What the World Cup Is Teaching America. I hope we are wise enough to learn.
- Craig Smith
- Jul 1
- 5 min read
As a casual soccer fan, I've been drawn to this World Cup, probably because it's here in the United States, and even more so because many of the games are being played in my backyard, Philadelphia.
Just to be clear, I don't normally watch soccer on Saturday or Sunday mornings. When it comes to sports, I prefer hockey. I love college basketball, and few things are better than watching Bryce
Harper smash a towering homer through a hot August night. In fact, there are probably a half dozen other sports I'd choose over a soccer game on any given day. But with this World Cup, I keep getting sucked in, game after game. It doesn't even matter who's playing - Mexico versus Czechia, Norway versus Senegal, or even some match involving Cabo Verde, a country I couldn't have found on a map before this tournament (if I wasn't already playing random geography games on my phone every day). Day after day, I keep getting drawn in, and drawn in, and drawn in.
And finally it hit me. This year’s World Cup world is trying to teach us something. By "us," I mean Americans.
This summer our nation is celebrating 250 years of independence. That’s 250 years of making it work. Look across the globe or rifle through your world history books. This is an incredible accomplishment, and our country has done some amazing things. But somewhere in the last couple of decades, we’ve lost something. We lost our joy. Right now, those World Cup fans running around our stadium parking lots are handing it back to us.
There has been a Tartan Army of Scots in kilts standing outside Airbnbs at 6 a.m., playing bagpipes with giant smiles on their faces. Norwegians are sitting in Times Square doing their rowing chants while the New Jersey Devils’ mascot jumps right in with them. Fans from Ivory Coast and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, from England and France, Japan, and Croatia are dancing through our streets by the thousands discovering all these little slices of America that we take for granted. They light up with pure joy when a giant plate of BBQ arrives at their table or they walk into a Costco for the first time. I saw a Swedish fan wearing a cowboy hat while getting interviewed on the news. The reporter asked him where he got it. He smiled and said, "From Buc’ees. Great place. I love the beef jerky. I love the cowboy style.” I've watched more cheesesteak reviews from British and French fans than I can count, and not one of them carries judgment. None of them are saying "ours is better" or "you're not as good as us." They're just enjoying it, enjoying the moment. They’re walking down American streets with their country's flag draped across their back and their favorite jersey on their chest. The smiles say it all. They are joyful.
That's what we're missing here. I haven't seen this level of joy in the United States in a while. Sure, there are little doses of it when your city's team wins it all and they hoist the trophy at the parade, but that celebration belongs to one city. This World Cup belongs to all of us.
I had a moment years ago when I was a TV sports anchor in a small town in Maryland. A consultant came into our news room and told us that sports wasn’t a priority for TV news viewers. He had a stack of data and research to support his claim, but all I could think was this guy is nuts. Sports is our community. I’ve never seen thousands of joyous people at a township board meeting, but I saw them shoulder to shoulder in town after town during countless Friday night football games, and I see them by the thousands gathering across the globe to watch their nation chase glory. Sports breaks down those barriers that stand between us. Sports is a magical thing that brings us together.
Humor me as I show my age here and take a bit of a tangent, but there is a movie from the 1980s called Vision Quest. Its about a high school wrestler who dedicates himself to beating an unbeatable wrestler from a few towns away. It’s an 80s movie, so you already know how it ends. Spoiler alert, he wins, but there’s one scene in it that encapsulates the beauty of sports. The star of the movie is talking to an older guy and he tries to downplay the significance of the big match by saying, it’s just six minutes. As the older guy is putting on his best suit, he isn’t having it. He looks our hero in the face and goes into a story about sitting alone one night watching the soccer player Pele on a Spanish language channel. Pele scores a brilliant goal and the crowd goes wild. The older guy says the moment brought him to tears, and he ends the scene by saying - “It ain’t the 6 minutes. It’s what happens in that 6 minutes. Anyway, that’s why I’m getting dressed up and giving up a night’s pay for this function.” A day’s pay doesn’t measure up to what could happen in those 6 minutes.
The “function” in front of us is this World Cup and we shouldn’t miss it, America. We should learn the lesson.
We have an amazing place here. Our culture is diverse and vast. It changes as you cross from state to state, region to region, and it deserves to be celebrated. We should be celebrating ourselves the way these visitors are celebrating us: smiling, hugging complete strangers, fully present in the joy of it all. That's what makes sports great. It pushes us. It dares us to want more. And it brings us together like almost nothing else can.
There's no other event on earth that can gather a group from France to dance with a group of Iraqis, or sends Brazilians dancing around the Rocky statue in Philadelphia. (Careful with that statue, though. The Ecuadorians put a jersey on Rocky and lost their next match. Don’t do that again.)
It's been a wildly brilliant couple of weeks, and the hard part is that it's already starting to end. We’ve hit the knockout phase of the World Cup. Every loss sends another country’s team home and their fans will go home as well. They'll pack their bags, board a plane, and carry their stories back to wherever they come from. They’ll show up at their homes with souvenirs in hand, maybe that cowboy hat from Buc-ee’s or a couple of bottles of ranch dressing, but the biggest thing they're bringing home are the stories from their journey through America.
They'll walk through their front door, hug their families, sit down at the kitchen table, and tell their loved ones about the adventures they had. Five years from now, ten years, twenty years later, when old friends gather, they'll tell that story again. And again. They might even say, "Thanks, America. Thanks for that moment."
But they've got it backwards. We should be thanking them. This influx of World Cup fans is bringing back the unbridled joy we've been missing. And maybe, just maybe, it's enough to kick-start something in us, so we find our way back to that feeling on our own.
Comments