‘It means love’: Scottish World Cup fans celebrate Boston with orange traffic cone | 2026 World Cup
Fresh off its first-class flight from Glasgow, it received a welcome worthy of a visiting dignitary: a bagpiper in full costume playing inside Boston Logan International Airport. Waiting to greet it were ambassadors, the governor and the mayor of Boston.
A celebrity guest? Orange traffic cone.
Tuesday’s arrival of the “Boston cone” marked the latest chapter in the city’s unexpected love affair with the Scottish army’s tartan, whose practice of placing traffic cones atop pictures during the team’s World Cup matches last month turned the humble orange cone into one of the tournament’s defining symbols.
“I have to admit, this is probably – yes, – my first official ceremony to accept a traffic cone,” said Maura Healey, the governor of Massachusetts, in terminal E of the airport, before signing his name on the corner. “But it’s very special, isn’t it? Because this piece is about what happened this summer. What happened in Boston, what happened in Massachusetts.”
“And special thanks to the Scots for drinking all the beer,” he added to a laugh. “I promise you, when you come back … we’ll never run out of beer in Massachusetts again.”
During the World Cup tour of Scottish fans, Boston pubs struggled to keep up with the tartan army’s thirst, with some running out of beer and calling for emergency deliveries. Fans turned parts of Boston into an unofficial center of Scotland, filling the city with pipes, chants and chants while bright orange traffic cones sprouted over some of the city’s most iconic landmarks, from the Samuel Adams statue outside Faneuil Hall, to the Celtics’ Red Auerbach outside TD Market or Keviny’s Kevin to the Make TD White duck statues in the Public Garden.
“There are still traffic scenes in our most important statues,” Boston mayor Michelle Wu joked Tuesday, recalling how Boston was “illegally New Scotland”.
The official commemorative cone, decorated with images celebrating Boston and Scotland and the slogan “No Boston, No Party”, will spend the next week touring landmarks across Massachusetts to raise money for mental health charities before returning home to Scotland.
The tradition dates back to Glasgow, where placing bright orange traffic cones over public figures began as a late-night pastime in the 1980s before evolving into an illegal symbol of the country’s irreverent humour. A well-known example is the statue of the Duke of Wellington in the city centre, where the statue has become so iconic that repeated attempts to remove it have been met with public opposition.
“It’s an extreme joke,” said one of Scotland’s corner attendants, Danny Campbell, laughing as he stood by the corner in kit. “But no, it’s not a joke. This is a metaphor for life.”
Campbell said people can get consumed with “going to our jobs and cooking sausages and all the kind of serious things that adults have to do” and forget what’s important.
“That’s what our people stood for when they came here,” he said, referring to the stay of Scotland fans in Boston. “They left their stomachs and cheeks sore from laughing, they cleaned themselves, they spread happiness, and these people came together through humor and built relationships with each other.”
“This is not just a silly cone,” Campbell said. “It means love. It means love, and that’s the whole point.”
