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ALEXANDRIA, Va. - The rain held off.
That was the first small victory Wednesday evening at Episcopal High School, where storms in the forecast gave way to clear, 80-degree skies just as several hundred Alexandria children filed onto the fields to watch a World Cup team train in their city for the first time.
The Croatia national team — the Vatreni, or "Blazers," runners-up at the 2018 World Cup and among the world's top-ranked sides — held its first practice and only public-facing community event at the West End campus that will serve as the team's training base through the group stage of the 2026 tournament. By the time the players jogged off the training pitch around 7:15 p.m., the night had delivered the kind of moment the city has been building toward for months: members of one of the planet's most accomplished soccer sides walking to the sidelines to hand out mini soccer balls, sign autographs and pose for photos with kids who, a day earlier, had only seen them on television.
For an evening, the distance between a Balkan football power and a Northern Virginia rec league closed to a few feet of turf.
A citywide invitation
The turnout was both large and deliberate. An expected 700 to 800 young people attended, drawn not just from travel-soccer rosters but from a cross-section of Alexandria's recreation and social-service programs. The invitation list included Alexandria City Public Schools middle and high school teams, the city's out-of-school-time and youth sports programs through the Department of Recreation, Parks and Cultural Activities, and Alexandria Soccer Association squads spanning ages 7 through 15-and-up.
Threaded through that list were the city's community partners — gang-prevention programs, youth served through the housing authority, and immigrant-serving organizations among them. The effect was to put a World Cup team in front of kids across Alexandria, including many who would not otherwise set foot on the manicured fields of a private boarding school.
The Alexandria Soccer Association handed out commemorative World Cup booklets to the young attendees.
"The beginning of our friendship"
Before the team took the pitch, the evening turned briefly ceremonial. Mayor Alyia Gaskins — joined by Vice Mayor Sarah Bagley and City Council members John Taylor Chapman, Sandy Marks, Canek Aguirre and Abdel-Rahman Elnoubi — welcomed the team and read an official proclamation declaring Alexandria the proud host city of the Croatian national team for the World Cup. City Manager James Parajone also attended. Council member Jacinta Greene was not present.
Gaskins framed the month ahead as more than a sporting arrangement, describing it as the start of a lasting relationship of friendship and cultural exchange between Alexandria and Croatia. She presented the team with two gifts: a ceramic bowl, which she offered as a symbol of hospitality, and a City of Alexandria coin for every player and coach — a piece of the city, she said, to carry with them through the tournament.
Accepting on behalf of the Vatreni was Stipe Pletikosa, the Croatian Football Federation's technical director and a former national-team goalkeeper, which lent a note of friendly rivalry to the exchange — the mayor joked about presenting a gift "from one good goalie to another." Pletikosa, in turn, presented a framed Croatia national-team jersey to the mayor and council.
The proclamation also pointed beyond the games, noting the city's intention to celebrate Croatian culture in partnership with the Embassy of the Republic of Croatia — a thread the city has yet to fully detail.
Culture on the field
The program leaned into that cultural exchange. The Alexandria City High School Band played two cadences for the crowd. Then, traveling from Cokeburg, Pennsylvania, the St. George Junior Tamburitzans of Croatian Fraternal Union Lodge No. 354 performed traditional Croatian music and dance in national costume — a reminder that the country now adopting Alexandria as a temporary home already has deep roots in American communities. Fox 5 DC's Chad Ricardo emceed.
Focused on football
If the city was in a celebratory mood, the players were measured. At a packed afternoon press conference — the first the team has held at Episcopal — midfielder Kristijan Jakić and striker Igor Matanović fielded questions from a room of dozens of reporters, answering in Croatian through the team's translator.
Both made clear the team's stay here will be all business. The players had not left the team hotel except for the press conference and training, and said sightseeing would have to wait. You won't see them wandering the streets of Alexandria anytime soon, one noted; the focus is entirely on the games, with the city's restaurants and landmarks a possibility only if the team's tournament run buys it more time. Under FIFA rules, the squad will leave its Alexandria base after the group stage and relocate to wherever it plays next.
There were flashes of the personal. Jakić, who played a single minute in Croatia's bronze-medal match at the 2022 World Cup, called that minute a highlight of his career and said he hoped for a few more this time. Matanović, one of the younger players in a veteran squad, described the privilege of learning alongside Croatian greats like Luka Modrić and Ivan Perišić. Both spoke warmly of the growth of soccer in the United States — one player musing that, if the game keeps rising here, "maybe you'll see me here one day as well."
Croatia opens its tournament against England on June 17 in Dallas, followed by Panama on June 23 in Toronto and Ghana on June 27 in Philadelphia. The team will train in Alexandria between those trips, returning to base camp after each match.
What lingers
For all the focus on faraway stadiums, the evening's most durable image stayed local: world-class players crouching to sign a child's ball as the light went down over a high school field in Alexandria. Whether the night becomes a one-time spectacle or the start of something more lasting — for the city's profile, for its young players, for the friendship the mayor described — is the question the next month, and the city's follow-through, will answer.
