coordinator, said the search intensified after December’s draw set the groups and venues, and that the Red Bull New York training campus in Morristown, which becomes the Columbia Park Training Center during the tournament, offered the right mix of modern facilities and seclusion. The confederation said the 80-acre complex was the most-requested base among competing nations. Basking Ridge itself, about an hour from MetLife Stadium, offers exactly the kind of calm a team seeking to avoid distraction tends to prize, a town of quiet streets, golf clubs and good schools, and the hometown of the actress Meryl Streep.

An unlikely World Cup crossroads

The choice produces a quirk of geography. Morocco, the team Brazil faces in its opening match on June 13, has set up its own training base in the very same town, at The Pingry School, whose athletic fields hosted teams during the 1994 World Cup. So two of the tournament’s heavyweight sides will spend the build-up to their meeting sharing a single small New Jersey town, one lodging there, the other training there, before walking out as opponents at MetLife Stadium. New Jersey is home to nearly 10,000 residents of Moroccan descent, giving that side a built-in local following in the area.

A region turned football hub

Brazil and Morocco are only part of a larger cluster: New Jersey will host four national-team base camps in all, with Senegal at Rutgers University and Haiti at Stockton University. For a town like Basking Ridge, more accustomed to commuters than to global sport, the arrival of the Seleção turns a quiet summer into something else entirely. The team will play early group matches in the New York area before the tournament potentially carries it to Philadelphia and beyond, but for a few weeks the centre of Brazilian football’s universe will sit on a quiet stretch of suburban New Jersey, a long way from the noise that usually follows the five-time champions.