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spring 2026
Photograph by Michael J. Clarke
Joe Dorant, BSBA ’05, looks out at tractors laying sod over fresh dirt at Gillette Stadium, a venue that more typically sports artificial turf. It’s early March, and there are still snowbanks outside the stadium, but inside, the new grass—grown in New Jersey and shipped up to Foxborough—has got to get in.
The pitch has exactly three weeks to take root before powerhouse national soccer teams from France and Brazil square off in a March 26 international “friendly,” a taste of things to come in June, when the world’s biggest sporting event descends upon Gillette Stadium and 15 other venues across the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
Like a number of things involving this 2026 edition of the FIFA World Cup, the new grass at Gillette has been a bit delayed. “This was going to start a lot earlier, but the Patriots’ season went a little longer than we expected,” deadpans Dorant, senior director of global expansion and events for Kraft Sports + Entertainment. Indeed, the Pats unexpectedly went all the way to the Super Bowl. When their home playoff run finally finished, the artificial turf was removed, and the dirt put down—just in time for massive snowstorms to put the whole process back on hold.
There’s little room for error, given the tight timeline and FIFA’s exacting standards. Soccer’s global governing body’s “Natural Turf Guidelines” alone elaborate for 120 pages about proper sprigging, turfing, mowing, scarification, and verticutting, among myriad other turf requirements. It’s but one example of the level of attention required to address the endless complexities of hosting the world’s most popular game on sports’ greatest global stage.
It is Dorant’s job to do just that.
Already on this March morning, Dorant has had meetings with food, beverage, and hospitality folks, followed by the parking people, then the construction management team, which is seeking permits from the Town of Foxborough to build the many FIFA-required compounds around the stadium used to manage the intense logistical demands of the event. Meanwhile, there are 14 different security and law enforcement committees representing Foxborough police, state police, and federal authorities, all working on safety and security planning, and Dorant is regularly coordinating with all of them. Gillette security will “run the show” on game days, he says, but only in close collaboration with those other agencies.
Nearly half a million ticketed fans are expected to swarm what is normally referred to as Gillette Stadium, though organizers will call it Boston Stadium during the seven matches in June and July—part of a 39-day continental carnival predicted to draw as many as 10 million visitors to cities across North America, including an estimated 2 million to greater Boston. The men’s tournament, held every four years, brings unrivaled vibrancy and pageantry. Teams that will play at Gillette—er, Boston Stadium—during the group stage include France, Scotland, Ghana, Norway, Morocco, England, Iraq, and Haiti, and their fans will don team colors and turn the stadium into a flag-waving, drum-beating, crowd-pulsing kaleidoscope of color, culture, and passion.
And many of them will not have cars. Figuring out how to get them to the stadium and back is just one more complexity Dorant is dealing with. Unlike Patriots games, where seasoned fans drive up or down Route 1 and into Gillette’s massive parking lots for pregame tailgates, many fans who will come to World Cup games will do so by public transportation or rideshare. In what starts to sound like an algebra word problem, if Gillette’s train station normally can service just two trains at a time, with each train holding about 1,500 people, how many trains will it take to accommodate 20,000 fans all leaving the stadium at the same time? The correct answer is 12 to 14, and Dorant is working with the MBTA, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, and others to ensure all of that runs as smoothly as possible. One stadium parking lot will be dedicated to a large queuing process that “looks something like a Disney line, only larger,” Dorant says.
“It’s a lot,” he admits. In fact, on this day, his phone is buzzing with texts and calls about some well-publicized dealings with the town of Foxborough around security funding, an issue that will ultimately get resolved a week later.
And then there’s FIFA. The powerful governing body, renowned for its influence as well as its bureaucracy, comes with both experience and expectations. For the last two men’s World Cup tournaments, Qatar in 2022 and Russia in 2018, mostly new soccer stadiums were built from scratch. But the 2026 games are relying on existing stadiums, like Gillette. These are established venues that regularly host large-scale events—not their first rodeo.
“Educating FIFA on that has been a large part of what I do,” Dorant says. “Aligning with their requirements and expectations, but also informing them, ‘Hey, we’re buttoned up enough here where we can handle this.’”
Still, Dorant calls it “an honor” to work with FIFA, including employees who are embedded on-site and have worked and lived all around the world and come from different cultures. “It’s very different than any other event I’ve worked on, so I love it,” he says. “With my international background, it really fits well.”It’s quite an international background for an accounting major who never traveled abroad until after graduating from Suffolk. Outside of the World Cup, Dorant’s day job is to grow the New England Patriots’ business and brand overseas. When people in Germany or Brazil think of American football, Dorant wants them to think of the Pats.
When the NFL launched its global markets program in early 2022, the Patriots opted to make Germany their first international home market. They had seen a spike in fan growth in that country, in part due to some rostered German-born players, most notably offensive tackle Sebastian Vollmer. Starting with small flag football events and watch parties in Germany, Dorant now leads a six-person team that drives strategic partnerships, sponsorship deals, and content creation in an expanding list of countries including Austria, Switzerland, and Brazil.
It’s a path that winds all the way back to Tremont Street in Boston, where a hard-working kid from Holbrook, Massachusetts, with a passion for sports and a willingness to take chances was itching to try new things.
“Just seeing people from all around the world here—seeing people from Scotland, Haiti, Norway, and France come into little Foxborough, Massachusetts, and leave with a sense of, wow, I got to see my nation play—that means something to me.”
By Greg Gatlin
Joe Dorant arrived at Suffolk as a freshman in September 2001. Everything was new to him, including city life. He was sitting in class the morning of September 11 when it was cut short by news of terrorist attacks. It stunned him like a slap in the face. The world immediately felt eerie and confusing. “It was tough for a kid who just left home for the first time, but I also felt lucky to be safe,” he says. “That experience has stayed with me, and I still think about it.”
Something else stuck with him—the cohesion of the people of Boston at that moment. As time went by, it was the life of the city that grabbed him. Living downtown pushed him to become more independent.
“I never had that college-campus experience where everywhere you walk, you’re still on [college] property,” he says. “Instead, I got to live in the center of Boston almost as a young professional. I experienced a lot. I grew up fast because of that. You get to experience the working world even if you don’t have a job. You’re walking with commuters. You’re in the center of everything. I cherish that the most, and I tell people that a lot.”
That first year, he met a freshman named Kim Bomal, BSBA ’05, who lived on his floor in 150 Tremont Street (now Smith Hall). Both later became RAs and eventually started dating. Today, Joe and Kim Dorant are married with two sons.
Dorant says he was never the type who could ace a test without studying. “I needed to work my butt off to know what I was looking at,” he says. But he did have a relentless work ethic and a willingness to ask for help, including from Suffolk faculty members who supported him.
He was also willing to take risks. He always wanted to break into the sports business, and in high school he’d developed a habit of sending notes and emails to people working in those organizations in hopes of making connections. “I got a volunteer job at Fenway. I don’t remember how that came about, but it was probably because I sent someone an email and they responded,” he says.
He remembers Jim Wilson, the Patriots’ director of finance at the time, coming to Suffolk to speak at an accounting event. Dorant handed Wilson his résumé, figuring he’d “give it a shot.”
Nothing seemed to come of it. So, after graduating, he took a job with Big Four accounting firm PwC, where he was auditing mutual funds. But he didn’t love it. About a year later he got an email from Wilson, who had an opening for a staff accountant. Dorant jumped.
“I’ve never been OK with just sitting at my desk and crunching numbers,” he says. “I always have an itch to try new things. The good part about the Kraft organization is they’ve allowed me to do that.”
Dorant spent four years in the Patriots’ accounting department, left for a year, then came back to the organization and began to rise up the ranks, first in accounting, then in sales operations. He started to work more closely with the organization’s marketing group.
“Along the way, as these things pop up, I just raise my hand—like, yeah, I’ll take it on. Something new, something I can learn, something interesting,” he says.
He hadn’t traveled abroad until a trip with Kim brought him to Paris. “I was like ‘Holy…! Why was I missing all this? I didn’t realize what Europe was, and I fell in love with it instantly. I absolutely love experiencing it. Just walking through cities, small towns, seeing what the culture’s like in these places, talking to people.”
In 2025, he became Kraft Sports + Entertainment’s senior director of global expansion and events, and he hasn’t stopped traveling since.
Students in the Sawyer Business School are taught to think beyond any one major or discipline—whether that’s accounting, marketing, finance. The school puts an emphasis on learning to address complexities across verticals to solve business challenges. Dorant is a textbook example of that kind of thinking.
When he was in the Patriots’ accounting department, he worked on the finance side and learned the back end of how sponsorship deals came through. He worked with sales, marketing, production, even food and beverage. He interacted with legal and learned to dig into the language of contracts. Accounting, he says, “gave me the ability to work across the business and understand the business as a whole.” Working internationally, he has learned how business is done differently in different countries.
That ability to work across organizations and cultures, in all their complexity, is on full display as Dorant works to ready Boston Stadium to host the World Cup. “I mean, you personally cannot do all of this work, right?” he says. You have to bring people together, understand the issues, foresee the pitfalls, and make disparate groups work together effectively.
Call it the Suffolk way.
As Dorant looks forward to June, he has two great hopes. The first is that when it’s all said and done, everyone who joined, whether as a fan, a team, a vendor, or an organization, felt like they had a good experience and were able to do their job successfully. The second hope is that people feel the passion. “We’ve had some international games here, and the atmosphere has been unbelievable,” he says.
That was the case in the March 26 friendly when French star Kylian Mbappé lit things up with a goal against Brazil in the 32nd minute in front of more than 66,000 fans.
“Just seeing people from all around the world here—seeing people from Scotland, Haiti, Norway, and France come into little Foxborough, Massachusetts, and leave with a sense of, wow, I got to see my nation play with their logo, with the flag, dancing the whole time. When you’re at a game and your country is playing, it’s just different. I think that means something to me.”
Photograph by Alex Grimm/Getty Images
Photograph by Kraft Sports and Entertainment
Photograph by Kraft Sports and Entertainment
Photograph by Danielle Parhizkaran/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Photograph by Michael J. Clarke
—Joe Dorant