Mikie Sherrill has embraced the World Cup like few other Democratic governors, save perhaps Gov. Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania.
She has been to seven matches, built a tight relationship with the former standout U.S. goalkeeper Tony Meola and will take in today’s final at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. (She missed one match because she was working on her first budget).
“There’s a lot of controversy over whether or not this makes sense. We’ll be doing all the math as these returns come in,” Sherrill said. “When I came into office, I really was focused on how to make this a net benefit for the state, and how to bring everyone into the state. If you’re going to host this game where one in three people in the world will be watching this final, you want the people of New Jersey to feel like they’re part of it, and not just that there are some elite people going to watch the game, but they’re actually able to take part in the excitement, and these fan zones have been really wonderful for that as well.”
Six months into her term, Sherrill spoke exclusively with POLITICO to talk about her battles with FIFA, President Donald Trump and, also, how she ended up in a puddle of beer doing the viral Viking Row celebration with an army of Norway fans outside of MetLife.
The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
How did you end up in that puddle of beer?
I think we’ve seen all over the internet people who are loving our delis and our Wawas and enjoying the shore, and I think it’s just been such a fantastic feeling. And we had Norway come, and as you’ve seen on social media, they were rowing. I rowed at Navy my freshman and sophomore year at Navy, so I had a little bit of a kinship there to all the rowers coming from Norway. So when they were coming back to the stadium, we reached out and said, “Hey, are you guys rowing? We want to come touch base and welcome you to the state. And they said, ‘Yeah, come row with us.’ So I did, and it was really a lot of fun.”
What have your battles been like with FIFA, particularly on cost-of-living issues?
I would say everything we’ve gotten out of the World Cup, we built.
I would really like to leverage it — if the Women’s World Cup is going to be in the U.S. — I would really like to leverage a little bit of what a special place it is to host a World Cup game here. And really try to leverage that for better benefits for the state because FIFA put nothing into this. I mean they’re making $11 billion and now they’re trying to sell grass, and they’re trying not to pay their bills. It’s really a problem.
So you’d be open to being a host site again in 2031?
If it made sense economically, yes.
President Donald Trump — whom you have battled — will be at the final on Sunday. How are you going to handle that?
What I think has been interesting is I think a lot of people went into Trump’s second administration thinking they had learned how to handle him in his first administration, and the word on the street seemed to be you just do an insane amount of flattery, and then get what you want, and just you know kind of work that way. You know, keep your head down, don’t say too much, just flatter the hell out of him, and then I’ll give you what you want. And I don’t think that has been the case in the second administration.
And so we in New Jersey had a year of watching him operate, and every promise he made, he walked back. And so the art of the deal to Trump seems to be. Figure out what you want, leverage the heck out of you, and never give it to you. But try to have you sell your soul in the process.
I just largely have focused on delivering for the people of New Jersey. And when he tries to punish people here in New Jersey, like when he tried to stop the Gateway Tunnel funding, when he gave out pink slips to the 1,000 workers that were already on the job, good union jobs. I didn’t try to cut some deal with him. I didn’t say I was going to name Penn Station after him or something because it wasn’t his money to leverage. I just took him to court almost immediately, and we won. And then he appealed it, and we won again. And now he’s, you know, said he’s going to build some mass detention facility in Roxbury in a warehouse that only has two bathrooms, and he thinks he’s going to put 2000 people in it. And there’s no sewersystem, so we took him to court, and we won.
So it’s not that we’re throwing gratuitous punches here. I’m just constantly fighting for the people of New Jersey, and when he attacks them, I’m going to stand up.
What are your predictions for the final on Sunday? Is Argentina going to prevail? How many goals is Messi going to score? What are some things that you’d make Kalshi bets on?
I don’t do Kalshi bets. But there are a lot of people from South America that live in New Jersey. A lot of our citizens have family there, and they’re going to kill me because nobody down there likes Argentina, right? But I will tell you, I… I feel like Argentina with Messi playing for the MLS. It’s just it’s almost like the closest thing we were getting this year to a hometown team.
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