As the FIFA World Cup captures global attention, much of the conversation centers on matches, rankings, sponsorships, and economic impact. But some of the tournament’s most meaningful moments are unfolding far from the stadium—including inside a children’s hospital in suburban New York, where I watched a group of Brazilian supporters transform hospital hallways into a World Cup celebration for children who could not experience the tournament themselves.
The cheering echoed through the halls of Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital, where patient wards are called neighborhoods and where the hospital’s founding mission traces back to 13-year-old Maria Fareri, whose death in 1995 inspired her family’s vision of a hospital devoted to “the health and well-being of all the children in the world.” Flags waved, songs were sung, and smiles spread from room to room as Brazilian supporters brought the spirit of the World Cup to children who could not experience it from the stands.
Dressed in the green and yellow of Brazil, members of Torcedores da Alegria — Fans of Happiness — moved from neighborhood to neighborhood, turning hospital corridors into something closer to a stadium concourse. Their chants, songs, and infectious enthusiasm transformed patient rooms into spaces of laughter and connection. Some children followed the World Cup closely. Others did not know a single player or team. It didn’t matter. The visitors adapted to each child — favorite teams, favorite sports, favorite players — at one point breaking into an enthusiastic chant for the New York Knicks, drawing cheers from kids and parents alike.
A Movement Born in 2018
The visitors were members of Movimento Verde e Amarelo — the Green and Yellow Movement — a Brazilian fan organization named for the colors of the national flag. Its signature initiative, Torcedores da Alegria, was created during the 2018 World Cup in Russia with a simple mission: bring the joy and atmosphere of the tournament to people who cannot be part of the celebration themselves.
“We wanted to bring a little bit of the joy and atmosphere of the World Cup to those who can’t be there at the stadium or on the streets during this moment,” said Dr. Fernando Pontes, a breast surgeon and leader of the delegation. “We want to bring joy and make them smile so they can get better soon.”
The visit didn’t happen by chance. Dr. Raphael Besborodco, a neurology resident at Westchester Medical Center who grew up in Brazil, helped connect the group with the hospital.
“Having grown up in Brazil, I saw on multiple occasions how much patients benefit from experiences like these,” Besborodco said. “So when we had the opportunity to bring that experience to the WMCHealth network, with a Brazilian group visiting during the World Cup, it couldn’t have been a better fit.”
A Shift in How Hospitals Heal
Children’s hospitals have increasingly formalized this kind of work. Child life specialists — credentialed professionals trained to support children’s emotional and developmental needs during medical care — are now common fixtures in pediatric hospitals, and many, like Maria Fareri, have built partnerships with professional sports teams, athletes, and cultural organizations into how they approach the patient experience alongside clinical care. The federal government has even built a standardized tool for measuring it: Child HCAHPS, a survey developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, allows hospitals to benchmark pediatric patients’ and families’ experience of care nationally. Visits like this one are increasingly viewed as part of that broader experience.
Pediatric care providers and child life specialists generally hold that a child’s experience of illness is shaped by more than treatment alone, and that positive emotional experiences can ease anxiety and help children cope with the stress of hospitalization. A visit like this one isn’t medicine in the traditional sense. But it may be part of healing all the same. It reflects a broader shift in how hospitals think about healing — as something that involves emotional and psychological well-being alongside medicine.
That shift helps explain why a Brazilian soccer fan club, in town for the World Cup, made time to visit a New York pediatric hospital in between matches.
“Whatever makes them feel good, we cheer for them,” Pontes said. For some children, that meant cheering for Brazil. For others, it meant basketball, football, or a hometown team. The common language wasn’t Portuguese or English. It was simply joy.
A Different View of the Hospital
For Pontes, who spends his professional life treating breast cancer patients, the visits have offered a different vantage point on the practice of medicine.
“As doctors, we see the other side of the hospital,” he reflected. “When we started doing this, for me, it was a really different and special feeling to see this side too.”
Besborodco had a similar moment of discovery, watching from the other side of the cultural exchange he had helped arrange.
“I didn’t know what to expect in terms of how the children would react, but that disappeared the moment the group walked into the first room and we saw how easily the children connected with them,” he said. “It was absolutely worth it.”
Dr. Wendy Rosenzweig, Physician-in-Chief and Chair of the Department of Pediatrics at Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital and Chair of Pediatrics at New York Medical College, witnessed the visit firsthand.
“Thanks to the Brazilian team ‘Fans of Happiness’ for bringing many smiles to Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital,” Rosenzweig said. “Happiness, like futbol, is a team sport.”
It’s a fitting metaphor for what the morning actually looked like. No single person made it happen — not the volunteers who navigated the hospital’s neighborhoods in Brazilian colors, not Besborodco who made the introduction, not the hospital staff who opened their doors. By the end of the morning, happiness had moved through every neighborhood in the hospital.
Why It Matters Beyond the Hospital
The U.S. and Brazil are not currently scheduled to meet on the field in this World Cup. But inside a children’s hospital in New York, the two nations met anyway—not as competitors, but as collaborators on a mission to help children facing illness feel, for a few hours, like champions themselves.
The visit was a reminder of something easy to lose in a tournament covered mostly through the lens of competition and commerce. Sporting events create a shared language that crosses nationality, politics, and circumstance. The World Cup final is weeks away. But for a group of children at Maria Fareri, the more lasting memory may be the morning a group of strangers in green and yellow showed up just to cheer for them.
