Football fans must be gutted.
I am not a football (soccer) fan but from what I can tell the US and FIFA are not doing a great job. High price tickets. Public transport not been upgraded. The President seems to want to use it for political shenanigans. Saying that he may move some matches from dangerous cities that happen to be Democratic led cities.
The final will be in a stadium that is not walkable from public transport and the area is a bit of a health hazard.
The final will be in a stadium that is not walkable from public transport and the area is a bit of a health hazard.
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As I understand it, FIFA has improved but Trump's Modus Operandi is hardly alien to them. So the slow motion car crash of this year's tournament should surprise absolutely no one.
I’ve never followed FIFA, but… it’s improved and it was previously worse than this? 😳
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/jan/18/embarrassment-fifa-donald-trump-peace-prize
And the tournament will be a car crash of epic proportions. I expect to see stadiums not full, and those who are there not being real football fans.
Which will be seen across the world. I just hope that the US go out really quickly.
America going to have to put tee shirts over all the empty seat backs for the cameras because their World Cup is shaping up a shitshow.
AFF
On the other hand, it could go the way of the 1978 World Cup held in the deeply corrupt Argentina. Off the field, thousands of people “disappeared”, while on the field, because Argentina had the advantage of playing last the round, knew that they had to beat Peru by four goals and they did so (6-0 as it turned out). Moreover, Peru was desperate for a grain shipment from Argentina.
Naturally, Argentina won the tournament and the Generals stayed in power until South Atlantic Unpleasantness four years later.
One other aspect to the world cup is that it is something of a testing ground for the next Olympics. I think they probably will pull their finger out a bit in terms of fan accessibility and crowd flows for the Olympics, but I suspect both will have echoes of the 1936 Olympics in terms of trying to showcase and aggrandise the host regime.
COYS!
Oh yes:
It's a good read.
"America" doesn't have to do a damn thing. Most of us aren't soccer fans and don't give a shit.
I can't tell you how much I'm not looking forward to the 2028 Olympics. I live walking distance from several venues. There were supposed to be some affordable tickets set aside for locals, but "local" was defined as pretty much all of southern California, so when my slot to buy opened up, there was nothing affordable remaining. I'm hoping that we'll get some kind of advance notice about what the logistics will look like in our neighborhood -- if streets will be blocked off, what security will be like, etc -- so we can decide whether to just leave town for two weeks.
Dafyd Hell Host
My apologies, just me being lazy in generating a summary. I can confirm, owning said book, that this is an accurate summary of it.
Bad aliens. Sorry.
Um, the US women's football team is famously excellent. This is specifically the men's football world cup - football meaning men's football by default is unnecessary sexism.
Then why go to all the effort of taking part in the bidding process, spend all the time organising what is a complex tournament and spending a load of money on a sport people don’t like?
Your own thoughts aside from what we are told football is growing in popularity in the US. The competition is a prestige event. The biggest tournament of the biggest sport in the world. Like it or not the world is watching.
Please see here for further discussion.
Doublethink, Admin.
Rent your house out to someone with tickets. 🙂
Why would you feel guilty?
I was going to post a bunch of statistics about the percentage of people who rent in this city, the percentage of them who are paying more than 30% of their income in rent, the percentage paying more than 50%, and the poverty rate here -- but instead I'm just going to say it's cute that you think I own a house.
The world is always watching the US. And the World Cup could be an utter disaster and it wouldn't even be close to the worst thing that will happen in the US this summer.
Huh? It's totally walkable from public transit. That's in fact the best way to get there -- people do it for 34 regular season NFL games every year -- and for the World Cup it will for most people be the only way to get there. FIFA wouldn't cover the increased costs for the transit system though, so New Jersey Transit is charging almost $100 for round-trip game day tickets to the stadium.
Well, let's fine-tune it...
Any American with an interest(emotional, economic whatever) in the World Cup being a success is probably gonna be pretty disappointed about what a shitshow it's turning into as a result of Trump's numerous fuckups. What percentage of the US public that is, I don't know, but I have to think it was at least an influential minority who were able to push for the USA as a host country and their own cities as match sites.
There are, of course, non-Americans with similar interests in the World Cup being a success(overseas fans, travel agents etc), but they'te not being screwed over by their own governments.
(Apart from the always interesting sociopolitical reverberations, I have no interest in sporting events. I did get into the spirit a bit for World Cup 2002, but I think that's because it was my first year in Korea so it kinda became part of the whole new novelty of the expat experience.)
But don't the municipal governments also have to formally green-light the holding of games in their jurisdictions?
I know that when Rob Ford was running for mayor of Toronto in 2010, that city had an ongoing bid to host the Olympics, which Ford opposed. As I recall, when Ford became mayor, that automatically prompted the IOC to strike Toronto off the list, because their policy was that mayoral support was a sine qua non, regardless of how much the other politicians or general public support the bid.
Again, that was the United States Soccer Federation, not “America,” that pushed for the US to be a host country.
FWIW, I hear and see very little coverage of the World Cup, beyond occasional bits in the news about ticket prices. Pure anecdata, of course, but nobody in my orbit is talking about it. From what I observe, it’s just not on radar screens, especially with the NBA and NHL playoffs going on and with it being baseball season.
Yes. But municipal governments are not “America,” and those municipal governments have no responsibility or accountability for what happens outside their municipalities.
I'm one of the many Parisians who decamped elsewhere for the duration. I don't regret our decision. (I'm a tenant and couldn't have legally rented out my home even if I'd wanted to.)
Possibly. Hotel bookings are well below what was predicted -- people aren't coming from overseas in the numbers expected, and lots of Americans were priced out because hotels jacked their rates up in anticipation of a World Cup windfall. My partner and I were planning to add a week in New York City to an already planned week in Maine, but then looked at hotel prices in New York and New Jersey.
The new Secretary of Homeland Secretary floated the idea in April and now says he is drawing up plans to stop processing international flights in cities that don't allow their cops to cooperate with federal immigration. This is in response to protests at an ICE detention center in New Jersey where conditions are so bad that some people being detained have undertaken a hunger strike; his "reasoning" is that if New Jersey folks don't want immigration officers operating at the detention center, they shouldn't be allowed to have immigration officers operating anywhere in the area. In addition to the New York and Newark, NJ airports, they're thinking about not processing international flights -- which means no people and no cargo could enter the country -- in Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. So fly into Miami or Houston, if you're coming to the US for the World Cup.
If he goes through with this, he'll create far bigger problems than keeping soccer fans from seeing World Cup games.
We're getting a lot here in southern California, as there will be games in LA. And soccer is definitely growing in popularity. During the last World Cup the local sports bars opened at 10 a.m. some days, and they were packed, with people spilling out onto the sidewalk. One of them put up Arsenal flags a few weeks ago
Exactly. The LA City Council voted to bid for the Olympic games, and the Long Beach City Council made an agreement with the LA Organizing Committee. I don't have a vote in Los Angeles, and the first I heard of the Long Beach deal, it was done. Though it didn't come as a surprise, since LB hosted events the last two times the Olympics were in LA. It's not like my city council rep would have cared if I'd expressed my opposition -- she needs the support of local businesses hoping to make money more than she needs my vote.
An aside -- some time I'll put together a post about what it means when someone says "America" as opposed to "the US" when discussing this country. There's interesting history behind the terms.
Living in Canada, I am always careful to refer to the USA or Canada or Mexico when I am referring to one of those countries, or North America when I mean the continent as a whole (though strictly, there are plenty of smaller countries included). Unlike trump, I would never just say 'America'.
I have also heard that some people who rent in Monaco sub-let their properties out for the F1 week, and it covers their rent for the year.
Of course, that assumes you are fantastically wealthy enough to rent in Monaco.
(Or for that matter, afford a property in Wimbledon)
Since the money started to dominate it, professional football has been a mess.
I am not saying that the players should not get paid - they should. But it is so dominated by a capitalist idea of making money out if it, it is no longer a game. It is a cash machine.
Not that I ever liked the game, of course. But I could once respect it.
You're saying this is rife? Tell me more.
Doublethink, Admin
That's not uncommon. Many football fans are very much club first. There's another cohort who love their club and go mad for England. There's then the fans who are only interested in the World Cup. Whether one considers the last group as Real Fans or not, I do not wish to comment.
AFZ
P.S. As a life-long supporter of Southampton FC, I do not wish to comment on whether cheating and corruption are rife throughout the game at this time.
OK the news channels over here were exaggerating then. If that is the case sorry.
As to the use of America and the US there is an agreed format to the effect that the terms represent their government and authorities. It is perfectly normal use for all countries.
Look up "Spygate" with regards to UK football. This is a current UK news story, so I don't think that mentioning the name of the news story would compromise any libel laws (not mentioning any teams or individuals on here of course).
(Also for US readers, WHU stands for West Ham United and COYS stands for Come on You Spurs (Tottenham Hotspur). The former were just relegated from the England Premier League and the latter just escaped relegation. As a lifelong and long suffering Sunderland supporter the season just completed has been an unexpected but very welcome joy.)
Also the often reported behaviour of footballers faking injuries is rife. I mean, quite monor, but also common.
I personally prefer rugby, where they have to insist people leave the field when they are spreading blood everywhere.