One Cup Makes the People Come Together

How FIFA Made My Summer Work

I've spent this tournament writing as an economist. The credibility problem, the halftime spectacle built for television, and the officiating calls that kept breaking one direction: that's the file I built Celebnomics to write, and I'll keep writing it. This is a different file, the one where I stop analyzing the tournament from a professional distance and admit I lived inside it for five weeks, across three host cities, and came out more attached to a sports event than I've been to anything wearing a scoreboard in my adult life.

I watched this World Cup from Mexico City, from New York twice, and from Los Angeles. I stood inside Estadio Azteca for the opening whistle. I was back in New York by way of a friend's living room for the final match where Spain defeated Argentina 1-0. In between: a country nearly setting a world record before its own tournament even started, a Nordic nation commandeering a subway car, a four-time champion packing up in June, and a host city that made me question whether Americans outside a stadium footprint actually noticed a World Cup was happening at all. Madonna, twenty-six years ago, sang that "music makes the people come together". This summer, a football tournament made a serious run at the same claim.

I should say up front that I have never been this guy. I've built a career on music and fame and the machinery underneath both, and if you'd told me at the start of the year that I'd spend my summer chasing a football tournament across a continent I'm about to leave, I'd have laughed and gone back to whatever essay I was arguing with. But I'm way into my second life, and one of the things that second life taught me is that you go where the aliveness is. This summer, it was here.

Mexico City: Fever Pitch Football
It started before it started. Days before the opening match, Mexico City tried to break the record for the largest human wave ever attempted on Paseo de la Reforma, timed to the fortieth anniversary of the wave's own debut in Mexico's stadiums during the 1986 World Cup. I wasn't there for a match yet but I was there for a country rehearsing joy in the street, thousands of people moving as one body just to prove they still could. That's when I understood what I'd actually flown into - this wasn't a nation hosting a tournament, they were reclaiming a memory.

The opening match itself, Mexico 2, South Africa 0 at the Azteca, ended up almost secondary to what surrounded it. Every block near the stadium had turned into a market for the same green jersey, the authentic Adidas version running close to two hundred dollars, the replica a half and sometimes a quarter of that, and for a country where those numbers represent real weeks of wages for a lot of people, the math simply doesn't work. So the street corrected it the way the street always does, with vendors selling bootleg kits stitched close enough to pass from a distance, laid out on folding tables that stretched entire sidewalks. I photographed every table I passed and bought from none of them, because that contradiction, a nation's own pride sold back to it at a markup most of the nation can't afford, is Celebnomics in its rawest form, and I've written that same sentence a dozen different ways about a dozen different celebrities without once thinking it would fit a football kit just as well.

CDMX was fever pitch from the moment I landed, with Reforma dressed for the tournament and every corner store beating every billboard to the memo. This is a city that has hosted this thing more times than any other on earth, doing it a record third time, and still treating it like the first.

NYC: Foreign Wave Of Friendliness
New York took the baton, and it took it loudly. Norway had already turned a soccer send-off into a subway performance by the time I landed. The "Viking row," arms pulling back in unison like a ship that wasn't there, moved out of the stadium and into Times Square, up escalators, into actual subway cars, days ahead of their group match against Senegal at MetLife. I stood in a car full of strangers, not one of them from Oslo, who joined in because refusing felt more embarrassing than rowing an invisible boat for thirty seconds. That kind of thing doesn't happen at a Super Bowl. New York got recruited, though it hardly took convincing, not with the Knicks having just ended fifty-three years of waiting and two million people already primed to lose their minds along Broadway.

Not every story in that stretch ended as well. I went to German House expecting the long, grinding run four-time champions are supposed to have, especially after they opened the tournament by putting seven goals on Curaçao, and instead I watched them go out in the round of 32 on penalties to Paraguay, Germany's first ever World Cup shootout loss. The room went from loud to silent in the time it takes a ball to sail over a crossbar. I know that silence from other rooms in my life, the kind where nobody wants to be the first one to speak because speaking makes it real, and I'll admit it landed harder than a group-stage exit has any business landing on a man who isn't German and had no stake in it. Watching a giant lose early and up close hits differently than reading about it the next morning. You feel the temperature of a room change in real time, and there's nothing else quite like it.

Somewhere in those New York weeks I also turned into an accidental geography teacher, or maybe the student. I lost count of the conversations that started with someone confidently confusing Cabo Verde, the tiny island nation making its first ever World Cup appearance, with Cabo, the vacation spot a few hours south of the US border. Meanwhile the opposite education was happening in real time, with fans arriving from every corner of the map discovering ranch dressing, marveling at how much food arrives on one diner plate, and quietly revising whatever version of America they'd packed in their suitcase. I heard some variation of "I thought you'd all be different" more times than I can count, and for the first time I also heard bartenders and waiters getting quizzed about tipping and living wages by visitors who couldn't work out why the math lands the way it does here, the questions asked with astonishment and answered with mild embarrassment.

A World Cup doesn't fix geopolitics. But it will put a Norwegian, a Cape Verdean, and a kid from Ohio in the same fan zone singing the same chant, and for a month, that's its own kind of diplomacy, one that no summit table has managed in years. New York was foreignness landing on friendly ground, a city that lets you in and lets you be loud about it, where the waves this time weren't records at all but people.

Los Angeles: Stadium Perfection, City Dullness
Then Los Angeles, for the stretch that should have felt like the crescendo and instead felt like a secret being kept from the city hosting it.

Inside SoFi, everything worked. Spain grinding past Belgium 2-1 in the quarterfinal, the kind of ugly, correct win that doesn't make highlight reels but wins tournaments, in a stadium that is a piece of engineering FIFA could not have designed better if they'd asked, with the sight lines and the sound and the movement all purring along like the whole apparatus had been waiting years for exactly this.

Outside SoFi? You'd almost never know a World Cup was happening in the city at all. A block off the stadium footprint and the tournament vanished, no bunting on Sunset, no flags off balconies in Los Feliz, none of those fan zones you stumbled into by accident the way you did in Mexico City or midtown Manhattan. LA had the least energy of any host city I set foot in this summer, and it wasn't close. It's the geography, mostly, because the city is too spread out for a single-thread cultural moment to hold together, and the entertainment complex here is so used to being the show that it doesn't quite know how to be the audience.

I stayed in LA through the semifinal doubleheader, watching Spain shut out France 2-0 and then Argentina claw past England 2-1 the next day. Neither match was actually played anywhere near LA by then, Spain and France were in Arlington and Argentina and England in Atlanta, but I stayed because I had friends there who understood what I was after, and a couple of them had lived it more thoroughly than I had. They'd flown to a handful of host cities across this tournament, following matches, and they'd also gone to Qatar in 2022. To a person, they preferred Qatar, and it had nothing to do with the football being better because it wasn't. Qatar was one city, one footprint, one energy, where you could attend three matches in a week without needing three connecting flights and a rental car, where the stadiums were closer and cleaner and easier to move between, and where the vibe stayed concentrated the way a tournament vibe is supposed to. This one, they said, kept asking them to chase it. And LA, of the three cities I'd been in, was the one that made you feel that chase the most, because even standing inside the host city itself, the tournament wasn't quite there.

That's the honest version, and it isn't a flattering one: the stadiums this summer were perfect, and the countries that hosted them were, more often than they'd like to admit, distracted.

​New York, Again: The Ending
I flew back to New York with just enough time to see how it ended, and I watched the final at a friend's place where the room was mostly leaning Spain but a few hardcore Argentina fans held the other half honest. That mix mattered, because you don't fully feel a 1-0 result unless there are people in the room who lost it too.

And it ended almost exactly where I'd started tracking it from a distance. Messi, 39, playing what's almost certainly his last World Cup match, against a Spanish side built around Lamine Yamal, a kid he once posed with as an infant nearly two decades ago. Football doesn't often hand you a symmetry that clean. Argentina went down to ten men late, Emiliano Martínez set a World Cup final save record with ten stops and it still wasn't enough, and Ferran Torres scored in the 106th minute off a Nico Williams assist to win Spain its second World Cup exactly the way it won its first, one goal in extra time from a team that finished the whole tournament unbeaten. Messi sat on the grass for a long moment before anyone came to get him up, and I don't think a single person left in that stadium, Spanish or Argentine, wanted to look away from it.

Before Torres scored, before the trophy came out, before extra time was even something anyone was thinking about, Tom Cruise stood at center field and opened the final with a speech about a game that "turns strangers into friends." Madonna followed him, hours later, with the first halftime show in a World Cup final's history. Neither one was there to be honored for what they'd already done, because Cruise is promoting a fall film called Digger that he's been trailer-dropping straight through the tournament, and Madonna is deep in the Confessions II rollout. Two active campaigns, on the same field, on the biggest stage of the summer. And here's the coincidence I still can't shake, that these are the exact two living figures whose careers first got me noticing that fame had begun to behave less like a byproduct of the work and more like the economy itself, the pair who quietly jump-started what I'd eventually build Celebnomics around more than two decades before I ever gave it a name. That both of them landed on this particular field, on this particular night, still building and still selling and still shifting the culture around them, is the kind of full-circle moment a younger version of me would have watched and missed entirely. This version had to sit down with it.

Madonna, in her set, told a packed stadium and however many hundred million watching around the world that music has always found a way to pull strangers into the same rhythm. She wasn't wrong. She just had no idea a football tournament had already spent five weeks proving her point on a bigger stage than the one she was standing on.

A Norwegian rowing chant took over a subway car that owed it nothing, a Mexican street vendor sold a country's pride back to itself at a discount rate, a German fanbase grieved together in a room in Manhattan, a kid from Ohio learned where Cape Verde is, and a living room in New York held both a Spanish celebration and an Argentine mourning without either side needing to leave. None of that required a single goal to matter, though plenty of goals happened anyway.

I've spent two decades watching fame and attention move through culture and calling it Celebnomics, and this tournament is the first time I watched an entire event become worth more than any single person inside it, more than Messi or Yamal or any marketing budget FIFA could have engineered on its own. Whether the next host country manages to hold that energy in one place the way Qatar did, or whether it scatters again the way this one did across three enormous nations, will be the tournament's real test.

I'm leaving for Asia soon, so this was my last American summer for a while (I think), and I didn't plan for it to be this one. I thought I was flying to three cities to focus on my work, and I ended up writing about a tournament instead, consistently, because the tournament turned out to hold everything I write about anyway, the fame and the money and the spectacle and that same machinery humming underneath all of it. What I got was the closing argument on a whole continent, delivered by a game I don't even follow, in front of strangers who kept turning out not to be strangers at all. Full time. Spain 1, Argentina 0. I'll take it.