Fútbol, You Bet

It’s been pretty much all soccer all the time around here of late.

For one thing, Kim, I met Lauren in Madison to see our local professional team play Wednesday night. We’d gone a couple of years ago and enjoyed it, so we figured it would be a lovely evening and indeed it was, storms notwithstanding.

It’s been a stormy year here in Baja Canada, it has to be said. Apparently as of today Wisconsin has had over 280 severe thunderstorm or tornado warnings – warnings mean you’ve got one, while watches mean you could get one – and that’s more in the last four months than all of the previous fourteen years combined. So, yeah, we got that going for us.

Fortunately the severe thunderstorm and tornado passed just a bit south of us and cleared off before game time. We decided to have dinner at a nearby Tibetan restaurant before the game rather than get food at the stadium, though, since the restaurant had a roof and it was in fact raining at that point. It was really, really good food, so if you’re in Madison and looking for tasty Asian food I have a place to recommend. The owners are actually Nepalese, and we had a lovely conversation with them about the various cuisines of the region.

From there it was about a four-minute walk over to Breese Stevens Field where FC Madison plays, and with the earlier rain slowing down all the pre-game activities we even managed to get there before kickoff. The opponents were Fort Wayne, the referee was an idiot who lost control of the game early (which is why the Madison coach got red-carded in the 17th minute – there are certain words that are automatic cards in soccer, no matter how justified one is in using them, and if you use them twice in succession that’s two cards all at once), and in the end it was a hard-fought and entertaining 1-1 draw.

It was also Free Hat Night.

Of course, all of this comes as the 2026 World Cup gets up and running. This year it’s being hosted by all of the North American countries – Canada, Mexico, and the US – which means that it has made a bigger impression on Americans than usual. Most times you’d be hard pressed to find a dozen Americans in any given census tract who even knew what the World Cup was, let alone that it was happening, but since this time it’s spread out across the entire US and our neighbors it seems to have penetrated the zeitgeist a bit more than usual.

And that’s all to the good, I say. Yes, I understand that FIFA is one of the most corrupt organizations in the world, on a scale that rivals Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s kleptocratic tyranny, but it’s the most popular sport on the planet, these are the best male players in the world (the women get to do this next year), and you might as well enjoy the spectacle in this fallen world.

We’ve been watching some of the games as best we can, given the fact that both Kim and I are still gainfully employed – not always guaranteed in the higher education world – and they’ve been fun. We don’t get any of the English-language broadcasts, but fortunately Peacock – to which we already subscribe in order to watch Premier League games (and let us pause briefly for a moment of silence for my poor, extremely relegated Wolves) – carries the Spanish-language broadcasts and let me tell you those are a lot more fun even if, and perhaps especially if, you don’t actually speak the language.

Those guys get excited by the game.

I know only a very small amount of Spanish which is often enough for me to fight my way through something written or spoken slowly but there is no way I can keep up with a conversation at speed, let alone soccer commentary at a much higher speed. All of the words blend together and while I can pick out some words here and there (“pelota!”) and once in a while they throw in some strangely American-accented English (“English Premier League”) I mostly go by tone. When the words speed up more than usual and the tone starts to rise that means something exciting is happening. Or might happen. Or just happened. Or possibly that it’s Tuesday. Whatever. It keeps me on my toes.

I have to admit I was more than a little hesitant about the fact that the World Cup is being staged in the US under our current regime. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves have never once missed an opportunity to be petty, cruel, vindictive, immoral, or violently authoritarian, and their reaction to the World Cup has been of a piece with that.

They banned a Somali referee from coming to the US despite him being fully vetted as Not A Terrorist. Apparently the idea of Somalis in America was just too much for these Nativist clowns. They made it almost impossible for the Iranian team to compete, forcing them to stay in Mexico unless they are actually playing a game in the US and then leave US territory within minutes of the game ending. Don’t even get me started on the shabby treatment of Iranian fans or the fans of several other brown-skinned nations. They yanked the Uruguayan team off their bus and sicced sniffer dogs on them because somewhere one of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s minions read (probably in a comic book) that a lot of cocaine comes from one of those countries in South America and it might have been that one and they might be using their World Cup soccer team to smuggle it into the US because that’s obviously how that sort of thing works. It took formal protests to stop their plan to seed the World Cup stadiums with ICE thugs, and even now I wouldn’t be surprised if they do it anyway – those jackbooted Fascists seem to regard themselves as untouchable, much as the SS did until suddenly they weren’t.

So yeah, I had my fears.

And yet not only has it not worked out that way, at least so far, but also it has been an astonishingly restorative experience overall to watch the visiting fans discover so many of the things about the US that we ourselves have forgotten in the avalanche of deliberately cruel and divisive cultural politics over the last decade or so. It’s been a long few years recently – and a very long two years in particular – and to see these visitors experience what the US can actually be and should actually be has been astonishingly lovely.

For one thing, my fellow Americans have generally responded to these visitors with warmth and hospitality. The entire city of Lawrence, Kansas turned out to welcome the Algerian national team. New Jersey fans partied with Moroccan fans. There’s a marvelous video of a cop hyping up the Egypt fans while everyone was waiting for something or other. And lest you think this is limited to here, the love fest going on in Mexico with the Korean fans and team has been amazing. I’ve trained my various social media algorithms to show me all of these things, and if you haven’t you should. One of my favorites was a reel where someone interviewed three or four big, burly American men dressed entirely in flag outfits, all of whom were asked what they would say to the Iranian fans. “You are welcome here,” they said. “This event is meant to celebrate the world despite our government’s actions.” “The everyday American wants you to feel welcome.” “The World Cup is not about shutting people out.” This is what it should be, not the ginned-up hatred spouted by the current American regime, and to see it coming from these guys in particular was cheering.

One English visitor filmed his friend at a Mississippi BBQ place as they ordered ribs. When the ribs came one of them – in a proper English move, it has to be said – pulled out a knife and fork and the restaurant owner just said, “No” and taught him how to eat ribs properly. The stunned look of joy as the guy took his first bite was worth the entire video. BBQ has been a theme among the visitors, actually – there’s a lot of reels focusing on it. It’s something the US does very, very well and Americans have been happy to share it.

Visitors have posted videos of themselves walking into firehouses and getting tours of the stations, of walking around neighborhoods, of dancing in streets. It’s amazing.

As an American it has been lovely to see them enjoying so many of the things that we just take for granted.

The stores that we go to – Buc-cee’s, Target, 7/11, Walmart, Costco, Bass Pro Shops – that have had them marveling. The yellow school buses that many of them were convinced existed only in movies. Steam vents on city sidewalks. Wild squirrels. It’s all new to them and their reactions make me want to experience these things through their eyes.

The national parks and the open spaces.

The stadiums and all the excess that Americans devote to them – the bald eagle flight before the game, the warplane flyover, the admittedly odd tradition of everyone singing Sweet Caroline somewhere about three-quarters of the way through any game. Watching the future king of England singing along was an experience.

And the food. My god, do they love the food here. As someone who has traveled abroad and marveled at the food there, it is both amusing and deeply heartwarming to see people doing the same in this direction.

The Italian visitor frankly amazed at the idea of free refills on sodas (“I can refill this a thousand times?”). The corn bread. The boiled peanuts. The barbecue, all the time the barbecue. The machines that some fast-food places have that allow you to combine hundreds of kinds of soda and flavors (which admittedly took me a bit to get used to as well).

Ranch dressing. Do they not have this anywhere else in the world? Apparently not. I live in the midwest where people put ranch on everything including pizza so perhaps I’m a bit jaded and that, really is the point. All of this knocks the jaded right out of us and we see through their eyes and it is new and amazing like it was the first time we tried it.

I lost track of all the people flocking to their nearest Waffle House – admittedly an icon of American eating, an experience not to be missed, and a cultural keystone of regret, spectacle, and grease that defines so much of the American experience. You have to love Waffle House.

Texas Roadhouse also seems to be a favorite among the visitors – I’ve seen videos from Africans (who rarely specify their home country for some reason), Australians, French people, and British people talking about it. “I don’t know why Americans are so angry all the time,” said one. “You have Texas Roadhouse. If we had that back home we’d be walking around hugging people all day.”

As one American said, of course our food tastes good. We’re not here getting chronic diseases for nothing.

One of my personal favorites was a Japanese visitor who went to a Mexican restaurant in the US and found himself presented with chips and salsa, and I can’t even explain it in a way that does it justice so here it is in the original:

Some of the best things I’ve seen are just clips of the visitors enjoying themselves here.

The Dutch fans dancing their sideways dance.

Norwegians doing that rowing motion that they do, in the streets and up escalators.

Japanese fans meeting cowboys.

The Ecuadorians, who took over Philadelphia, sang in the El, and partied on the Art Museum steps though nobody told them about the Rocky Curse – no visiting team who puts their jersey on the statue of Rocky at the Art Museum wins their game, and they duly lost to Cote d’Ivoire. The Brazilians are there now, partying just as hard if not harder, but they’ve posted guards at the statue.

And, of course, the Tartan Army. “No Scotland, no party!” as the song goes. They sang with the Iraqi fans in the streets of Boston. They took over Fenway Park during a Red Sox game. They paraded through the streets – pipes and drums calling – thousands strong to get to Fenway. They literally drank Boston out of beer – one bar noted that they did three times the business they usually do on St. Patrick’s Day, and at a nearby liquor store when someone came in to buy a case of water they booed.

They also cleaned the park after they left, much as the Japanese fans did at the stadium where they played. That’s a class act. They even donated thousands to local charities in Boston and Providence where they were staying.

My favorite bit from the Tartan Army is that they have brought the Glasgow tradition of putting traffic cones on statues to America. It started with the statue of the Duke of York in Glasgow in the 1980s, and eventually the city stopped fighting it.

And now it’s here.

The thing is, all of this has been a balm to the American soul. We’ve had a long, hard decade of division, tyranny, and anger. We needed to see joy for a change. We needed to be reminded of who we can be when there is nobody actively working to rob us of that. To see and participate in community. Kindness. Service. Diversity. Welcome. Healing. We’ve been starved of that in the public sphere for so very long, and it took all of these outsiders, all of these visitors, to make us see what we’ve lost so we could find it again.

“The World Cup didn’t need us,” said one American on social media. “We needed the World Cup.”

I watched a video today where a guy from Boston talked about how his city had a whole different vibe now, joyous and oddly unified. It has been wonderful, he said, to see how great it could be if we had things like the World Cup more often to bring people together and bring them into the city to celebrate with each other, and it will be hard when it’s over because we’ve been reminded of how things can be better. “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days when you’re in them,” he said. “This feels like one of those times.”

We still have problems in the US. They haven’t and won’t magically go away because of the World Cup. We’re still ruled by a senile, corrupt pedophile and his cult of slaves. We just lost an illegal war of aggression that he started for no coherent reason. We still have a frightening degree of economic inequality, there are Fascist thugs wearing federal badges hauling the innocent away without due process, we have a racism problem that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough, and so on. None of these things have disappeared.

But it has been good to be reminded of who we can be, of who we are. That we can come together with kindness and community, that we can welcome the visitors and bring them into our lives in joyous celebration, and if we can do that here, if we can look into the mirror that is being held up to us by our World Cup visitors, we can do it elsewhere and we can do it when they’re gone.

We can be better than the last decade. We are better than the last decade. Sometimes you need people from outside to help you see that.

To all our visitors, thank you. Welcome to the United States. We will try to be good and kind hosts, to show you the best of our country and people, and send you home with cherished memories. We will try to carry that over into the rest of our lives and into our broader society. It may take some time. We will not completely succeed. But we will try.