After nearly four years, the World Cup is back to take over the summer. But alongside celebration for the sumptuous soccer to come, there’s ample cause for consternation. This year’s tournament, jointly hosted by the United States, Mexico and Canada, will play out against a backdrop of endemic FIFA corruption, President Trump’s depredations and severely strained relations between the host nations.
To gauge the mood on the eve of the competition, we asked three writers — an American, a Mexican, a Canadian — what the World Cup means to them and their countries. Their varied responses testify to both the maddening complexity of contemporary life and the enduring wonder of world soccer.
It’s Not U.S. 1994, but It’s Something
By Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
Mr. Jelly-Schapiro is a geographer and writer who edited a series of essays about the 2018 World Cup for The New York Review of Books.
It’s not easy to explain, to kids growing up today surrounded by screens and viral videos, the epiphanic force with which the men’s World Cup landed on American TV in 1994. It certainly did on the old Magnavox TV in my parents’ house in northern New England’s woods. Like many American kids in the waning years of the Cold War, I spent my Saturday mornings kicking a ball around American fields. I had joined a travel team whose sponsor’s logo (“CABOT: Cheese from Vermont”) vied for space with Adidas on our chests. But I’d never seen the game played at the highest level — until 1994.
To live in range of ABC’s coverage of the games that summer was to glimpse the world’s finest players and best-loved teams. It was also to be treated to vivid and at times incongruous tableaux of ethnic fervor and comity, involving not merely those teams but their impassioned fans, too. They filled America’s biggest arenas — green-clad Nigerians and sombrero-wearing Mexicans, Swedes in Viking hats and Argentines singing songs about Diego Maradona. Feelings of national rivalry and pride occasioned not war but play.
To take in those games, as ABC’s commentators informed us, was to watch telecasts also being absorbed by billions of other humans — and to participate in the world.
In 2026, the world doesn’t look like we hoped it might from the sunny vantage of the early 1990s, when history still felt like it was moving in a positive direction. The United States, which seemed destined to be increasingly open-minded, is more closed off. But the return of the World Cup, a competition founded in the same era as the League of Nations and involving a sport that Americans have now learned to love, will still channel conflicts between countries into “peaceful contests in the stadium,” as Jules Rimet, the man who masterminded the competition, once put it. As important, it will offer us all a chance to experience, even if just for a moment, a mighty form of communion.
In 1994, the Cold War was over and America — notwithstanding Washington’s frequently awful proxy wars in developing countries — was admired as the global paragon of democracy and the rule of law. But the sporting culture in the United States was insular and jingoistic. It was defined by sports that Americans evolved from the games of our colonial masters: Gridiron football was a more dynamic and violent form of English rugby; baseball was an American riff on cricket. Americans took pride in the fact that few others in the world cared about or played our “national pastime.”
Association Football — a game with ancient global roots but whose modern form was, like rugby and cricket, codified in England — became the globe’s game thanks to factors both of history and of form. The British Empire brought British sailors, engineers and miners to the world’s ports. The game they played by wharves from Buenos Aires to Accra to Hong Kong was embraced by people who founded clubs in those cities and a thousand more. Soccer became the 20th century’s pre-eminent way for people around the world to hail, as the soccer historian David Goldblatt put it, “the miracle of our own solidarities.”
Except in the United States — until 1994, anyway. That summer’s World Cup was the best-attended and most-watched tournament that soccer’s worldwide governing body, FIFA, had ever staged. This was the goal. FIFA and its partners, among them some of the world’s biggest companies and media conglomerates, aimed to make the globe’s best-loved sport a big business in the world’s richest market.
In the 32 years since the 1994 World Cup, the dreams of FIFA and its corporate cronies have in large part come to pass. We follow the world’s top leagues on TV, and our women’s team are worldbeaters. Soccer, according to one recent poll, has surpassed baseball as Americans’ third-favorite sport. Among teens, it comes close to rivaling the N.B.A. for hearts and eyeballs.
Now the World Cup is back. Since 1994, the reputations of both the United States and FIFA have taken some profound dings. FIFA’s corruption was never exactly a secret, but has now been exposed to the world. President Trump’s contempt for the rule of law and international norms has done vast damage to America’s global standing and American society alike.
The reason FIFA’s flagship event has returned to the world’s richest country, this time sharing hosting duties with our North American neighbors and cosignatories to NAFTA that Mr. Trump loves to hate, is the same reason that Gianni Infantino, FIFA’s unctuous current head, expanded this World Cup from 32 nations to 48: cash.
This is the world as it is. But we’ll be watching regardless. In 1994, we thrilled to Romario’s balletic goals for Brazil; in 2026, we’ll wonder if Kylian Mbappé’s mercurial French team can pull together and if the great Lionel Messi of Argentina has one more “mundial” in him. We’ll cheer along for smaller nations, from Haiti to Jordan to Cape Verde, hoping they can notch even a single, glorious win.
This year’s final will be staged on July 19 in New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, whose turf played host in 1994 to a memorable match between Italy and Ireland. It was filled to bursting with immigrants’ kids bellowing their love for the old countries in the new one where they’d made good.
We tuned in then, and we will tune in now — to hundreds of matches across the continent. And we’ll know that what happens on their fields will model, as only a World Cup can, the world as we want it.
What Did Mexico Do to Deserve Such a Measly Tip?
By Juan Villoro
Mr. Villoro is a novelist, screenwriter, playwright and journalist whose most recent book contains the latest in his extensive writing on soccer (or as he calls it, football).
In 1913, at the age of 71, the American writer and journalist Ambrose Bierce crossed the border to join Pancho Villa’s troops. In one of the final letters before his disappearance, he wrote: “To be a gringo in Mexico — ah, that is euthanasia!” The relationship between Mexico and the United States, it’s fair to say, has always been intense.
Today, the tension is impossible to ignore. Under President Trump, the United States has bullied Mexico — led by the left-leaning Claudia Sheinbaum — with threats and tariffs. Recently, Washington issued a demand for the extradition of 10 Mexican politicians, including the sitting governor of Sinaloa, for collaborating with drug cartels. With around 80 percent of Mexico’s exports going to the United States, Ms. Sheinbaum has done her best to appease her counterpart. But Mr. Trump is implacable.
This is the setting in which our countries join as co-hosts of the World Cup. In football — the standard in global English — social tensions have always found a mirror. The sport is one domain where my country has long had the upper hand over the United States. But for this year’s tournament, the hierarchy has been reversed.
After hosting two of the best tournaments in history — the one that consecrated Pelé in 1970 and the one dominated by Maradona in 1986 — Mexico received only 13 of 104 available matches. The United States, whose football culture we’ve done so much to build up, will host 78. Our collective feeling is that we’ve been reduced to a bit player, a humiliating downgrade when you consider how much football means to Mexicans. What have we done to deserve such a measly tip?
Our neighbor’s indifference to the game was once so great that it preferred to play as the visiting team. In January 1954, something remarkable happened: Both our qualifying matches against the United States ahead of the World Cup in Switzerland were played in Mexico. We celebrated the goal-laden victories of 4-0 and 3-1 as if we’d reclaimed Texas. As the decades wore on, though, we lost the privilege of defeating the country upon which our economy depends. Men’s football in the United States has improved significantly, and the country dominates the women’s game. A sport that was once a guilty pleasure now fills the stands.
The paradox is that we Mexicans have contributed to the improvement of our adversary. Immigrants played a key role in energizing stadiums in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, and helped foster the creation of a competitive domestic league. Roughly 40 million people of Mexican origin live in the United States. Their nostalgia is good for business. They spend vast sums to attend games and wave the Mexican flag. Mexico’s national team plays like the home side all across the United States, with only a few exceptions like Alaska and Hawaii.
The Mexican Football Federation, driven by profit, takes full advantage of its migrant fan base: Our national team plays two-thirds of its friendly matches in the United States, which has caused widespread discontent at home. The people’s team has become yet another export commodity — it’s no surprise it was booed during the reopening of Mexico City’s newly renovated Estadio Azteca in March.
That night, the exorbitant price of World Cup tickets coincided with the lack of success of El Tri, as the Mexican team is known. South of the border, football has been losing steam. In the United States, however, the game no longer takes place in the shadows. The 1994 World Cup was difficult to secure and required diplomatic maneuverings by the likes of Henry Kissinger; in 2026 the audience and commercial prospects are guaranteed. What’s strange is that today’s moneymaking scheme depends on a highly unusual arrangement: One host is the star while the others have been cast in supporting roles.
Goethe’s “Faust” has a prologue set in heaven; the most recent World Cups have had theirs staged in purgatory. Russia and Qatar won their hosting bids with bribes, and not long after the F.B.I. opened an investigation into those same payoffs, the United States won its own. In order to project regional unity and expand the market (FIFA’s primary objective), Mexico and Canada were pulled in as co-hosts of the 2026 tournament.
Meanwhile, a country that won’t be on the pitch is winning a silent contest, proving there’s more than one way to participate in the World Cup. In Mexico City street stalls, national team jerseys cost anywhere from $115 to $202, while counterfeits range from $11.50 to $17 — they’re identical and come from far away. Identity adapts to circumstance: We’ll be cheering for our national team wearing jerseys made in China.
Not all is lost. Time and again, football has demonstrated a capacity to produce antibodies against the threats that besiege it. Before the World Cup in Qatar, there was justified criticism of a country that violates human rights, lacks footballing tradition and has temperatures so extreme that games must be played in air-conditioned stadiums. Despite these shortcomings, we still witnessed a tournament that was, in sporting terms, one of history’s best.
The World Cup exists to transform reality into illusion. This year, it will conjure singular wonders. Lionel Messi represents veteran experience while Lamine Yamal embodies youth. When Yamal was an infant in a family of migrants, he was bathed by Messi in an F.C. Barcelona photo shoot promoting UNICEF. Did the Argentine star anoint Spain’s future genius in the manner of legend, designating him as his successor?
This is the strange magic football is made of.
For Canada, It Matters More Than Anyone Anticipated
By Andrew Potter
Mr. Potter, an associate professor at McGill, coaches recreational soccer in Montreal.
The North American World Cup promises a huge leap for Canada’s sporting identity. It should mark Canada’s final transition into a country of fans of Canadian soccer, as opposed to Canadians who are fans of soccer.
It arrives, however, at one of the more uncomfortable moments in recent Canadian history, with the country divided domestically — there are active separatist movements in both Quebec and Alberta — and in a highly uncertain position abroad.
The result is that even as Canadians gear up to cheer on the greatest collection of soccer talent the country has ever produced, there is a decided reluctance to join our North American cousins in a happy, continental kumbaya of sporting amity.
The journey from soccer doormats to middle-power status has been long. For decades through the second half of the 20th century, soccer in Canada had two main constituencies. The first was an immigrant fan base — English, Scottish, Portuguese, Italian and Greek mostly — who were die-hard fans of clubs and national teams back in the old country. Starting in the 1970s, they were joined by a growing cadre of suburban kids playing for local recreational soccer clubs and their school teams.
Between these two groups, the Canadian men’s national team was somewhat of an orphan. Outside of the Vancouver Whitecaps and the Toronto Blizzard, the two main Canadian franchises in the old North American Soccer League, there was no proper professional league to help develop talent and little in the way of a fan base for the homegrown game.
When the national team improbably managed to qualify for the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, the roster was described as “filled with amateurs, indoor soccer players and N.A.S.L. refugees.” It was a bit mean, but not inaccurate.
One consequence was that whenever the Canadian team played international opposition on home soil, it was more often than not a de facto away game. The stadium would be flooded with Jamaicans, Mexicans, Guatemalans, Costa Ricans, Italians, Croatians and so on — all cheering for the visitors. The problem was especially acute in Toronto, which even in 1986 was one of the most diverse cities in the world. This led Canada Soccer to make a point of spreading games out across the country, as much to avoid diaspora fans as to give the team a more national reach.
What emerged was a significant disconnect between the increasing popularity of soccer at the grass-roots level — it overtook hockey in the number of registered players in the mid-1990s — and the substantial indifference of the public toward the national team. Compounding the problem was that decent Canadian prospects frequently had dual citizenship and were easily induced to take up offers to play for their or their parents’ country of origin. Canada’s national program was, for good reasons, considered a dead end for anyone with ability and options.
That all changed over the past decade, thanks to a confluence of factors including the emergence of some generational talents, the youth development infrastructure built by Canada’s three Major League Soccer teams, the creation of a Canadian professional league and the hiring of the Englishman John Herdman in 2018 as the national team’s manager.
The hiring of Mr. Herdman was probably the most significant. He did a remarkable job persuading players to sign on to the Canadian program, and qualification for the 2022 World Cup was probably the first time Canadian soccer really captured the wider public sporting imagination. When Canada qualified for Qatar, players like Alphonso Davies, Jacob Shaffelburg and Milan Borjan became bona fide folk heroes.
To understand just how consequential this shift has been, it is worth noting a remarkable moment during the Copa América soccer tournament hosted by the United States in July 2024. The Canadian hockey legend and Olympic gold medalist Sidney Crosby visited the Canadian Men’s National Soccer Team in their locker room to deliver a message of inspiration after the soccer team defeated Venezuela in a penalty shootout to advance to the semifinals. You could not script a clearer sign of the shifting status of the two sports in Canada.
For all this, it would be a stretch to say that Canadians have come down with any sort of high-grade World Cup fever. Partly it is because the country is a very junior partner in the proceedings, hosting just 13 of the tournament’s 104 matches, divided between Vancouver and Toronto. It doesn’t help that FIFA’s perennial corruption, along with the enormous cost of hosting the games (about $720 million for Vancouver alone), has given the bread-not-circuses crowd plenty of ammunition.
More than anything, though, there is the awkward matter of North American politics. Much as it mystifies the U.S. ambassador, Pete Hoekstra, Canadians are genuinely unhappy that the American president has spent the past year and a half threatening their sovereignty and vowing to destroy their economy. Throwing themselves into a pan-North American celebration was never going to come naturally this summer.
Even so, things on the field are looking better. Despite a rash of injuries for key players, including Davies, the Canadian team is expected to at least make it out of its group — something it did not manage in either of its previous World Cup appearances.
But whether it manages that or not, something has already been settled. A country that spent decades producing soccer players who couldn’t wait to represent somewhere else now has a team its own people want to claim. In a summer when Canada is having serious doubts about its very existence, that turns out to matter more than anyone anticipated.
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, who teaches at N.Y.U. and is director of publishing at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, is the author of, most recently, the forthcoming “Daylight Come: Harry Belafonte and the World He Made.”
Juan Villoro is the author of, most recently, “The Game at the End of the World: Villainous Referees, Communist Bakers, the Secret Women’s World Cup, and a Goalkeeper’s Last Stand.” This essay was translated from the Spanish by Francisco Cantú.
Andrew Potter, an associate professor at McGill, is the author of “The Authenticity Hoax: How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves” and a co-author, with Joseph Heath, of “The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t Be Jammed.”
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