SAN FRANCISCO — The stadium is in Santa Clara. Not San Francisco. Not Oakland. Not Berkeley. Santa Clara, 45 miles south of the city whose name the Bay Area has borrowed for this World Cup, sitting in the middle of Silicon Valley at the end of a Caltrain line and a VTA light rail spur.
This is the most important thing to understand before you book anything. And once you understand it, the Bay Area becomes the most logistically versatile World Cup destination in the United States, a region where six extraordinary cities and a half-dozen different neighborhood universes are all within reach of a single stadium.
Six matches. Three weeks. An area with more Michelin-starred restaurants per capita than almost anywhere in the country, a transit system that actually works, and a Bay that reminds you, every time you see it, that you are somewhere genuinely extraordinary…