A hydration break during Netherlands versus Tunisia at the 2026 World Cup. Photo by elisfkc3, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

It is axiomatic that countries hosting the World Cup try to put their best face forward. During the monthlong tournament, streets are cleared of anything (and anyone) that might offend the eye, political evils are swept under the rug, warm welcomes generally abound, and even authoritarian states, or those with notoriously disturbing human rights records, present themselves as sporting, full of bonhomie, and as cuddly as their official stuffed mascots. This time around, Mexico and Canada appear to have offered the standard warm embrace to teams and tourists alike; Mexico went so far as to provide a base for the Iranian team after the U.S. refused to allow its members to train, or even stay overnight, on American soil.

In general, Trump’s government, which might claim it is simply eschewing hypocrisy, has been proud to display its ruthless, cruel, and ugly side, as if to declare, godlike, “We are what we are.” Hence, before the first whistle had been blown, Omar Artan, the FIFA-approved, award-winning Somali referee, was denied entry and deported, while Iraq’s star player and vice captain, Aymen Hussein, was held by border patrol at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport and questioned for almost seven hours before being admitted. The Iraqi team’s photographer was not so lucky, nor were a number of Iranian officials and support staff, who were all given thumbs down for visas, along with untold thousands of fans from countries the U.S. doesn’t like. Despite the hostile intent suggested by their Viking helmets and imaginary longboats, no problems arose for the Norwegians. 

The question is always, Can the excitement of o jogo bonito transcend not only a host country’s xenophobic politics but also FIFA’s eternal greed and aura of corruption? How much can fans conveniently forget in order to enjoy the games? The answer, evidently, is a lot. A case in point: this year, for the first time, FIFA introduced compulsory hydration breaks at the midway point of each half. This seemed a reasonable response to the extreme heat forecast for some of the venues, and clearly good for the players’ health. However, more than a few games were scheduled in air-conditioned domes, or in locations with temperate climates. The hydration breaks quickly generated an animated fan response. Fox Sports, so the story went, had colluded with FIFA to generate more commercial revenue by turning football into a U.S.-style game with four quarters. 

“Fucking hydration breaks,” a fan yelled behind me on the way into the newly named New York New Jersey Stadium (it’s in New Jersey) to watch France play Senegal, then added, “Fattening the fucking capitalist wallet.” When the game began and the peerless Kylian Mbappé scored, he forgot all about wallets and I saw him fall into a kind of rapture. Meanwhile, the longest hydration break of all was taken by the Scottish fans in Boston, who may have drained the city of beer. Among its rewards for Scotland’s win, Boston became Glasgow’s sister city. It was surprising, given Boston’s fondness for the Celtic tradition, that no one had considered this before.

I heard the boos loudest in Boston Stadium when England played Ghana, in one of many matchups between a former colonizer and the formerly colonized. In my section, much of it was aimed at a sole tall, inebriated England fan who refused to sit down. Our entire phalanx of the crowd booed, yelled, clapped, and sang “Sit down” in unison, but he wouldn’t budge, instead bursting out into a verse of “Rule, Britannia!” The guy next to me started yelling about the “fucking Brits,” seemingly ready to punch someone. His girlfriend, wearing a blue Italy shirt, leaned over and said to me, “You can take the boy out of East Boston but you can’t take the East Boston out of the boy.” 

***

I started watching the World Cup on TV, broadcast by the BBC on a two-day delay from Chile, as a twelve-year-old Londoner in 1962. I remember very well witnessing the infamous Battle of Santiago, when Italian and Chilean players kicked one another up into the air and the police intervened more than once on the pitch. David Coleman, the BBC’s go-to football commentator, offered this from his elevated position as an Englishman raised on fair play: “The game you are about to see is the most stupid, appalling, disgusting, and disgraceful exhibition of football, possibly in the history of the game.” I was all in! 

The first World Cup game I attended was England against France at Wembley Stadium in 1966, a 2–0 victory for England in a tournament that it went on to win, its sole triumph in the past sixty years. In 1994, the last time that the tournament was held in the States, I traveled the country covering the games for an American magazine. Both the game and its analysts have undergone changes over the years, many of them cosmetic but perhaps none more perceptible than a reliance on and recourse to statistics as a way to apprehend player and team performance. A salient example: “assists” have been credited in international soccer only since 1994, a U.S. intervention and the first skid on the slippery slope to hydration breaks. 

Warm-ups before England versus Ghana. Photograph by Jonathan Wilson.

The game has also become more data-driven, with a plethora of statistics now available on demand from Opta and other sites. And yet what has struck me most are the nearly spiritual swells of emotion from what have been both huge and hugely enthusiastic crowds. In and up from their seats, almost always wearing team shirts in primary and secondary colors, dancing to drumbeats from different continents, supporters are governed by hope, will, exhortations (sometimes tearful), and prayers to a wide variety of deities, as well as more or less every one of humankind’s globally recognized irrational affiliations. Warren Zevon told us a long time ago that sometimes the mystics and statistics say the same thing, but where the World Cup is concerned, they often work in opposition rather than in tandem. The stats tell us that Harry Kane, Lionel Messi, and Cristiano Ronaldo have all missed penalties in World Cup games, while Kylian Mbappé has not. An algorithm can calculate the probability of Mbappé fluffing one, but not the one you’re watching him about to take, which is clearly up to the gods and whether or not you’re wearing your lucky full-kit-wanker socks. (Thursday night, the gods ruled against him, when he flubbed against Morocco.)

***

Somehow, between taking the tube on the old Bakerloo line to Wembley Park in 1966 and riding NJ Transit to the Meadowlands station in 2026, I have watched or attended sixteen World Cups. In 1994, the stadiums drew surprisingly large crowds by American standards, but now they are packed even for games that, on paper, don’t sound too sexy. Scotland versus Haiti drew a full house at Boston Stadium. The Democratic Republic of Congo’s triumph over Uzbekistan brought out more than sixty thousand spectators in Atlanta. Despite the exorbitant prices occasioned by FIFA’s dynamic pricing system and the Stephen-Miller-time border restrictions, attendance records have all been shattered. (It should be noted that ICE, though busy hanging around at college graduations, seems to have given the World Cup a pass.) The world’s most popular sport has finally taken hold here and, as if to celebrate that fact, the sport’s brightest stars—Messi, Mbappé, Haaland, and Kane—are shining. The millions are watching and holding their breath. 

What’s more, in this tournament of miracles and wonders, the minnows have been shocking the sharks—no team more so than Cape Verde’s, who quickly became the darling, first by tying with Spain and then by giving Argentina a major scare in a game of astonishing sublimity before succumbing in overtime. Along the way, the team’s forty-year-old goalkeeper, Vozinha (which means “little grandma”), became a media sensation. So did the recruitment story of Roberto “Pico” Lopes, the team’s center back, who usually plays for Ireland’s Shamrock Rovers. Born in Dublin to a Cape Verdean father, the defender was invited for international duty by way of a LinkedIn message he didn’t respond to because it was in Portuguese and he thought it was spam. Eventually he received a notification in English and replied. This may be the most interesting thing that has ever happened on LinkedIn.

Every culturally extended fiesta has its own local Altamont, the end of the party, and it arrived for Mexico on Sunday night. The Aztec stadium was filled to its eighty thousand capacity and ready to erupt, only for El Tri to lose 3–2 to England in one of the greatest World Cup games ever played. The U.S. suffered the same on Tuesday when it lost to Belgium 4–1, an act of instant karma following Trump’s ridiculous interference in l’affaire Balogun. (After America’s star Folarin Balogun received a red card, Trump seemingly interfered with the ruling, a combination of instinct and ignorance having convinced him that the American striker had made “no infraction,” even while conceding that he had no idea what a red card was.) This was a shame for a team that had acquitted itself well under the tutelage of their discerning coach, the likable oenophile Mauricio Pochettino (he specializes in Argentine wines).

England versus Ghana at Boston Stadium. Photograph by Jonathan Wilson.

Dispiriting defeats for all three host countries aside, these are golden days for soccer in North America. The games have been almost universally thrilling, with the unfortunate exception of Paraguay’s brutal assault on France and the subsequent monologue of racist slurs against Mbappé delivered by one of Paraguay’s senators, Celeste Amarilla. Two days after the Trump fiasco, I went down to a local restaurant called Tango Mango to watch Argentina play Egypt, the game that nearly provided the greatest upset of the tournament. It was my first visit to this particular lunch spot, and I had assumed from its name that it served Argentine food. It turned out that the emphasis was more on the mango than the tango. The fare was Mexican.

There were four big screens all tuned to Telemundo, whose ratings have been through the roof: 23.1 million for Mexico versus England. Most customers in the restaurant were simply concentrating on their burritos, until Egypt scored and scored again and suddenly people were coming in off the street to watch. In the seventy-ninth minute, Argentina’s great fight began with a goal for Cristian Romero and then, inevitably, one for Messi, and finally, in the second minute of injury time, a winning header from Enzo Fernández. Messi cried, and so did the Egyptian fans in their wonderful King Tut headdresses.  

The end-of-the-World-Cup party approaches on July 19, back at New York New Jersey Stadium. Trump says he will attend and thereby get his hands on the gold trophy. Will he pass it on to the captain of the winning team? (After all, he kept the trophy that Chelsea won in the Club World Cup last year, giving the team a “high-quality replica.”) Perhaps he’ll hear a single raspberry emitted from a lone vuvuzela, the long horn whose slapstick toots defined the South Africa World Cup in 2010. Or maybe he’ll just get the hydration-break treatment. 

Jonathan Wilson is the author of Kick and Run: Memoir with Soccer Ball. His most recent novel is The Red Balcony. He is Fletcher Professor of Rhetoric and Debate Emeritus at Tufts University.