Good morning.

The buzz around next summer’s FIFA World Cup games in Vancouver and Toronto kicked up this past weekend when the schedule was announced and Canadians learned which teams would be playing in this country.

Besides two Canada games, fans at BC Place will see matches featuring teams from Australia, Belgium, New Zealand, Switzerland, Egypt and Qatar.

That has got some diaspora communities excited. Mohammad Abdou, director of the Association of Egyptians in Vancouver, said he’s in many group chats connecting hundreds of Egyptians in Canada. News that Egypt’s team will play in the city meant his phone blew up with chatter.

“For us, soccer is something like a second religion,” Abdou said in an interview with Globe reporter Andrea Woo on Sunday. “All of the WhatsApp groups, from morning until like midnight, it was all about soccer.”

But while the lead-up to the games has diehard soccer fans excited, there have been no red-mitten moments of the like that happened with the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The iconic woollen mitts, along with Canada-branded gear designed by retailer Roots, were everywhere then.

Meanwhile, civic officials have kicked into gear. Vancouver has introduced temporary bylaw changes to allow it to meet FIFA’s rules for “brand protection” and security.

Bylaw officers will be required to be on the lookout for graffiti or unauthorized advertising related to the games in the so-called “beautification zone,” an area covering much of the downtown peninsula, part of the Downtown Eastside and the south shore of False Creek, including Granville Island.

“We need to have these rules in place to make sure we don’t have that graffiti on the worldwide stage with billions of people literally watching,” deputy city manager Karen Levitt told councillors last month.

Businesses in the zone are also being told they cannot draw in patrons by advertising World Cup watch parties. Toronto has produced a guide on words to use and avoid when promoting such celebrations and pub owners are figuring out euphemisms: “Football is being played here!”

There is some disappointment, too, amid the hoopla.

Vancouver’s sizable Iranian community, for example, was disappointed to learn their team won’t play here.

Globe columnist Cathal Kelly said FIFA’s choices for Canada are an affront: The country got nothing in the way of big headliner teams between Vancouver’s matches and the six in Toronto.

The larger stadiums in the United States gave that country the games with top-ranked players, he wrote.

“In each instance where there was a good game versus a not-so-great game, America got dibs and Canada got their leftovers.”

The reveal of the game schedule on Saturday also meant people who had already bought tickets found out which games they’ll be seeing.

Apparently, some weren’t thrilled: Two hours after the announcement, tickets on StubHub for the June 17 Ghana versus Panama match in Toronto dropped more than 50 per cent in value, to a range of $763 to $1,163 from prices of $1,553 to $2,764 only minutes before the teams were known.

But most of the resale tickets to matches at BC Place were holding steady, with fluctuations of up to 10 per cent in either direction.

On Monday, as Frances Bula wrote, Vancouver organizers for the FIFA World Cup gathered members of the press to show off a new field in southeast Vancouver that will be one of the two practice pitches for the games.

Unlike the kind of city-changing legacy projects that transformed the region in 2010, the grass field at Killarney and the new outdoor amphitheatre at Hastings Park are not the kind of lasting benefits that make hosting events of this calibre worthwhile, critics say.

“It’s next to nothing,” said Vancouver park-board commissioner Brennan Bastyovanszky after the latest round of announcements about FIFA preparations in the city. “There’s nothing tangible here.”

But given how the draw worked out, Kelly argued it was wise for federal, provincial and municipal organizers not to get too ambitious building new stadiums.

“Instead, we stuck with the boring, aging, mid-sized stadiums we already have. On Saturday, it became indisputable that that was the right call. If somebody in Vancouver and/or Toronto wants new stadiums, they should pay for them themselves.”

This is the weekly British Columbia newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.