The irony of the 2026 World Cup is that it began with all sorts of questions about affordability and access and inclusion, but it became one of the greatest communal events of our lifetime.
All for you and me to watch, cheer and go nuts with others and watch others do the same thing.
All over our little sport of soccer.
In America!
The World Cup struck a nerve.
A lot of time will be spent going over why soccer, why the World Cup and why this summer?
First and foremost because of how great the soccer has been. The tournament has had a great vibe and great feel with storylines of teams and players many Americans had never heard of before June.
“It’s just like a movie,” Joaquín Duro, the executive vice president of sports and head of streaming for at NBCUniversal Telemundo, told Deadline midway through the tournament.
Soccer delivered with the best team, Spain, and the team with the best player (Lionel Messi), Argentina, meeting in the final.
Other stars showed up, too. Kylian Mbappé, Ousmane Dembélé, Michael Olise, Harry Kane, Jude Bellingham, Erling Haaland, and in his own way, Lamine Yamal.
This is the 13th World Cup I’ve covered in some manner. España 82 was always my favorite for the number of great games. Brazil-USSR, Algeria-West Germany, France-West Germany, Italy-Argentina, Italy-Brazil and Italy-West Germany all come to mind.
This World Cup has produced classics like Argentina-Cape Verde, England-Mexico, Argentina-Egypt and Argentina-England. Who’d have thought England-France, for third place, the game of the tournament?
The 2026 World Cup had the added benefit of the USMNT’s presence and an extra round. The first half of USA-Paraguay is the best the USMNT has ever played. Even scoreless draws took on historic proportions: Cape Verde vs. Spain and Curaçao vs. Ecuador.
But the most basic answer to why this World Cup struck a nerve is the sheer humanity of it all.
The recognition that others from different places and with different skin colors and different languages are more like us than we think — they are just as kind and friendly and funny as we think we are.
Boston and Scotland was an obvious marriage. The Tartan Army descended upon New England for the first two Scotland games and drank Boston bars dry. One night the Scots went to Fenway in kilts and with bagpipes. It was “Scottish Celebration” night, the brainchild of Travis Pollio, Red Sox director of ticket strategy and promotions. (Give the man a big raise.)
But the love story between Lawrence, Kansas, and Algeria? The Fennecs stayed at the DoubleTree and were taken in by the citizens of Lawrence. Fans from the Algerian diaspora soon came and were welcomed with open arms. One Lawrence resident told KSHB, Kansas City’s NBC station, about the city’s Algeria guests: “The most beautiful thing I heard was this woman say, ‘You made us feel like we weren’t alone.’ That really touched me.”
Haaland, the Norway star, embraced Texas, riding the Tormenta Rampaging Run at Six Flags Over Texas in Arlington, eating funnel cakes and leaving Wild Bill’s Western Store with a cowboy hat, cowboy boots and T-shirt (“Y’all Can Kiss My Dallas”) and a $750 taxidermied raccoon.
“Dallas is amazing,” he said before Norway’s 2-1 loss to England, “I’m coming back here. The people are so positive – they’re just enjoying life.”
(The craziest thing I saw was Haaland eating a huge pastrami sandwich from Katz’s Deli in New York and a CBS Mornings reporter trying his 6,000-calorie “Viking diet.”)
The 2026 World Cup is the most-watched tournament in U.S. history. About 1.4 billion U.S. viewers — that’s right, billion — will have watched the 104 World Cup games on Fox and Telemundo platforms. (The 2022 total for Qatar: 287.8 million viewers for 64 games.)
The USA-Belgium averaged 50.1 million viewers, more than more any sporting event in the last year except Super Bowl LX (124.9 million) and Chiefs-Cowboys on Thanksgiving (57.2 million).
The work on Fox and Telemundo has a lot to do with the over-the-top interest in the tournament.
The brilliance of Rebecca Lowe, on loan from NBC, and the story-telling of Tom Rinaldi (check out here his story on Argentine defender Gonzalo Montiel) on Fox. What Argentina means to Andrés Cantor calling every game on Telemundo and how Telemundo embraced the diversity of Spanish-language audiences, hiring commentators and reporters to speak to audiences from specific countries, Colombians on Colombia games, Spaniards on Spain games, etc.
The World Cup has been a media event of unprecedented proportions.
The Athletic put more than 70 soccer journalists on the ground and broke many of the important stories of the World Cup, in the buildup with its stories on FIFA’s ticket strategy and during the tournament. Its story on FIFA’s decision to clear USMNT forward Folarin Balogun to play in the round of 16 was the most viewed story in its history.
But it wasn’t just The Athletic, the New York Times-owned sports publication. Politico produced a soccer newsletter on the infinite political angles the World Cup and soccer provide, abroad and at home (“Democrats look to World Cup watch parties to register thousands of voters”). The wide coverage in the Atlantic and New Yorker spoke to the overall importance of sports in society these days — but also to how many writers out there love soccer.
Golazo Network wasn’t around in 2022 for the World Cup in Qatar, but it has quickly become an American soccer institution, offering non-stop coverage and analysis in every way as rich as you’ll see in soccer’s great nations, where wins and losses are debated for hours.
Out of nowhere, “Coaches Corner,” a YouTube podcast presented by FanDuel hosted by Rob Stone with former USMNT coaches Bruce Arena, Bob Bradley and Gregg Berhalter became the must-watch reaction show of the World Cup. You could feel Bradley’s wonderment of this World Cup and its soccer in his every remark.
One of the major questions about the 2026 World Cup concerned in whose hands would tickets end up. Another was, would foreigners travel to the United States to support their teams? They didn’t so much, but it did not matter.
U.S. residents have traveled to support the six South American teams, often in the tens of thousands, most recently at the 2024 Copa America, and one way or another, at great expense they found tickets and their way to the games this summer.
Argentina fans and their support of the defending champions and Messi in their wild run to the final are one of the greatest fan stories you’ll ever see play out on American soil.
After Argentina’s 3-0 over Algeria in their opener in Kansas City, Marleah Campbell, a local TV sports director (KCTV5), posted a video of celebrating Argentines who had taken over the stairwell at Arrowhead and were singing and banging. The walls were perfect for banging and stairwell provided an echo. “One of the coolest things I’ve ever seen,” she posted. They had been there for at least 20 minutes and showed no sign, she wrote, of stopping.
When Algeria players toured Allen Fieldhouse — the mythic college basketball arena, where Wilt Chamberlain played in the 1950s — the University of Kansas athletics department posted an Instagram video — “thanks for stopping by, Team Algeria!” — and it quickly became the most viewed social media content in the school’s history.
My wife’s first World Cup — her point of reference — is 1986 in Mexico. Shirley lived in Tepic, home to Ramón Ramírez. The stories she remembers are the same we saw this summer. The stories of hospitality. The one she often repeats: Moroccans scarfing down tacos in Monterrey.
When Mexico played Germany in the 1986 quarterfinals, everyone was at home watching. The streets were silent. She and her mother went to church to pray. (My mother-in-law would sit in her room and pray throughout our son Paulie‘s baseball career.) Shirley says they knew Mexico had lost — in a shootout — because the streets were still quiet when they left church.
For that reason, Shirley was surprised when we went to dinner for our anniversary last Saturday at Corso, our favorite Italian restaurant in Berkeley. The original reservation was for 7:15 p.m.; we changed it to 8:15 p.m., figuring Argentina-Switzerland would have just ended. The short-handed Swiss had taken the game to overtime.
As we sat down, Shirley asked, “Why aren’t all these people home watching?” (Corso doesn’t have a TV.) A few seconds later, I looked over at the table to my left. The two men had leaned their phones horizontally on either side of the salt and pepper shakers and were watching the overtime in Kansas City.
This was a scene you could see everywhere. People out and about. With their phones out. Watching the game or watching the clips. As you dig into the viewing numbers, you’ll see it’s streaming numbers that are driving the explosive growth in viewership of soccer content.
Nowhere could you feel the World Cup more than in Seattle.
I was in Seattle two different weeks, for USA-Australia and USA-Belgium. For USA-Australia, I received from the National Soccer Hall of Fame the right of purchase two tickets for one USMNT game. I bought tickets for Shirley and Paulie ($265 each) for the Seattle game.
I was worried they wouldn’t like the seats. They were Category 3, in a small corner of the upper deck at Lumen Field. Category 4 was one section of the corner. Shirley and Paulie never said a word about the location. It was their first World Cup — Paulie had been born in May 1994 — and they loved everything about the game and about Seattle.
The one constant in Seattle was seeing fans in green jerseys everywhere. We have family friends from the Bay Area like us — American father, Mexican mother — who won the ticket lottery and traveled up to Seattle for USA-Australia. They arrived the night before and were astonished, like Shirley and Paulie, to see all the fans in green shirts who had taken over the city for Mexico-South Korea. (The same was true for Mexico-England on July 5 when I returned.)
The World Cup not only brought different communities closer together but also showed communities just how big they really are.
Every day, you could tell who was playing by who was coming and going in the streets of Seattle. The day after USA-Belgium, I went to meet my colleague Jonathan Tannenwald for coffee at one of the great Umbria shops.
I sat, facing the window with JT sitting across from me, and started watching everyone in Argentina jerseys head back to work and everyone in Colombia jerseys get ready to watch the Switzerland game.
I stopped JT at one point. “That was Tyler Adams,” I said matter-of-factly as Adams, all alone in street clothes, suddenly walked by in a hurry. Later, I stared out the window, throwing JT off. “Who did you see?” he asked.
One of the recurring themes of the World Cup was whether the glass was half full or half empty. The foreign media loved to point out how few Americans follow soccer. But it is easy to forget just how big sports is in America.
The baseball Mariners were in town during both the weeks I was in Seattle.
On our arrival for the first U.S. game, the Link light rail from Sea-Tac to Pioneer Square was packed with Mariners fans going to T-Mobile Park, the baseball stadium.
Three local Mariners fans standing struck up a conversation with a Mariners fan from out of town. They told him the trick to getting on the train after the game was walking up or down a couple of stops, and catching an empty train in the direction he wanted to go but before it reached the stadium. Whether it was soccer or baseball, our hosts wanted to help.
The second week, Fourth of July weekend, it was Mariners vs. Blue Jays at T-Mobile Park, a rematch of the 2025 ALCS. It wasn’t just Mariners fans you needed to contend with on the Link but also Blue Jays fans who came from across Western Canada en masse. Mariners fans came from out of town, too. I met a Mariners fan who had not followed the World Cup at all but came from Philadelphia to watch the Mariners on July 4. “11-0, bro,” she said proudly.
One of the best social feeds of the 2026 World Cup was the look at life on the inside of the French national team (@equipedefrance). If you were a coach, you could learn a lot about how Les Bleus, one of the best teams in the world, trained each day. The FFF social crew went into the rooms of players and the dining room for birthday celebrations and meals at the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston’s Back Bay, where France stayed for almost the entirety of their U.S. stay.
On Thursday, a series of Instagram posts showed the smiles on the faces of the departing French players as the staff at the Four Seasons bid adieu. Team videos have to be taken with a grain of salt, but it was clear just how much a bond had developed between these young men, all superstars back home, and their American hosts.
There were a lot of what’s-life-really-like-in-America stories in the foreign media, and one of the best I read was by Théo Denmat for the French publication So Foot, “Le club du troisième âge” on Al, Bill, Evelyn and Lydia, New England seniors who work the press elevators and press box at Gillette Stadium for extra income.
Like all the other U.S. stadiums, the four World Cup stadiums at which I attended matches — Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco and Dallas — are all huge NFL stadiums, and it is easy to get lost on the way from one press area to another, but volunteers, as pleasant as can be, were placed yards apart to make sure we didn’t get lost. (That didn’t prevent me from getting locked in Lumen Field with no way out after the press center closed following USA-Australia. Thankfully, I found the number to Lumen Field security and someone found me quickly.)
This World Cup was particularly emotional for me. It will be my last as I will retiring soon. Reporters I’ve known for years and others I never met before last month came up to me to wish me the best or seek help with their stories.
A “media availability” with U.S. Soccer president Cindy Parlow Cone before USA-Bosnia & Herzegovina at the press lounge in Santa Clara was her opportunity to surprise me — which she did — with the presentation of a USMNT jersey for my 50+ years of covering soccer for Soccer America.
I was still in shock a few minutes later as I went to return to my seat in the nearby press box. The woman responsible for scanning my badge was an African-American woman about my age. She did not know me from Adam but she had seen Cindy’s little presentation and had the biggest smile on her face. “Congratulations again,” she said.
The kindness of others is what I will always remember about this World Cup.
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It’s been sweet! Thanks for all of your good work.
Fantastic article Paul !
Beautiful, Paul. Thanks for all the years of devotion to soccer and Soccer America.
-Ken
We will miss your writing! Great article, as usual…