I’m not a sports guy. That is not to say I’m a sports hater — I’ll watch the occasional tennis final and Olympics curling match and the Michigan-Ohio State game in November. But I don’t have the bandwidth to truly follow any sport. The athlete cameos in Super Bowl ads sail over my head. In my LearnedLeague trivia matches, the questions about Premier League soccer — there are more of them than you might think — always spell my doom.
But the summer of 2026 has done strange things to the least sportsy among us. If you live in New York, as I do, you may have spent a lot of time rewatching the Knicks’ OG Anunoby reaching for that NBA Finals tip-in like Michelangelo’s God giving life to Adam, reminding us that we could actually have good things.
Then the World Cup came ashore in North America and, lo, we had the show of the summer. The broadcasts are pulling football ratings — sorry, American football ratings — setting records even in games not involving the U.S. team. This summer has felt as if the whole tense world were exhaling and taking a collective play break.
I can resist sports, but I can’t resist vibes. I started dipping into matches in the group stage. (Also, I learned what a “group stage” is.) I read up on Cape Verde and became willing to lay down my life for that country.
Now I am that guy, glued to my phone in the passenger seat on during a car ride, watching little red Norwegian dots try to maneuver around a swarm of tiny white English dots. Now I am setting calendar reminders for games between countries I will probably never visit. Now I am … a fan? Of a sport?
I do not mean to imply that I am suddenly sports-knowledgable. I supported Morocco because my mother was born and raised there; I know nothing more about the team than that, and I will not be taking further questions on the subject. I learned a smattering of terms from “Ted Lasso.” To invert the Supreme Court ruling on pornography, I know what offside is, but I don’t know it when I see it.
The broadcast industry is well aware of me and my fellow bandwagon-jumpers — Will Ferrell even made a Lay’s commercial for us — and it has taken measures to make our eyeballs comfortable.
To the true fans out there, I apologize. People like me are, I assume, the reason for the numerous patronizing football, hockey and basketball analogies made by the Fox Sports team to try to translate soccer for the Yanks. If it’s any consolation, they don’t help me understand the game any better.
And these concessions seem unnecessary and dated, given the enormous growth in American soccer fandom. Even Hank Hill, on the Hulu revival of “King of the Hill,” loves soccer now. (Many purists much prefer the announcing on Telemundo, which makes the radical assumption that its soccer audience likes the game.)
The actual play-by-play has kept my less-than-expert eye where it needs to be. The annoyances creep in at the edges: the “hydration breaks” that lubricate the ad-sales machine, the enigmatic “match momentum” chart, the cringe-inducing pleas from the Fox booth for American fans not to bail after the U.S. team was eliminated by Belgium. And no amount of newfound fandom can make me enjoy the repurposed celebrity-stunt comedy of James Corden on the Fox aftershow — though, as usual, he seems to enjoy his own antics enough for everyone.
The best entertainment lies in the fans, sporting goofy hats in the stands, discovering Costco and Buc-ees in social media videos, proving that fun is a universal language. The sea of Norway fans doing their viral “Viking Row” after a win, heaving and ho-ing in unison to the rhythmic thump of a drum, is a special effect that “House of the Dragon” can’t match. The play makes the Cup, but the people make the world.
I don’t mean this in the naïve sense that the World Cup “brings all together” and “makes us forget our differences.” Clearly it doesn’t. It’s a competition, often heightened by national rivalries and decades-old conflicts.
There are wars across the globe, including the one between the United States and Iran, whose team was shunted across the border to Mexico between games. There was the presidential intervention into an American red card and homophobic chants by Mexican fans, and all these controversies were treated gingerly if at all on air.
Still, this Cup feels like the show we needed when we needed it. This is a time when countries, on this continent and elsewhere, are putting up barriers, coveting their neighbors’ land, casting suspicions on outsiders and guarding against perceived threats to their ethnic heritages. The low-stakes delights of this Cup suggest that maybe it’s actually good when people cross borders and mingle, bringing their cultures and silly customs to the party.
Not everyone can afford the airfare and tickets, of course. The images I love most from the Cup are the cutaways to the watch-party crowds of ordinary fans around the world, thronging together, tensing up and exploding in cheers, transported by the same game that we’re watching.
We live in the age of the algorithmic feed, the personalized stream, the customized media experience. But occasionally Marshall McLuhan’s global village manages to reconstitute itself. There is still a power to these rare moments when live TV pulls us into a virtual stadium that exists everywhere at once, with a capacity of billions.
That stadium will empty out soon. The cruel reality of an event like this for the bandwagoneer is that the more deeply you get into the games, the fewer games there are left. Am I going to need to figure out how to watch the Premier League?
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