World Cup Fever in Los Angeles: A Unique Experience
Los Angeles doesn’t so much host a World Cup as swallow it whole. The city sprawls out to the horizon, a maze of freeways, palm trees and strip malls, and somewhere inside it all a global tournament is happening on television while life carries on, largely unbothered.
It’s been two decades since I last found myself in the host country for a major tournament that didn’t involve England. Germany 2006 was all autobahns and steins, Ian and Matt and Oli in the passenger seats, Trinidad and Tobago fans dragging us into impromptu street parties, and a hangover so savage I was relieved to miss Brazil v Australia. This is different. Less backpack, more broadcast schedule. Less wondering where the next beer is coming from, more wondering if the next podcast upload has actually worked.
Back home the question lands the same way every time: “So, is there World Cup fever in the States?” It takes me back to a local TV crew wandering around central Cambridge before an FA Cup quarter-final against Crystal Palace in 1990, politely asking shoppers for their thoughts on the big game and discovering, repeatedly, that many of them didn’t know Cambridge had a football club.
The same energy applies when the Ashes rolls into Melbourne and someone on air asks: “What’s the atmosphere like down there, Max?” Well, mainly I’m on the kitchen floor with two under‑fives, trying to wipe rice off tiles while explaining to no one in particular why Bazball has just lost by an innings. Real life doesn’t pause for sport, and it certainly doesn’t pause for journalists. So to the partners of players, officials and reporters, holding it all together while we gallivant around North America: an enormous debt is owed. If my 18‑month‑old, Willie Rushden, ever stumbles across this, he should know this was absolutely not the moment to come down with hand, foot and mouth.
You don’t need a guidebook to know the US is vast. You feel it in your legs. Los Angeles seems to roll on for ever. I tried to LimeGlide – a bike without pedals, essentially a scooter with ideas above its station – from West Hollywood to Santa Monica and ended up stranded on a dual carriageway, in a non‑cycling zone, dragging an inert lump of metal through a hedgerow like a condemned shopping trolley. One minute the sun is in your face and the wind is in your hair; the next you’re wondering how far it is to civilisation and whether anyone has ever died trying to return an e‑scooter.
The broadcast schedule pins us down. An hour between games means your world shrinks to a Trader Joe’s, the cafe opposite, and a hotel pool patrolled by influencers with improbable abs debating their next TikTok series or whether they’re on the Nylon nightclub guest list. Yet the football does cut through. Bars in West Hollywood show the matches, US shirts dot the stools, and every so often a passing Bosnian gets a casual “Good luck later” from someone who might never watch another game all year.
Early on, the basketball almost stole the show. You absorb the NBA by osmosis here. You wake up one morning and realise you’ve somehow become a Knicks or Spurs fan without consent. I picked San Antonio. Naturally, they promptly blew what felt like the biggest lead in NBA Finals history. It was, in its own way, a reassuringly familiar sporting choice.
The most stirring moment so far hasn’t come from a stadium, but from a microphone. Zohran Mamdani – Guardian Football Weekly listener and, less crucially, mayor of New York – delivered a speech at the Knicks parade that genuinely raised the hairs on the back of my neck. He reeled off names of basketball players I’d never heard of, yet it sounded like scripture.
Football, though, has found its own electricity. The US win over Paraguay lit a fuse. Not for the tourists and bandwagon jumpers, but for the people who have carried this sport here for years. Journalists, coaches, diehards who have pushed “soccer” uphill in a country that instinctively turns to the NFL, NBA and MLB. For them, this wasn’t just three points. It was validation. A sense that their sport might finally be allowed a seat at the grown‑ups’ table.
In England, a World Cup triumph or a last‑32 implosion won’t decide whether people care about football. The game is woven into the country’s weekends. In the US and Australia, the stakes feel different. A quarter‑final or better can change the conversation. It can drag the sport into prime time, force the sceptics to pay attention. That’s a burden the players don’t need, but they carry it anyway.
Thousands of miles away, Fed Square in Melbourne has provided the most emotional jolt of the tournament. Watching the scenes there, the flares, the limbs, the raw noise, came close to breaking me. Nestory Irankunda, a refugee, taking that touch and scoring that goal for Australia – that’s the sort of moment that slices clean through the noise of politics. In an era of rising populism and nationalism, there is something powerful about a player whose family fled conflict representing a country built on immigration, just as the US is.
Connor Metcalfe’s reaction in the mixed zone summed up a different side of the story. Watching his own goal back, he was as Australian as it gets: “Far out that was far out, that was ick!” – or something very close. The accent, the understatement, the disbelief. I openly adore the Socceroos in a way that jars completely with how I feel when Australia’s cricketers walk out. Some contradictions are best left unexamined.
Distance from England has been healthy. You’re spared the pub bores and phone‑in warriors obsessing over whether Thomas Tuchel belts out the national anthem. I doubt King Charles is losing sleep over it. Why should anyone else? England are good, and they’re fun. Harry Kane has pace buzzing around him. Noni Madueke is grinning his way through games. Elliot Anderson is popping up in the right spaces. Djed Spence suddenly looks quicker than the Road Runner. There is hope again, but not the usual dread‑soaked version. Not yet.
Most days here are a blend of two constants: living with my friend and co‑host Barry Glendenning, and watching Fox Sports. The main jeopardy is whether Zlatan Ibrahimovic will throttle Alexi Lalas on air before Barry decides to throttle me off it.
The US coverage has been solid. There’s plenty of Soccer 101, but that’s part of the job. BBC and ITV do the same at home. An England World Cup game draws in people who barely glance at Crystal Palace v Brentford on a Monday night. Not everyone is supposed to be an expert. That said, I could happily go the rest of my life without seeing Christian Pulisic selling Wells Fargo during a hydration break.
As for life with Barry, we’re discovering our limits. Neither of us would sign a lifetime tenancy. But we’re functioning. Just about. I can’t think of many moments where I’ve really got on his nerves, apart from – deep breath – eating an apple too loudly, failing to screw the lid on a bottle of Coke Zero properly, offering unsolicited advice on how to chop a chilli, asking whether he needed the big saucepan, decanting yoghurt into a bowl, doing too much laundry, and criticising his unapologetic flatulence, from both exits. Other than that, seamless.
Somehow people lap this up. The bickering, the mishaps, the hotel‑room domesticity. It lives on Instagram, on the pod, on YouTube, or wherever you get your content. It feels like pilot season. Barry has just helped a star of Selling Sunset with her key fob – not a euphemism, regrettably – and suddenly we’re joking about “cracking the States”.
Maybe we will. Maybe we won’t. For now, there’s another game to watch, another show to record, another day to navigate in this vast, indifferent, mesmerising host nation. And somewhere out there, between a Trader Joe’s and a TikTok shoot, football is still trying to claim its share of America’s attention.
