Dr. Amy Bass.
Professor of Sport Studies and Chair of the Division of Social Science and Communication, Executive Director of the Sport Knowledge Institute. Manhattanville University. An Emmy Award winning writer, she is the author of One Goal: A Coach, a Team and the Game that brought a Divided Town Together, among other titles.
Instagram: @bassab1
Web: www.amybass.net
Email: amy.bass@mville.edu
The headlines were as predictable as the opening whistle, another World Cup ushered in trailing controversy, from immigration crackdowns to militarized security, exorbitant ticket prices to thousand-dollar train rides. Every four years we are reminded that this beloved tournament is one of our most complicated spectacles.
And yet, we watch.
At the center, of course, is the sport itself. Ninety minutes (ha!), twenty-two players, a ball, an impossibly large pitch, and the irresistible drama that theatrical flopping and questionable red cards produce.
But the World Cup has never simply been about soccer. It is a global cacophony of performative nationalism, capitalistic greed, political nonsense, and media intervention, a carnival built within a marketplace where thousands of people find themselves connected to folks they would never otherwise meet.
In 1994, when the United States hosted the men’s World Cup, the game arrived hoping to convince Americans that it belonged. Flash forward thirty-two years, and no convincing is necessary. The future was here, all grown up and with a gaggle of children of its own.
Kids who watched for the first time in 1994 now coach youth teams. They are the journalists covering the game and decision-makers helping America’s professional leagues thrive. In 2012, NBC’s first contract to broadcast the Premier League expanded what many Americans knew of the sport, widening the circles of soccer fans from generations of immigrant communities who carried the game in their baggage to a broader cultural realm.
The real story, then, hasn’t been whether America embraced soccer this time around. America already had. What this tournament revealed instead was something deeper about who Americans are, what the world thinks of them, and what happens when people turn away from the news and take in what is right in front of them.
One of the central arguments I made in One Goal was that sport doesn’t create social change as much as it exposes where change is needed. Soccer did not make Somali refugees in Lewiston, Maine, American. It became the language through which a community and its newcomers negotiated with one another, a language the World Cup speaks fluently. At a moment when political policy narrowly and punitively mandates who belongs, soccer quietly claims that identity is seldom singular, turning binary oppositions into couples. American and Mexican. American and Ghanaian. American and Portuguese. These layered identities are not contradictions, but rather soccer’s foundations, making clear that belonging can be vast. Beyond the frames curated by broadcast television (the graphics and endless statistics and multiple camera angles), beyond the dynamic ticket pricing and Stub Hub controversies that make sport a luxury product, and beyond FIFA itself, something stubbornly human breaks through.
Massachusetts born and bred, there was no clearer example to me than watching the Tartan Army descend upon Boston, arriving by the thousands in kilts, singing at full volume, emptying kegs across the city, and somehow convincing the Fenway Faithful to replace “Sweet Caroline” with chants celebrating John McGinn. They ate lobster rolls and chowder, learned how to pronounce Worcester and Leominster, and placed orange traffic cones on everyone from John Harvard to the famous ducks of Boston Common.
On the pitch, fans adopted Cape Verde, one of sport’s many feel-good stories. A small island nation whose remarkable run captured hearts far beyond its population, the team who recruited players through LinkedIn reminded everyone that sport sometimes becomes a rare space in which size, wealth, and geopolitical influence yield to hope. For a few unforgettable weeks, millions of people who could not have located Cape Verde on a map found themselves obsessed with 40-year-old keeper Vozinha, who gained almost six million new Instagram followers within hours of his heroics against Spain.
It is a curious kind of magic in which strangers celebrate each other’s joy, something that sociologist Émile Durkheim dubbed “collective effervescence.” When I studied Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life as a first-year college student, sport, never mind soccer, was not on my bingo card — nor was it on his. But the feeling Durkheim described — the spirit that emerges when people gather around something bigger than themselves — comes alive at the World Cup. With apologies to the New York Knicks, few events generate it more reliably.
That Americans experience this feels especially valuable. Unlike so much of sporting culture, the World Cup reminds the United States that even as a host, it is not the center of the story, but rather participants in a genuinely global conversation. So many countries. So many chants in so many languages. So many colors. So many stories.
The headlines surrounding the World Cup deserve their scrutiny. The politics remain, at best, messy. But for all its contradictions, the World Cup continues to create fleeting moments when humanity takes center stage, as people fill stadiums and streets to celebrate together, mourn together, and discover that the strangers they may have been taught to fear might become the friends they remember most.
