I set out around 6 p.m. in search of somewhere to watch Monday’s Netherlands-Morocco game.
It was not hard.
All I needed to do was look for the orange.
I’ve been on the road covering the USMNT for most of the last three weeks, so this was my first neighborhood World Cup watch party. I did not have to travel far.
At Headlands Brewery, a beer garden in Berkeley’s Westbrae district, there were 100-150 people sitting at wooden tables and in lawn chairs, half outdoors, the other half in a large tented area.
The Dutch fans weren’t hard to find. A group in orange T-shirts filled a table right in front of one of the big TVs.
Summer weather is very cool in Berkeley, though, so most of us were bundled up in hoodies or coats. One woman in her 50s sitting alone was wearing a woolen orange coat. Every time something dramatic happened, she covered her eyes, almost laughing at the agony.
At 90 minutes, I asked her if she was Dutch. “No,” she said, “but my parents are.”
When I arrived, it took about five minutes to find a seat at one of wooden tables that didn’t obstruct someone’s view. A boy about 9 was sitting with his mother and father and said he was fine with me sitting on the other side of the table.
During a lull, the father asked his son, “What did you think of Germany?” The boy did not answer. That was my chance to gauge his World Cup experience. Did he watch the penalty kicks? He nodded. “It was cool,” he said. I told him I’d watched hundreds of shootouts and the Paraguay-Germany ending was one of the wildest I ever witnessed. The father jumped in and said his son wanted Germany to win. “I’m sorry,” I said.
The father and son moved on to the subject of other teams in the tournament. England came up, and the father asked his son who England played next. The kid thought about it for a few seconds and said, “Congo.”
I was blown away. When I was 9, I did not even know what soccer looked like.
The Headlands Brewery crowd was not a hard-core soccer crowd. Not everyone was watching the game closely. But many of the fans cheered when Cody Gakpo scored for the Netherlands against Morocco. They understood why he was in tears. They knew of the story of Gakpo’s partner Noa van der Bij, who posted on social media on Saturday about the loss of their unborn son late in the pregnancy.
World Cup watch parties have been around for a long time. The first World Cup I followed closely was the 1978 tournament in Argentina. Again a tournament with favorable kickoff times. Most games aired on closed-circuit.
I went to Madison Square Garden or the Felt Forum in New York to watch on giant screens. But the first World Cup game I ever saw was at the Paterson Armory in New Jersey. It was Italy-France live from Mar del Plata. There must have been 2,000 Italians and me, rooting for France. What I remember is that the armory was dark and filled with thick cigarette smoke. And that Bernard Lacombe scored for France in the second minute. (Italy won 2-1.)
In 2014, the last summer World Cup in which the USMNT played, I compiled a list for Soccer America, 503 Places to Watch the World Cup. It was the heyday of lists with random numbers. I stopped at 503, but there were many more.
This World Cup is different. The word I’d use is ubiquitous. It is everywhere.
There are many reasons for its popularity. Soccer is no longer a novel experience. Many Americans have connections to the sport. From one person to the next, they might not all be the same connections. But the common denominator is some understanding of the World Cup and its teams and players.
The 2026 World Cup is hard to avoid. It will extend 39 days, from the opener to the final, and go without a rest day until July 8.
It helps that the World Cup has become a huge story in the media. Foreign journalists have set off trying to find out what we have known for years. Americans love soccer.
Simon Hughes went to Brownsville, Oregon, for The Athletic, searching for the World Cup in the land of Stand By Me. He later went to Alaska, the home of Obed Vargas, who plays for Mexico.
Rory Smith “did something a little bit different by going around the world in 24 hours without leaving Los Angeles,” presenting in video and print for the Observer what he learned about “Hyphen-Americans” at watch parties on a rooftop for Colombian-Americans in Westlake, at the Brazilian Mall in Culver City and at Liberty Park, among 5,000 Korean fans, in the heart of Koreatown,
L’Equipe sent Régis Dupont to hot and humid Lafayette, Louisiana, to watch France-Iraq with a local crowd and get a chance to see what life is like in the “most French” American city and how the French language is being preserved. In Seattle, Baptiste Chaumier reported on the Rain City Soccer Club, a bastion of soccer activity for the LGBTQ+ community.
A “véritable safe place” is how Chaumier described the Rain City Soccer Club. (L’Equipe uses a lot of English phrases.) In Rory Smith’s story on Los Angeles, the expression “safe place” came up, too.
Coverage of the American soccer phenomenon has not been limited to foreign publications.
Traveling the country in an RV for the Golazo Network, Nico Cantor discovered Mexican fans in green jerseys at the Power & Light District in Kansas City. He said the support was a microcosm of the story of soccer in our country, how everyone grabbed a little piece of their culture when they arrived here and soccer was the vehicle of that culture.
Some of the best coverage of the World Cup has come from small American outlets.
The Northwest News Network, a collaboration of public radio stations in Oregon and Washington, reported on what it meant for Seattle Bosnians to watch Bosnia & Herzegovina beat Qatar 3-1 in Seattle and advance to the round of 32, where it will face the USA on Wednesday in Santa Clara.
Kansas City stations reported on the Boulevard Drive-In Theatre, the city’s last remaining drive-in theater, getting into the action with three watch party events for fans to view the World Cup on the largest theatrical screen in the area. (It was recommended to bring a battery-powered radio and tune into an FM station for the best sound experience.)
From now until June 8, Soccer America will be publishing trivia contests. Test your soccer knowledge and earn a chance to win a free annual subscription.
There will be many ways to measure the impact of the World Cup. There’s been a lot of talk of businesses in World Cup markets being disappointed about foreign tourists not showing up in the numbers they were promised.
The economic impact of the World Cup has been more spread out thanks to American soccer community, which has come out in droves to gather and watch the matches. Fan festivals have been big business not just for the local World Cup organizers but for pro soccer teams whose business, after all, is the event business.
But the World Cup watch craze has extended beyond soccer. The New Hampshire Fisher Cats (Double A baseball) advertised proudly that they just had secured permission from FIFA to host watch parties.
And the commerce World Cup viewing has created extends down to all the small businesses. The Berkeley brewery at which I watched Netherlands-Morocco was all over it with signs for deals on “Limited Edition Merch” next to the tip jars.
The World Cup is a shared experience, bringing communities together in ways unimaginable, which makes it all that much more powerful.
The World Cup is soccer’s gift — our gift — to America on its 250th anniversary.
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The world cup definitely becomes a shared experience around the world (more focused than the Olympics, which is the only other event that comes close). Watching the Netherlands play Morocco in Mexico became surreal when the crowd began to sing “Take Me Home, Country Roads”….I had to google it see if I heard what I thought I heard or if I was actually going out of my mind (it took about 10 minutes for someone to post something about it).
This was beautiful, Paul. Thank you for articulating something that is impossible to truly capture but what all of us can feel. You did as good a job as anyone could.
Great Story PK – well done. Joe E
This may be just a bit simplistic but……what if countries were ruled by sports, not politicians?….in the words of Sam Cooke….”what a wonderful world it could be”! Some many countries coming together at the World Cup and, once interacting, realize we’re basically all the same cept for those that govern. You get a small taste of what it could be like with world peace. I know, dream on!!