World Cup teams have been playing this game forever: book a bunch of decoy hotels, keep the real location quiet, hope the traveling fanbase doesn't figure it out before kickoff. England apparently went all in on the strategy this time around, reportedly locking down 15 separate hotels to throw Mexico supporters off the scent. It did not work.
Fireworks going off on the sidewalk outside the actual England team hotel, with fans camped out filming and watching.
However Mexico fans cracked the code, they showed up in force and treated the hotel like a concert venue, setting off noisemakers well into the night. Anyone who's ever tried to get a decent night's sleep before a big match knows this is the stuff nightmares are made of for a team trying to lock in before facing Mexico.
It wasn't just noise on the sidewalk, either. A pedestrian bridge near the hotel turned into its own scene, with a crowd gathering as flares and smoke lit up the night sky.
An aerial look at the pedestrian bridge packed with fans as flares streak through the smoke.
England's decoy-hotel plan turning into a viral fail is exactly the kind of chaos that makes international soccer fandom so much fun to watch from the outside — and exactly the kind of headache that makes it miserable if you're the team trying to sleep through it.