SoccerFest: The World Comes to South Side Bethlehem at ArtsQuest

Find a seat on the SteelStacks lawn this summer, and odds are the family beside you is cheering for a country on the other side of the planet.

Beneath the same Bethlehem Steel blast furnaces that once defined the city of Bethlehem, fans from dozens of countries have been gathering all summer to watch the world’s biggest tournament together–for free.

This is SoccerFest, ArtsQuest’s free World Cup viewing party, and it has developed into one of the most unique gatherings in the Lehigh Valley.

The United States Men’s National Team bowed out against Belgium on Monday, and anyone on the lawn when the final whistle blew felt the air go out of the place. But SoccerFest doesn’t fold up its screens just because the Americans are done–and honestly, that’s the whole idea.

Curt Mosel, ArtsQuest’s Chief Operating Officer, said what’s happening on that lawn isn’t an accident. It’s a vision that took more than a decade to create.

A Game With Deep Roots Here

If it seems only right that the world would pile into Bethlehem to watch soccer, consider this: the town was once the beating heart of the American game.

“In the 19-teens and ’20s, we had the most successful professional soccer team in the history of the United States,” Mosel said. “It started off as a club team, and then the company took it professional and invested in it and started recruiting some of the best players from England and Scotland to come and work at Bethlehem Steel. And the team won 11 championships over a 17-year period.”

Over 100 years later, Bethlehem Steel Soccer Club gear hangs at the ArtsQuest merchandise booth, right beside jerseys for every country still chasing the trophy. The place that once was a force in the sport is watching the world play it again–on the very same ground.

Bringing People Together

Mosel spent years of his professional career working in the NBA, followed by a stint in Major League Soccer that included the Chicago Fire–which, not coincidentally, shares a home with U.S. Soccer.

A 2006 trip to Germany with a group of buddies, chasing the World Cup, is where the whole SteelStacks idea was quietly born.

“I grew up playing the sport,” Mosel said. “I was fortunate enough as a teenager to spend some time in Germany with the club team and play over there.”

“We went over, stayed on a houseboat in Amsterdam and watched games in the pubs there and were kind of amazed by the culture,” he said. “We rented a van and drove down into Germany, and we were fortunate enough that we got to see two U.S. matches, USA-Czech Republic and USA-Italy that year.”

Italy would go on to lift the trophy that year. But the memory that lodged in Mosel’s head had nothing to do with a stadium.

“Where the dots got connected for here at ArtsQuest was in Frankfurt at their fan fest,” he said. “They probably had a hundred-foot-wide screen in the middle of the river in the center of town and thousands of people on both sides and bars and restaurants packed with people from all over the world. And it was that magical experience that was like, wow, this is special.”

The trip came with a personal wrinkle too good to skip. Rolling into southwestern Germany to stay with a host family, Mosel found his own surname staring back at him from storefront to storefront. The Mosel River cuts right through that wine country.

“Literally every winery had my name plastered on it as you’re walking down the street,” he laughed, “and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.”

Still, the screens and the wine weren’t what reeled him in. It was the warmth.

“Every step of that experience, from staying with a family and having people, their friends come over for dinners, it was so communal. It was so inviting. People were so excited to meet us,” Mosel said.

“And that’s what ArtsQuest does every day. We bring people together that have a common interest for music, for visual arts, youth education. It is literally the backbone of what we do.”

A Hard Sell

If it wasn’t for Mosel’s persistence, today’s SoccerFest idea might still have simply been drawn up on a whiteboard somewhere.

Mosel joined ArtsQuest in 2010. A year later, SteelStacks flung open its doors. By 2012, he was already knocking on his boss’s door with a long-shot pitch.

“I started asking my boss and our founder, ‘Hey, what do you think about a World Cup viewing party here? It’ll attract people from different backgrounds, and we can show the games here,’” Mosel recalled. “And they were like, ‘That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard.’”

Credit them for not sugarcoating it.

The rejection, in Mosel’s telling, wasn’t unreasonable. If you’ve got a sports background, fine, but how would soccer square with the organization’s mission? ArtsQuest was built on Musikfest–the music and arts festival dreamed up after Bethlehem Steel’s layoffs left the city hunting for a way to draw people back.

Even so, the believers kept finding him, and Mosel became convinced it had to happen.

“I went back and said, ‘Hey, I know you guys said this isn’t really the best idea, but people keep telling me it is, and I just want to revisit this,’” he said. “And I want to articulate that our event should be different than what I saw in Europe and it should really embrace what ArtsQuest does.”

And that was what unlocked the door to develop the event. SoccerFest wouldn’t be a European fan fest airlifted into Bethlehem. It would be a through-and-through ArtsQuest event that simply had soccer at the center.

Beans, Bands and Buy-In

SoccerFest debuted in 2014, and the ArtsQuest DNA was stamped on it from day one. Not every match made the screens that first year, but plenty of them did. The ArtsQuest staff and their immensely dedicated volunteers went all-in on the concept.

With England on the pitch, ArtsQuest lined up a Who tribute band for afterward, folding a slice of English culture into the day. And when Brazil’s tournament gave the world the caxirola–a bead-filled rattle so disruptive it got banned as a projectile inside the stadiums there–ArtsQuest’s visual arts and education team reinvented it as a kids’ craft: a paper plate, a scoop of beans, done.

“So we were inviting soccer fans into SoccerFest, and they were experiencing visual arts, and maybe that would lead to kids taking art classes,” Mosel said.

A youth soccer clinic followed, and then a clinic for children with disabilities, because accessibility threads through everything ArtsQuest puts its hands on. Kids from local clubs jumped in to help coach.

“Now you’ve got kids that don’t sit at the same lunch table participating in a clinic together and then doing a craft together afterwards,” Mosel said. “There were only 30 kids or so that participated in that first clinic, and it’s never been that enormous in size, but the parents and others that see this were just magically affected by that environment.”

The World Showed Up

Jump to this summer, and attendance has sailed past what anyone penciled in. Sure, the U.S. matches brought the rowdiest crowds, but the moments that stick tend to belong to supporters of nations you’d never expect to spot on a Bethlehem lawn.

Egypt is the prime example. Their opener pulled maybe 40 or 50 fans, spread out across the grass on a sweltering Thursday afternoon.

“They’re talking at halftime, and then they’re taking pictures and selfies,” Mosel said. “And then I’m like, ‘Hey, can I take some pictures of you guys?’ And then I took a selfie with their camera in their picture, and we all laughed together.”

By match two, that Egyptian contingent had swelled to around 100. Match three is when it became eye-opening. The game landed at 11 o’clock at night, stacked against three others in the same window, forcing ArtsQuest to pick which broadcast would get the sound.

New Zealand and Belgium got the initial nod. Then the inbox lit up.

“Our social media manager sent me a message and said, ‘Curt, we’re getting messages from Egyptian fans asking if we would show the sound for their match instead because their match is more important and they’re coming,’” Mosel said. “And I’m like, ‘I’m not saying no to this.’ We made the change. Two-hundred-fifty Egyptian people came out at 11 o’clock at night to watch that match.”

Two-hundred-and-fifty Egyptian fans. At 11 p.m. On a work night. In Bethlehem.

“That’s the part you can’t plan for,” Mosel said. “And I think that’s what we’re looking for here.”

As Mosel points out, ArtsQuest isn’t gunning for big-city fan-fest numbers. Philadelphia’s version can jam 50,000 in for a single match. SoccerFest wants something else, something more intimate. And the response keeps telling him they’ve nailed it.

“What we’ve heard over and over, whether it was the Egyptian folks or some folks from Germany or the Netherlands or a gentleman from Curaçao who was here. They’re like, ‘I can’t believe you’re showing every match and it’s so cool that we can come here,’” Mosel said.

Accessibility Is the Goal

A huge piece of why SoccerFest works is that walking in is free; a genuine draw when households are on a budget. Bring yourself, bring a lawn chair and that’s it. The campus is an easy hop from the major highways, with the SteelStacks lighting up the South Side sky overhead.

That free admission policy isn’t a soccer quirk, either. It’s on-brand for ArtsQuest.

“Forty percent of the programs we do are free to attend, and with good reason,” Mosel said. “If a child walks into the new ArtsQuest Creative Factory that’ll be opening this fall and can’t afford to take a class, they can register right there on the spot and take the class. The goal is really accessibility of arts for everybody in the Lehigh Valley.”

Those ticketed events, he explained, bankroll the free ones–a give-and-take ArtsQuest has spent decades refining. And SoccerFest is stitched on purpose into the rest of the summer slate, shining a light on Sabor Latin Festival, ReggaeFest and the Levitt Pavilion concert series, frequently with a handful of events squeezed into one day.

“All of those programs that are taking place down here will benefit from SoccerFest and vice versa,” Mosel said. “That’s what we try to create and plan out programmatically, so that the sum of the parts is greater. We’ve been doing that every day for 43 years. It just looks a little different now with the twist of adding that on top.”

Looking for More?

SoccerFest carries on through the end of the World Cup, every match beamed free onto the giant SteelStacks screens. Food and drink are for sale on site, and vendors–local youth soccer clubs and the Soccer Post merchandise booth among them–turn up throughout the run, with a few more expected for the semifinals and final.

The Americans may be out, but the SteelStacks party is only warming up. Next on deck is Musikfest 2026, opening July 31, which sprawls across the ArtsQuest grounds and stretches of Bethlehem’s North Side.

Anyone wanting to learn more, pitch in or explore everything ArtsQuest does beyond soccer can head to Artsquest.org or follow them on social media for more information.