Fan Path Wants To Simplify World Cup 2026 Travel For Fans

Founder and CEO Karn Saxena joined SDH AM to explain how Fan Path aims to help supporters plan World Cup 2026 travel, find housing, connect with fellow fans, and manage a tournament spread across three countries.

Fan Path is pitching itself at exactly the right moment.

With the 2026 FIFA World Cup approaching, fans are starting to wrestle with a tournament that will be bigger, wider, and more complicated than anything the sport has seen before. It will span the United States, Canada, and Mexico. It will include 48 teams instead of 32. It will stretch across 16 host cities and thousands of miles.

On SDH AM, Fan Path founder and CEO Karn Saxena laid out his vision for a platform built to help supporters deal with that scale. The company’s website currently describes Fan Path as a place for fans to “simulate, connect, experience,” centered on helping supporters save money and coordinate travel around major events.

For Saxena, the idea started with a problem he ran into himself.

A lifelong sports fan who has traveled around the world for football, tennis, Formula 1, combat sports, and more, he said the process of attending major events has consistently been fragmented, expensive, and full of uncertainty. Tickets can be difficult to trust on the resale market. Travel planning gets pieced together across multiple websites and message boards. Reliable information is often hard to find.

That frustration sharpened during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.

Saxena said he spent roughly $12,000 over two weeks while attending the tournament, including the final and quarterfinals. Even in a compact host environment like Doha, he said congestion, ticket coordination, and fragmented fan communication were major challenges. When he projected that experience forward to North America in 2026, the scale of the problem became obvious.

Qatar was one city. World Cup 2026 will be three countries and 16 host markets.

That is the gap Fan Path is trying to fill.

Mercedes-Benz Stadium will host 8 matches this summer and fans will be coming from all over the world. (photo: Vanessa Angel for the SDH Network)

On SDH AM, Saxena described Fan Path as a platform designed to bring several pieces of the tournament experience into one place. That includes trip-planning tools, fan community spaces organized by national team, housing coordination, event discovery, and what he hopes will become a peer-to-peer ticket exchange system that avoids the heavy fees and markups of traditional resale platforms.

One of the earliest sparks for the project came from a simpler question: where could Argentina and Portugal potentially meet in the knockout round?

Saxena said he went looking for bracket simulators after the 2022 World Cup group stage was finalized and found inconsistent results across the internet. As a founder and builder, he decided to construct the model himself based on the tournament format. From there, the project expanded from a simulator into something much bigger.

That broader vision is what now defines Fan Path.

Saxena said the platform is being built around “nation communities,” with supporters of teams like Argentina, Brazil, England, or the Netherlands able to gather in their own spaces. Those communities would not just be about conversation. In his description, they would also become practical planning hubs where fans could share housing options, coordinate stays, post events, and exchange information specific to their team’s path through the tournament.

At the same time, he emphasized that the platform is not meant to be sealed off by nationality. Users would still be able to filter across the wider Fan Path community, meaning a fan based in one group could still explore housing, events, or intel tied to other teams and other supporters.

That flexibility matters in a World Cup setting where many supporters will not be traveling only for one match or one team. Some will be following a national team closely. Others will be host-city based, planning around whatever happens in their market. Others still will be looking for the most efficient and affordable way to sample as much of the tournament as possible.

Saxena said Fan Path is also working on a feature called “My Path,” which he described as a conversational trip planner. According to his explanation on the show, it would allow users to input factors such as budget, travel appetite, comfort level, and risk tolerance, then generate itinerary options around those answers.

That kind of planning may be especially relevant for local fans in host cities like Atlanta, who may not be following one team as much as they are trying to maximize the event in their own backyard.

Another major part of Fan Path’s pitch is information.

Saxena said one of his biggest frustrations in Qatar was trying to track practical intelligence around teams, especially details like where training sessions were being held and when fans might have access. He described that information as scattered across WhatsApp groups, Facebook posts, and message boards, without one trusted source. Fan Path, he said, is trying to partner with football federations to provide more official and verified intel inside the platform.

He was careful not to name the federations currently in discussions, describing those conversations as still being in early stages. But the goal was clear: if fans are going to cross countries and spend heavily to follow the tournament, the information they rely on needs to be better than rumor and guesswork.

There is also a business layer to all of this.

Saxena argued that sports still lags behind major tech platforms when it comes to understanding fan behavior outside the stadium. In his view, teams and federations know plenty about in-person spending but far less about how global online supporters behave, travel, coordinate, and engage. Fan Path, he said, wants to help close that gap through anonymized fan data while remaining compliant with privacy rules like GDPR.

In practical terms, the immediate focus is more basic.

Saxena said the company is aiming for a hard launch in May after an earlier soft-launch plan tied to the Finalissima fell through. Between now and then, he said the priorities are product development and federation partnerships: making sure the app and web experience work cleanly, and making sure the information ecosystem behind it is strong enough to be useful.

That timeline gives Fan Path only a narrow runway before World Cup travel planning begins to accelerate, but it also underlines why the concept is getting attention now.

Supporters do not just need tickets for 2026. They need coordination. They need trustworthy information. They need ways to manage travel costs across a continent-sized tournament. And they need better tools than scattered group chats and overpriced resale platforms.

That is the opening Fan Path sees. The problem it is trying to solve is real, and for anyone already staring at flights, host cities, and possible knockout-round paths, it is easy to understand why the idea resonates.