The World Cup For Nobody Is Almost Here

Everything about this World Cup is designed to make you hate it. If you live here and you’re a soccer fan, tickets to games are a ripoff, fan zones are built to give you heatstroke, and Fox Sports’ soccer coverage is an unbroken insult to human intelligence. If you’re a local who’s not really into soccer but wants to be part of the fun, you’ll need to work hard to discover pockets of the host cities with any visible sign (flags, bunting, festive paraphernalia) that the World Cup is less than a week away. If you have match-day tickets and want to get to a stadium using public transport, you’ll probably need to sell a kidney to afford the bus or train fare. If you try walking, you’ll probably die (though you’ll keep both kidneys until the end, which may be an acceptable tradeoff.) If you make it to a stadium alive, you won’t be able to bring your own water. If you have the genius idea of just watching the whole tournament on TV, once again, and I cannot stress this enough: that will be awful too. If you care about quality soccer, FIFA’s decision to expand the tournament to 48 teams means you’ll have to endure a punishingly long group stage, then an inaugural World Cup “round of 32,” before you even get to the good stuff. If you care about footballing heritage, there are assorted “improvements” designed for the American market launching this tournament that will be guaranteed to piss you off (on-field player and coach interviews during matches, a halftime show for the final, advertising on everything), and that’s before we even consider the crime of holding the final at an NFL stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey rather than at the temple of World Cup history that is Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca. If you’re a foreign soccer fan with designs on experiencing the American World Cup in person and you’ve made jokes on social media at any point over the past two decades: tough luck pal, entry is denied. If you’re flying into a sanctuary city, there’s every chance your flight will be canceled before you even start packing. Assuming you make it here, fear not: unlike the crappy games in the group stage, you won’t go unwatched. ICE will be on hand to “secure” the World Cup and keep the brownshirt party going all summer long. As you enjoy the matches you’ll face constant surveillance and the continuous risk of deportation for being the wrong race or having the wrong face, with the possibility of indefinite detention in a life-threatening ICE facility as a bonus. Should you survive all that, you can look forward to getting caught in the dragnet of the Trump administration’s “summer surge” of law enforcement around the US’s 250th birthday celebrations.