We are a nation of contradictions, buffering at 4K. There is an aspect of cultural schizophrenia to the World Cup. To feel it properly, you have to scroll back through the sheer spectacle of mass culture we have been served over the last twelve months — the whole psychotic slideshow.
—First there was Kristi Noem, out on horseback, talking tough about illegal immigration like a character who wandered off the set of Yellowstone and forgot to return the horse.
—Then there was Pam Bondi, issuing directives putting sanctuary cities — and the “aliens” within them — formally On Notice. Then came the nighttime roundups on the evening news, shot with the hushed, urgent camerawork of a nature documentary.
—Then Jeffrey Epstein came bobbing back up into the national consciousness, as he periodically does, like a ball you keep shoving underwater that keeps surfacing on the far side of the pool.
—Then there was an actual shooting war with Iran — a real one, with the Strait of Hormuz and everything, a body of water roughly 100 percent of Americans could not have located on a map the previous Tuesday.
—And then the whole deranged pageant reached what felt like its natural crescendo: a professional cage fight — a genuine MMA title bout — staged on the front lawn of the White House, beneath an 87-foot octagon and an overhead lighting rig that a grown adult, in a meeting, with a straight face, named “The Claw.”
—But then, in a final and most improbable twist, every bit of it was wiped off our screens and replaced by the one force still capable of reuniting a shattered republic. Dominating the television once again, washing over the entire culture like a rinse cycle: FIFA World Cup soccer. Full circle. We had come all the way around, from a nation rounding people up to a nation getting weepy over Ecuador.
—Which is how you find yourself, on this and every summer evening, in a living room from Longboat Key to Longmont, watching an entire country that spent a year starring in its own fever dream now settle in with a cold drink to watch grown men from distant nations kick a ball approximately nowhere.
—Only in a deconstructed America — a country held together almost entirely by streaming services and the collective fear of losing one’s password — could those two things follow one another so seamlessly, on adjacent tabs.
—FIFA Trumps Ice
—Here is the part that would keep me up at night. We spent the last half of last year and the first half of this one rounding up more or less anyone who had claimed asylum for any reason other than a sports scholarship, a math scholarship, or a short and grateful turn in the hospitality industry. Whole planeloads of people were returned to the very countries we had decided, on reflection, we had no room for.
—And now every single one of those countries has come roaring back — through FIFA, of all agencies — onto the World Cup stage. We are, at this exact moment, hosting them. The United States is co-hosting the whole spectacle with Canada and Mexico across eleven American cities, which means we deported the world in the spring and mailed it a stadium in the summer. Senegal is here. Ecuador is here. Ivory Coast, Morocco, Egypt, Iran — all here, all sponsored, all with commemorative merchandise. It is the largest and most awkward family reunion in recorded history, and remarkably, no one has brought it up.
—Amnesty: The Subjective Sport Nobody Medals In
—I have come to believe that amnesty is itself a kind of sport — a purely subjective, point-of-view game played mostly in immigration holding cells. There are two ways to play. You can take the liberal position, which is to hear a person’s story and say, that sounds horrible, why on earth would you go back, please, stay. Or you can take the hard-ass position, which is to say, well, life is tough everywhere, pal, and if we took in every poor, repressed, politically inconvenient soul on the planet, we would eventually become the exact country you were so desperate to leave.
—Both sides are, in their own way, entirely certain they are the reasonable one. This is what makes it a sport. There is no referee, no instant replay, and no VAR review that has ever once caused a single American to change his position on the subject at Thanksgiving dinner.
—There Is No Longer One Television. There Are Nine Hundred Million Televisions.
—And here is why all of this is landing so strangely: we no longer have a country that watches things together. We used to have a centralized, claustrophobic, top-down American broadcasting apparatus — three networks, one Cronkite, everybody herded into the same living room to feel the same feeling at the same time. That is gone. Now everybody watches everything, all the time, in a million different ways, on a million different glowing rectangles.
—So these World Cup matches are simply on — everywhere, always, humming in the background of the entire nation like a benevolent low-grade fever. And it was somewhere inside that ambient haze, around the ninth match, that I finally, at long last, understood soccer.
—In Which I Finally, Genuinely Understand Soccer
—Follow me here, because this took decades.
—For most of my life, soccer struck me as the slowest-paced game on Earth that human beings nonetheless got wildly excited about. Unlike hockey, it never seemed to build to anything. Nobody fought. Nobody got checked into the boards hard enough to matter. And goals — actual points, the entire ostensible purpose of the exercise — arrived roughly as often as Halley’s Comet. I was genuinely shocked at the sheer volume of enthusiasm being generated on behalf of so little scoring. You can watch an entire match, all ninety minutes plus the mysterious bonus minutes they seem to invent at the end, and everyone in the stadium is perfectly, radiantly content with a 1–0 final. One goal. For the whole thing.
—This makes tennis look frantic. It makes a pitcher’s duel look like a fireworks accident. People say baseball is slow; baseball is a car chase next to this.
—The Overly Excited Petri Dish of Humanity
—And then it clicked. Soccer is not slow. Soccer is a slow burn.
—What you are actually watching is an overly excited petri dish of humanity — a living specimen under glass, half the organisms swimming and shifting frantically one direction, the other half swimming and shifting frantically the other, back and forth, back and forth, for a solid hour, until at some unpredictable moment one side finally breaks through and the whole stadium erupts as though a new element has been discovered. (Overly Excited Petri Dish, incidentally, would be an excellent name for a band.)
—Achieving a Zen-Like State of Craziness
—The genius of it — and I say this as a man who has left a golf tournament because it was too stimulating — is that it forces you to stay in the moment. You cannot look away, because the one thing that matters might happen in any of the ten thousand seconds during which nothing is happening. It is a Zen-like state of craziness: total serenity and total anticipation, suspended in perfect balance, following the play-by-play, waiting for the moment.
—There is none of the one-on-one tension of golf, or of singles tennis, or even of a good pitcher’s duel. It is almost the opposite of basketball. In basketball, you fully expect the shot to go in; scoring is assumed, routine, practically rude. Soccer is defined by the absence of scoring — it makes a chess match look fast-paced — and yet, crucially, and this is the part American culture has at last cracked wide open, there is an enormous quantity of alcohol one can comfortably consume while so very little is happening.
—Gratifying, Life-Affirming, and Completely Bizarre
—Which brings us back to the sofa, and to the strange, gratifying, life-affirming, thoroughly bizarre summer we are all living through together but separately.
—We are a nation that put a cage fight on the White House lawn, spent a year deciding the world was too full to admit anyone else, and then turned around and invited that same world over for the biggest party we have thrown since 1994 — and we are watching every bit of it at once, drunk and delighted, on nine hundred million different screens. There is something almost unbearably American about the whole arrangement: the contradiction, the spectacle, the streaming, and the deep, sincere, beer-scented joy of a room full of strangers erupting, in unison, over a single goal.
—And then my favorite part of it all is just before any World Cup commercial break comes on a little glowing trophy says, “Brought to you by FIFA.”
—I feel reassured by the order of the world.
