I’m writing this from a sunny rooftop in downtown Philadelphia, a city much lovelier than anyone ever told me, so I may be biased, but so far this has been an unexpectedly good World Cup. It’s partly the profusion of goals, unmatched since the 1950s, and partly the profusion of minnow countries, each with their own Cinderella story, some of them doing surprisingly well. But the tournament’s biggest asset may be, against every expectation, the US. We’d all talked beforehand about the chief host’s flaws: the American-style ticket prices, the ICE immigration police and the official government policy of hating the world. We didn’t talk about the qualities that make the US in some ways the ideal host of a World Cup.
First, contrary to snobbish foreign perception, the US has plenty of soccer lovers — more than previous hosts like Qatar, Russia, Japan, France in 1998 or indeed the US in 1994. A good chunk of the country has embraced the foreign game with its alien culture. US fans went on a European-style march to their opener against Paraguay in Los Angeles — the most watched soccer game in the country’s history, with 27.5mn TV viewers. The American team is pretty good, too.
But the country’s chief asset as host is precisely the issue that has been tearing it apart this past decade: immigration. Almost every team in the World Cup has a diaspora here. The first game I went to was Brazil-Haiti in Philadelphia. There had been lots of anger, rightly, about the US denying visas to Haitian fans. Yet there were thousands of Haitians in the stadium, singing their songs during their team’s 3-0 defeat, and in the car park afterwards, while Brazilians queueing for the subway sashayed to the tunes. The World Cup is a carnival of nations, and people actually want the opposing team’s fans to show up.