World Cup Day 8: The Buzz

I live in a soccer bubble. Even if I wanted to pretend otherwise, my work and my life create circumstances that might make living any other way exceedingly difficult.

To be clear, living this way a choice and I'm happy to make it. After eighteen-ish years of blogging, podcasting, and broadcasting, I feel blessed that I get to make a living thinking about my favorite sport. I wouldn't want it any other way.

But because I live in a soccer bubble (maybe it's more like a soccer Barbieland?), I often miss (or am oblivious to) the themes of the current mainstream American sports conversation. Although I have thoughts on whether such a thing exists in the same ways it did when I was a kid, there's undeniably a national sports conversation—created mostly by big events and controversy—that mixes in with all of the other (more important) national conversations to drive narratives in our current moment.

If you want to be German about it, I guess you could call it the "zeitgeist".

For the first weekend of the World Cup in North America, despite the United States kicking off its tournament with an emphatic 4-1 win over Paraguay in the entertainment capital of the world, soccer's primacy in the national sports conversation was occluded by the NBA Finals.

It's impossible to know how different it might have been if it hadn't been the New York Knicks—an exceedingly weird franchise with a massive fan base—facing off against the San Antonio Spurs and their potentially generational talent with a fascinating (read: French) backstory. The NBA really couldn't have asked for a more compelling combination and by extension, the World Cup couldn't have asked for stiffer competition for attention.

The Knicks finished off the Spurs on Saturday night (I actually tuned in for the final few minutes of the Empire of New York's capture of the Republic of Texas because it happened to fall in between World Cup games; they were the first and only minutes of the 2025/26 NBA season I watched) and while the story of the Knicks victory had a tail that extended through the rest of the weekend and into the week we're now in, the big event stage cleared for soccer with the end of the Finals.

Because I live in the bubble and am 24 games into a commitment to watch every match live, I'm probably not the best equipped to understand how this tournament and the USMNT (re: it's impact on soccer interest) are being discussed in the mainstream culture with the NBA off the stage. And though I stopped worrying myself about the popularity of soccer in America a long time ago in a day-to-day way, I am of course interested in what effect a home World Cup is having on our sports mad country.

Questions like "Is Stephen A. Smith talking about the World Cup" come to my mind like scenes from a horror movie before I quickly dismiss them. It probably matters if people like Smith are dropping half-baked takes on the World Cup, the USMNT, and soccer more generally, but I have a hard time reconciling my general dislike for sports media tourists jumping into soccer with my more pragmatic appreciation that them doing so is a good thing.

Remember when Bill Simmons went to the Azteca? I'm still processing that.

I might not have described the phenomenon "a good thing" a few years ago, when the chattering sports classes were less open to the game and often dismissed it as to (FILL IN BLANK) to matter in America. Thankfully those days are gone, replaced instead by national media figures recognizing that soccer's power is undeniable and it makes little sense to alienate a generation of sports fans who long ago folded soccer into their consumption habits.

That's the thing that strikes me most. Soccer's place in American culture is established, secure, and ubiquitous thanks a slow burn process that saw it inculcated among the very online before moving into greater culture. The more connected the world became, the more difficult it was for resistant elements within American sports to keep soccer from spreading. That's what took soccer from Saturday youth games to a sport we respect and engage with in serious ways.

This came up on the most recent edition of The Best Soccer Show, recorded on Wednesday night. Ryan Rosenblatt and I discussed a range of topics and when I asked Ryan for his thoughts on the tournament's impact on soccer's popularity, we came to the mutual conclusion that while there might be something of a small World Cup "bump" when it comes to fans who directly engage with the sport, soccer's place is so well established (particularly among the kids) that it's hardly worth worrying about.

I love that. I might not be the best guy to ask about how the World Cup is viewed outside of my soccer bubble, but I can see that soccer jerseys are everywhere, that the baseline for soccer knowledge has risen, and that people who slate soccer stand out as weirdos rather than as reflecting the consensus.

I don't personally need soccer to be massive in America to be validated as a someone who works in soccer, or even as a fan. My days of checking MLS attendance numbers and soccer match TV ratings are over. Maybe that's an expression of some personal growth or maybe it's just so obvious that soccer is big here now (in distinctly fractured ways) two decades into my career that I don't feel it necessary.

But if I'm being honest, I still care about the growth of the game. If the importance of soccer culturally (I think this is different than "popularity"; soccer is massively popular in India and that country can't put together a decent national team) is critical to the quest to win a men's World Cup title and keeping our women's national team in conention for more trophies, than we need to keep growing. I'd like to see a world champion USMNT before I die.

And now I'm off to count the number of Lamine Yamal jerseys I see in the wild.

TL;DR: I don't have a good sense of the buzz around the USMNT and the World Cup because I live in a soccer bubble and I have complicated feelings about soccer going mainstream.

If you can help with either of those things, feel free to jump into the comments.

PROGRAMMING NOTES

As mentioned above, there's a new episode of The Best Soccer Show available you YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts.

I'll be on SiriusXM FC tonight from 6-9 PM ET with Eric Wynalda. We'll be on live during Canada-Qatar with check-ins from Vancouver and will of course be talking about Thursday's other games and the massive test for the USMNT tomorrow against Australia.

See you tomorrow.