"They're bullies, plain and simple." That's a former town selectman and high school principal talking about the Kraft family — owners of the New England Patriots, Gillette Stadium, and, at the moment, a lawsuit against the very town that hosts them.
With the World Cup's final local fixture at Gillette wrapping up this week, Foxborough residents are taking stock. The tournament ran smoother than many expected — trains worked, traffic was managed, and the neighborhood saw Haitian families barbecuing with kilted Scots before a match and Norwegians juggling with Iraqis outside the ground. Good stuff. But the old friction between the town and its most powerful resident hasn't gone anywhere.
A $1 million fight hiding behind the flags
Kraft Sports and Entertainment LLC and the Patriots sued Foxborough in Norfolk Superior Court last month, arguing the town is improperly using the stadium's annual entertainment license renewal to extract nearly $1 million in charges they say aren't authorized under state law. This week, the town fired back, asking a judge to dismiss the suit and arguing the Krafts — not local taxpayers — are contractually on the hook for public safety costs at their own venue.
Between 2023 and 2025, Gillette and its affiliates paid approximately $42 million to the town, including over $4 million for police, fire, and EMS in 2025 alone, according to a statement from Kraft Sports + Entertainment. That's their case: we already pay. Residents like Bert Delaney, the former selectman, aren't impressed. "Anytime they don't get what they want, they threaten the town with legal action," he said.
Retired correction officer Paul Morrison put it more bluntly: "When he snaps his fingers, he wants the town to jump."
Not everyone's throwing stones
Foxborough isn't a monolith on this. Cal Davis, a 70-year-old semi-retired cabinetmaker who has been parking cars at his licensed North Street lot since a Grateful Dead concert in 1989, sees the bigger picture. "He's done so much and people expect so much more," Davis said of Kraft. His World Cup experience was positive enough that he's now hoping the logistics success opens the door for a future Super Bowl at Gillette.
Without the stadium, as more than one resident acknowledged, Foxborough is just another patch of Massachusetts suburbia. The venue gives the town its identity, its economy, and its chaos — skinny-dippers in neighbors' pools after concerts, barefoot women walking Route 1 after CountryFest, and on quieter nights, the roar of the crowd audible from backyard decks along North Street.
Delaney's question cuts through all of it, though. Once the World Cup bunting comes down and the final accounting is done, what did Foxborough actually net from hosting seven matches of the biggest sporting event on earth? "That's what I want to know," he said. So do a lot of people.
