The World Cup
an apology for my absence and my love letter to the best sporting event in the world.
Lillian and I parked half a mile from the stadium in a private parking lot off a side street. Next to us, two men a little younger than me exited their car adorned in Salah jerseys, one Liverpool and one Egypt. On the way to the stadium and despite cheering for different teams, we shared our stories of convergence, finding solace in our impulsive and debatably irresponsible decision to head to Atlanta for the Argentina vs. Egypt Round of 16 game. The night before, at midnight, they had rented a car, bought their tickets, and driven all night from Maryland.
Having attended a slew of MLS games, I assumed that the crowd would mostly be made up of soccer fans from around the Southeast, showing their support for the exotic sport of soccer in a land dominated by SEC football. But the closer we got to the entrances of the stadium, the more heavily accented Argentinian Spanish and number 10 jerseys we saw. By the time we made it through security and scanned the tickets I had bought 12 hours earlier, I was already wishing I had brought some earplugs. With 30 minutes before kickoff, the chants inside Mercedes-Benz Stadium were deafening. I counted no fewer than five tattoos celebrating either Messi or Maradona, and often both. My understanding of sports fanaticism up until this point had been informed by Cheeseheads in Wisconsin supporting the Green Bay Packers and Patriots fans in New England. Lillian and I were walking into something I was just beginning to fully grasp.
The night before, and much to the chagrin of Lillian’s mother, I bought the tickets online for roughly the cost of my mortgage payment. We were back in Alabama visiting her family for the Fourth and were flying out of Atlanta the next day at 6 p.m., or four hours after the end of the Argentina vs. Egypt Round of 16 game. Since I got my first pair of Copa Mundials in 2000, I had always wanted to see a World Cup game, and I couldn’t pass up this opportunity. Halfway through the Belgium–USA game, I saw the writing on the wall and started looking at tickets for the next days game as a way to distract myself from the imminent US team crashing out. Prices ranged from the cost of a mortgage payment to a decent used car, and I hemmed and hawed about whether I should pull the trigger for roughly 60 seconds. In four years, my life will likely look very different, with increased responsibilities, complexity, and less freedom. I had to do it—if not for the 38-year-old me, then certainly for the 12-year-old.
Every four years, my life comes to a screeching halt for around a month. I watch matches on my TV and prop my phone up while doing chores to catch the first halves. I grew up playing soccer in rural Washington and then club soccer in Portland, Oregon. I convinced my parents to get Sky Sports on satellite TV and watched Premier League, La Liga, the Bundesliga, and Serie A whenever I could. I had Zidane’s blue Predators and dreamed of going to Europe and watching the greats play. For an 11-year-old watching a match on a rainy Saturday morning in rural Washington, the stadiums and energy of soccer fans felt worlds away.
As hormones took over and I fell in love with snowboarding, soccer took a back seat, but it stayed in my life through high school, when I played varsity and watched the World Cup religiously every four years. I’ll never forget watching my childhood hero, Zidane, headbutt Materazzi during the 2006 final against Italy. When I moved to New York City, I would play pickup games with New Yorkers and people from around the world who called the small island their home. Most of the time, we played along the Hudson, just over the West Side Highway. I was at the peak of my physical prowess, running 20 miles a week and doing CrossFit. None of this helped my touch or passing during our weekly pickup games, unfortunately, and the assortment of Nigerian and Irish veterans in their 30s and 40s ate my lunch. During breaks and after games, we debated the prowess of Argentina’s head coach, Diego Maradona, his apparent heir, Lionel Messi, and the outlook for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
When I headed to Europe for work in my mid-20s, I made sure to attend a few games. I saw Pep Guardiola’s Bayern Munich play at home and watched his old club, FC Barcelona, play Real Sociedad on San Sebastián Day in 2013. Messi scored the opening goal, only for Barcelona to lose 3–2 in stoppage time to the hometown club, giving Barcelona its first loss of the season and turning the streets of San Sebastián into chaos.
During the building of the tree houses in 2014, we listened to games on Makita jobsite speakers while we worked and headed to friends’ houses to catch the key matches. In 2018, I had the opportunity to sell my soul to the devil and head to Russia for the World Cup as part of some influencer activation, but I skipped out. I was in the thick of working on projects at Movie Mountain and had little desire to return to Russia. In 2022, I was fresh off wrapping up a handful of commercials at Movie Mountain and was on a “sabbatical.” I dove into the World Cup with a dedication I hadn’t felt since 2006, in the liminal summer between high school and college. I woke up early every morning to catch the first game of the group stage on the TV in my living room next to the raging wood stove and watched as Argentina’s run through the tournament took shape. I rooted for the little number 10 from Rosario and will never forget watching the final on a rainy December day with my brother, screaming and cheering as France and Argentina traded hopes for the trophy, with the triumph of will and the hopes of a nation eventually winning over the superior team.
This year, my life hit pause on June 11 with the kickoff of the World Cup in North America. I avoided the heat and gave the World Cup my full attention. I stopped responding to emails, stopped writing for my Substack, and watched games like it was my job. For years, I’d threatened to put in for tickets in Seattle and San Francisco, but life got in the way, and I delayed my hopes of attending games in person for another four years. From my couch, I cursed the commercials, specifically the Lay’s potato chips one with Will Ferrell and David Beckham and the YouTube one with Zlatan. Advertising people’s shamelessness in stealing others’ ideas is only outpaced by their greed and sycophantic lust to be close to celebrities. Whenever I could, I rooted for the underdogs—Cape Verde, Haiti, the U.S., and the African teams—hoping that one of them would make it far enough into the tournament to bring chaos. I also rooted for the encore performance of the small Argentine I had watched that night 13 years earlier in Spain.
