World Cup Fever in Los Angeles: A Different Experience
Los Angeles doesn’t so much welcome you as swallow you whole. Freeways hum, palm trees lean in the heat haze and somewhere, between a Trader Joe’s and a hotel pool full of influencers rehearsing their next TikTok bit, the World Cup is happening.
It’s 20 years since I last found myself in the host country for a major tournament that didn’t involve England. Germany 2006 was a different life: Ian, Matt and Oli in a hire car, steins appearing as if by magic, Trinidad and Tobago fans turning every square into a carnival, and the sort of hangover that made missing Brazil v Australia feel like divine intervention rather than poor planning.
This is more structured. More professional. Less “where’s the next beer?” and more “where’s the next Wi‑Fi signal?” But the central question from home hasn’t changed in decades: is there World Cup fever?
World Cup in a City That Barely Notices
The honest answer: not really, not in the way people in England imagine it. Los Angeles is too big, too distracted, too busy being Los Angeles. You can drive – or, in my case, ill-advisedly LimeGlide – for miles without any sense that the biggest tournament in football is unfolding on the screens you can’t see from the freeway.
A few days ago I tried to scoot from West Hollywood to Santa Monica on a LimeGlide, one of those bikes without pedals that look like a midlife crisis on hire. For a while it was idyllic: sun on my face, breeze in my hair, the faint illusion that I was living my best Californian life. Then I hit a non‑cycling zone on a dual carriageway and suddenly I was dragging a lump of dead metal through a hedgerow, miles from anything resembling a beach or a bar.
That’s the scale of this place. The World Cup here is not a city‑wide roar; it’s a low‑level hum, audible only if you’re listening for it.
Within our working radius – one hour between games, no more – life shrinks to a few landmarks: the Trader Joe’s, the café across the street, the hotel pool where people with impossible abdominal definition debate guest lists for the opening night of Nylon nightclub. Yet step into a bar in West Hollywood and the tournament flickers into focus. US shirts at the counter. A Bosnian jersey here and there. The occasional “Good luck later” tossed across the room like a friendly free‑kick.
Basketball First, Football Second
In truth, the opening days felt more like an NBA city than a World Cup one. You don’t choose to follow the Knicks or the Spurs here; you absorb them by osmosis. I drifted towards San Antonio – Spurs supporting Spurs felt thematically tidy – only to watch them surrender what was billed as the biggest lead in NBA Finals history. Of course they did. Some sporting destinies are transferable.
The most stirring speech of the trip so far didn’t come from a manager in a mixed zone or a captain in a press conference, but from Zohran Mamdani – Guardian Football Weekly listener, and, incidentally, mayor of New York – at the Knicks parade. I barely recognised a name he mentioned, yet the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. That’s the thing about sport in this country: when it grips people, it really grips them.
And football, at last, is starting to do that.
US Relief, Australian Euphoria
The United States’ win over Paraguay didn’t just settle a group; it released years of pent‑up anxiety. The joy wasn’t in the tourists or the curious neutrals, but in the people who have been here, in the trenches, trying to make “soccer” matter in a country where everything else seems to come first.
For them, this tournament is not just about glory. It’s about survival. England can win it or go out in the last 32 and the Premier League will still drown the airwaves every weekend. The game is baked into the culture. The US and Australia don’t have that luxury. A quarter‑final run, a deep surge into the knockout rounds, can change budgets, boardrooms, broadcasting deals. It can decide whether a generation of kids choose football or drift back to basketball, baseball, anything else.
The players don’t need that weight on their shoulders. They carry it anyway.
Half a world away, in my adopted home of Melbourne, Fed Square erupted when Nestory Irankunda took that touch and buried that goal. Those scenes came closest to breaking me. Irankunda, a refugee, scoring for a country built on immigration, at a time when populism and nationalism are tightening their grip – that’s football at its most powerful. The ball hits the net and, for a second, a story of flight and fear turns into one of belonging and pride.
Connor Metcalfe, replaying his goal in the mixed zone, could not have been more Australian if he’d tried. “Far out that was far out, that was ick!” – or something gloriously close to that. There’s a part of me that adores the Socceroos in a way that makes no sense when I’m watching Australia’s cricketers grind England into the dust. Some contradictions you don’t need to solve.
England From a Distance
Being away from England has its benefits. Chief among them: not having to indulge the cottage industry of outrage over whether Thomas Tuchel belts out the national anthem with sufficient gusto. King Charles is unlikely to be losing sleep over it. Why should anyone else?
From here, England look… fun. That’s not a word we’ve always been able to attach to this team. Harry Kane has pace buzzing around him. Noni Madueke is grinning. Elliot Anderson keeps popping up in exactly the right pockets of space. Djed Spence suddenly runs like someone pressed fast‑forward on a cartoon. There’s hope, but not the usual, suffocating, terror‑laced kind. Not yet, anyway.
Inside the Bubble
Most of my days boil down to two constants: living with my friend and co‑host Barry Glendenning, and watching Fox Sports. One ongoing subplot: whether Zlatan Ibrahimovic will eventually lose patience with Alexi Lalas live on air before Barry loses patience with me.
The US coverage has been… decent. Lots of “Soccer 101” explainers, but then BBC and ITV do much the same when England play at a major tournament. A World Cup game draws in people who couldn’t pick a full‑back out of a line‑up on a Monday night at Selhurst Park. Not everyone wants a tactical thesis. Some just want to know why Christian Pulisic is suddenly in a Wells Fargo advert during a hydration break, and how many more times they’ll have to see it.
As for Barry and me, we are, in theory, adults. Would we choose to live together long‑term? Probably not. Are we managing? Just about.
I say that with a caveat: I have, apparently, eaten an apple too loudly, failed to screw the lid on a bottle of Coke Zero tightly enough, dispensed unsolicited advice on chopping a chilli, queried his use of the big saucepan, put yoghurt into a bowl in an unacceptable manner, done too much laundry and dared to criticise his unapologetic flatulence – all of it, from every conceivable angle.
Other than that, domestic bliss.
Life Beyond the Lens
Somehow, people find this stuff compelling. The minor arguments, the soft‑focus chaos, the mundanity of two middle‑aged men failing to share a kitchen – it all ends up on Instagram, on the pod, on YouTube, or wherever you get your content these days. It feels faintly ridiculous and oddly exposing, but apparently this is what passes for pilot season.
Barry has already assisted the star of Selling Sunset with her key fob – not a euphemism, just a very 2020s sentence – and you start to wonder how long it’ll be before someone in a glass office decides this is exactly the kind of nonsense America needs in a late‑night slot.
Back home, partners juggle kids and real life while we roam around North America talking about back fours and pressing triggers. They are the unseen heroes of every tournament, the ones mopping up rice with wet wipes while we debate xG. My own 18‑month‑old, Willie Rushden, has picked this exact moment to come down with hand, foot and mouth. If he ever reads this, he should know: the guilt crosses oceans.
The US is vast. The World Cup, in places, still feels small. But in the bars of West Hollywood, in Fed Square, in living rooms in New York and Brisbane and Birmingham, something is shifting. You can sense it in the way Americans talk about this team now, in the way Australians cling to every Socceroos surge.
The question isn’t whether there’s World Cup fever. It’s whether, when this tournament ends and the cameras move on, the game here will finally have grown too big to ignore.
