I haven’t watched a single game of the World Cup yet. Not because I don’t want to, but because the part of my brain reserved for paying attention to sports is still recovering from the NBA Finals. My wish for the New York Knicks to lose just enough to extend the series to a full seven games—I never know when to leave a party—did not come to pass. So it’s only a matter of time before I learn who’s playing in the tournament and let a vague sense of geopolitics guide me to the right plucky underdog.
For now, my relationship to the spectacle consists of the whiplash between horrible news of immigration shakedowns and World Cup Racial Harmony videos. I consume the latter greedily, sending them out to friends with a promptness you might expect from a newswire. Occasionally I behave like a one-person propaganda office for the concept of soccer-based multiculturalism.
It is simply quite funny to watch a video titled something like “Spain National Team Arrives In Chattanooga, Tennessee.” There is apparently no limit to the number of times I can enjoy clips of Korean fans binge-drinking alongside Mexican ones. A deli is just a deli until you hear “Can I get a chicken parm with vodka sauce?” in a London accent, and a thick New Jersey one coo “I’ll make it beautiful for you” in response.
There are genuinely moving moments, too. Bosnia-Herzegovina fans’ booming “Palestina” chants ahead of their first game recall the global solidarity protests in recent years. And there’s nothing quite like watching a ponytailed Kansan in a bedazzled fedora welcome the Algerian team to Lawrence. “Lawrence true community event of what is typically a ticketed public training session, inviting young fans to practice alongside them. The University of Kansas marching band opened the session with the Algerian national anthem, celebrating its revolutionary victory over the French. KU’s athletic department shared a video of the team trying its hand at basketball and football, set to Rachid Taha’s cover of “Rock the Casbah.” In three words, “Rock Chalk Algeria” captures one side of world sports’ perennial contradiction between universalism and violent factionalism.
So much of this off-field exchange is happening out of view, in corners and moments none of us will ever see, but I’m grateful for the glimpses. There’s the human impulse to make something of the feeling, to ask, What does it mean? It’s not unusual for a global sporting event to cultivate exchanges like these, but it does seem like all the right conditions are maximized to an unusual degree this year: a rebuke of the U.S. government’s jingoism, teams and fans more multiethnic than they’ve ever been, spread across an entire continent instead of just one country.
And as for what it means? Maybe nothing more than that people like other people. I like them, too.
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