Forty-Eight Countries Showed Up. So Did Everything They Carry.

Lawrence, Kansas, in the Rain

There is a video going around. An elderly man, standing outside in a storm in Lawrence, Kansas — a college town of about 100,000 people in the northeastern part of the state — visibly undone by emotion as the Algerian national team arrived at their base camp. Rain on his jacket. Something breaking open in his face. It went viral. Then more videos followed, and what emerged was described by those paying attention as the unlikeliest love affair of the tournament: a small American city and a North African football federation, finding each other in the middle of a World Cup nobody was sure this country was ready to host.

I keep coming back to that man in the rain. Not because it's sentimental, though it is. Because it's the truest image of what this tournament has become — and what it has always threatened to become, if anyone would let it.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup is the largest in the sport's history, expanded to 48 nations and spread across three countries. The scale was always going to produce strange adjacencies. Algeria drawing Messi's Argentina in Kansas City. Cape Verde — making their first-ever World Cup appearance — training in Rhode Island, their celebration stretching back to the islands off West Africa. Iran drawing 2-2 with New Zealand in southern California, in a stadium full of Iranians who had not agreed on anything in decades. Morocco fans flying in from Dubai, from the UK, from Montreal, paying for tickets that, as one Guardian report noted, could run double the average annual salary back home — roughly $7,400 a year — just to watch their team face Brazil in New York.

These are not footnotes to the tournament. They are the tournament.

The Infrastructure of Welcome

Missouri set aside $42.5 million to renovate Arrowhead Stadium for World Cup matches. Three thousand five hundred seats were removed to fit a full-sized pitch. The playing surface was resodded. The stadium that belongs to the Chiefs was temporarily converted into something that could hold a different kind of spectacle — one where Lionel Messi and Algeria's national team would share the same grass.

That number — $42.5 million — is worth sitting with. It represents a specific American calculation: that the World Cup was worth bending the building for. That the sport had earned the renovation. There is something almost confessional about it. For years, the conversation about soccer in America carried a faint condescension, a waiting-room quality, as if the sport were perpetually auditioning. The money spent on Arrowhead is not that. The money spent on Arrowhead is a decision.

But infrastructure is the easy part. You can resod a field. You can remove seats. What you cannot engineer is the man weeping in the rain in Lawrence, or the Senegalese community gathered at Cafe Ru Dix in Brooklyn — a moment captured by Andscape columnist William C. Rhoden and ESPN FC host Alexis Nunes — trying to explain to an American audience why Senegal vs. France is not a soccer match so much as a reckoning with history that predates the sport entirely. That conversation doesn't get built into a renovation budget. It either happens or it doesn't.

What the Ticket Price Reveals

The Guardian's reporting on Morocco's opener against Brazil contained a detail that should make anyone uncomfortable: fans who had traveled from Marrakech and Casablanca to sit in the lower bowl of the New York New Jersey Stadium, in a country where the average annual salary is $7,400, having paid — in some cases — double that figure for access. One supporter described being there as a minimum. Not a luxury. A minimum. The floor of what he owed his team, his country, himself.

That is either the most beautiful thing about football or the most troubling, and the honest answer is that it's both, at the same time, with no resolution available. The World Cup has always been aspirational in ways that cut. The expansion to 48 teams theoretically opens the tournament to more nations, more stories, more of that elderly man in the rain. But the ticket market doesn't expand with the bracket. Cape Verde debuting on the world stage means something profound to everyone who traces their family back to those islands — and also means that many of them will watch from very far away, priced out of the rooms where history is being made.

FIFA sets the stage and FIFA sets the prices. Those two facts live in uncomfortable proximity.

Ninety Minutes of Forgetting, and What Comes After

The Guardian's account of Iran vs. New Zealand in Los Angeles described a stadium that held, simultaneously, supporters of past and present regimes and opponents of both — Iranians separated by decades of political fracture, briefly occupying the same bleachers. The match ended 2-2. It captivated everyone. And then it ended, and same old problems returned, as the headline put it with a directness that felt almost unkind in its accuracy.

Soccer unites. We are told this. And sometimes it does — genuinely, in ways that last. But what the 2026 World Cup seems to be revealing, story by story, city by city, is something more complicated than unity: it is revealing presence. The Cape Verdeans are here. The Algerians are here, in Kansas, and Lawrence loves them. The Moroccans flew across oceans and paid what they couldn't afford because minimum is minimum. The Iranians sat next to each other for 90 minutes and felt something that politics had denied them, even if only briefly.

The tournament didn't fix anything. It never does. But it created the conditions for these people to be seen — by each other, by the host cities, by whoever happened to be watching a video of an old man standing in the rain.

That's not nothing. In fact, I'd argue it's the whole reason the sport travels at all — not to resolve what divides us, but to insist, for a few weeks every four years, that showing up still means something.