House of Yes and Footballco Have Partnered on Soccer Pop-Up House of Goal

Jason Wagenheim, who runs North America for the football media company Footballco, has spent years arguing that soccer lives in the culture surrounding it: fashion, music, food, art, and community as much as in the ninety minutes on the pitch. This sentiment has always been easy enough to express—but with the World Cup taking place across North America, he had to transform it into something a person can experience. As such, Brooklyn’s House of Goal was born.

Wagenheim partnered with House of Yes, the Bushwick institution known for celebratory nights that resist easy description and fuse music, performance, nightlife, and self-expression. A media organization often determines a narrative. Wagenheim wanted the opposite. “House of Goal could not feel like a media company putting up signage and programming a few panels,” he tells Surface. “It had to feel alive. It had to feel a little unexpected. It had to feel like Brooklyn.”

House of Goal sits inside Industry City, the sprawling waterfront complex in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The idea to land there came from Ilan Telmont and the House of Yes team, who know the space and how to make it breathe. “The best version of this is not House of Yes trying to become a soccer company, and it’s not Footballco trying to become a nightlife producer,” Wagenheim says. “It’s both sides doing what they do best.”

The build has run the better part of nine months, led by House of Yes, Grey House, XUES, and Footballco’s global teams, plus creative director Valentino Vettori, whom Wagenheim calls the wizard behind the curtain. “I speak to him more than my wife lately,” he admits. Inside, the experience is organized around seven pillars: play, music, tech, film, style, food, and art. They aren’t arbitrary categories but the actual doors people use to enter the game.

“There’s no one-size-fits-all definition of fandom,” Wagenheim says. “The way an Arsenal supporter in North London experiences the game is very different from the way an LAFC fan, or a first-time World Cup viewer, might experience it here.” Soccer travels, but it also adapts, taking the shape of the community around it. For example, the food pillar runs through Modelo’s Match Day Market, curated by chef Akhtar Nawab and built around the same global diversity the game runs on, while style arrives by way of a Jameson x KidSuper collaboration that treats soccer as a fashion language of its own.

By day, House of Goal is free, open to all ages, and rooted in global football culture with screenings, panels, creators, gaming, a youth match on a community field. By night, especially on weekends, the place tips into what House of Yes does best: DJs, performance, spectacle, a very Brooklyn music sensibility running until 3 a.m. “That doesn’t mean football disappears,” he says. “It means the energy changes. The sport becomes the backdrop and the connective tissue, while the party becomes the expression.” House of Yes, as he puts it, knows how to create a room, not just book a lineup.

Then there’s the matter of scale. Footballco is planning for 200,000 people, and House of Yes is famous for nights that feel personal. “Scale is only a problem if the experience feels anonymous,” he says. “That’s what we’re trying to avoid.” Football fandom, he points out, is never one giant mass; it’s national-team fans and club supporters and expats and first-timers and diehards, each with their own songs and colors and rituals. The job is to build something big enough to hold all of them and layered enough that a person can still find the corner that feels like theirs.