World Cup in Los Angeles: A Unique Experience
Los Angeles doesn’t so much host a World Cup as swallow it whole. The city just rolls on, six lanes wide and sunburnt, while somewhere inside it all a football tournament is taking place and a few of us are trying to keep up.
It’s been 20 years since I last worked a major tournament in the host country – Germany 2006, a hire car, Ian, Matt, Oli and the constant threat of another stein. Back then the biggest decision was whether my hangover could cope with Brazil v Australia in the midday glare. It could not. I missed the game and dodged sunstroke. A tactical withdrawal disguised as poor planning.
Now the questions from home are different. “Is there World Cup fever in the States?” people ask, as if there might be a single, measurable temperature for a country this big. It takes me back to a local TV crew wandering around central Cambridge before our FA Cup quarter-final with Crystal Palace in 1990, shoving microphones under the noses of polite people who didn’t know Cambridge even had a football team.
It’s the same when the Ashes hits Melbourne and someone asks: “What’s the atmosphere like down there, Max?” The honest answer is usually that I’m on my hands and knees, scraping cold rice off the floor with a wet wipe while two under‑fives scream about something other than Bazball’s flaws. So to the partners of journalists, players and officials holding the fort at home while we gad about North America: you’re the unsung heroes of this whole circus.
If my 18‑month‑old, Willie Rushden, ever stumbles across this, he’ll discover that now was not the ideal moment to get hand, foot and mouth. Timing, like finishing, is everything.
Out here, the scale of the US hits you first. Los Angeles doesn’t end; it just fades into a different kind of Los Angeles. I tried to LimeGlide – a bike with no pedals and plenty of misplaced confidence – from West Hollywood to Santa Monica. One minute I’m coasting along with the breeze in my hair. The next I’m in a non‑cycling zone on a dual carriageway, dragging a lump of useless metal through a hedge, miles from anywhere you’d want to be.
The tournament schedule pins us down to a tight little triangle: Trader Joe’s, the cafe over the road, and a hotel pool full of influencers with washboard stomachs and carefully curated ennui. They talk about their next TikTok series and whether they’re on the list for Nylon nightclub’s opening night. We talk about full‑backs. Different worlds, same Wi‑Fi.
Football is on the screens in the bars of West Hollywood. US shirts are dotted about, and every now and then a “Good luck later” floats towards a Bosnian on his way to somewhere more important. It’s not exactly a carnival, but the sport is there, nudging its way into the American noise.
For the first few days, though, the real soundtrack has been basketball. You can’t spend long here without being claimed by the Knicks or the Spurs by osmosis. I chose the Spurs, obviously, and watched them cough up the biggest lead in NBA finals history, or something close enough to feel inevitable. A natural fit, in other words.
One of the standout moments so far didn’t come from football at all. Guardian Football Weekly listener – and, in his spare time, mayor of New York – Zohran Mamdani delivered a speech at the Knicks parade that raised the hairs on the back of my neck. A roll call of basketball names I’d never heard in my life, delivered with such fire it didn’t matter. Sport at its best makes strangers’ stories feel like your own.
Football, though, is where the real emotion is building. The most thrilling part of this tournament to date has been the reaction of US fans to the win over Paraguay. Not the tourists in replica shirts, but the lifers – the people who have covered this game for years, desperate for it to claim a proper place in a country ruled by other sports. You could feel the relief, the vindication, the sense that they weren’t shouting into the void after all.
In England, a World Cup win or a last‑32 exit doesn’t change whether the game is popular. Football is baked into the country’s DNA. Here, and in Australia, everything feels more fragile. A quarter‑final, maybe better, can shift the dial. It can move football from niche to necessary. That’s a heavy, unspoken pressure to place on players who already carry enough.
The cost and the payoff are written on the faces in places like Fed Square in Melbourne, my adopted home. Those scenes after Nestory Irankunda’s goal – a refugee taking that touch, hitting that shot, and sending a crowd into orbit – were the closest I’ve come to crying at this tournament. In a time when populism and nationalism are on the rise, there is something quietly magnificent about a family fleeing conflict and their son ending up representing Australia, a country built on immigration, just like the US.
Connor Metcalfe summed up the other side of that story in the most Australian way possible, watching his goal back in the mixed zone and unleashing a stream of “Far out that was far out, that was ick!” – or words close enough that the translation doesn’t matter. I don’t fully understand why I’m so openly fond of the Socceroos when the sight of Australia’s cricketers still makes me instinctively bristle, but here we are.
Distance from England has its uses. You avoid the noise, the invented culture wars, the fury about whether Thomas Tuchel sings the national anthem. I’m fairly sure King Charles isn’t losing sleep over it, and nor should anyone else. What matters is on the pitch, and right now England are good, and fun. Harry Kane finally has pace buzzing around him. Noni Madueke is grinning his way through games. Elliot Anderson is in the right places. Djed Spence looks faster than the Road Runner. There’s hope, but not that tight‑chested, terror‑based hope we’ve grown used to. Not yet.
Most days here are some blend of living with my friend and co‑host Barry Glendenning and watching Fox Sports, while silently wondering whether Zlatan Ibrahimovic will throttle Alexi Lalas on air before Barry does the same to me off it. The US coverage is largely solid. There’s plenty of basic “soccer” chat, but that’s the deal when you’re talking to a World Cup audience rather than the diehards who tune in for Crystal Palace v Brentford on a Monday night. Not everyone wants to argue about inverted full‑backs. I could, however, go a long time without seeing Christian Pulisic sell me Wells Fargo during a hydration break.
As for living with Barry, let’s just say neither of us is drawing up a 10‑year lease. To be fair, I can’t think of a single moment I’ve genuinely annoyed him. Other than eating an apple too loudly. Or failing to screw the lid on a Coke Zero bottle tightly enough. Or offering unsolicited advice on how to chop a chilli. Or asking if he needed the big saucepan. Or putting yoghurt into a bowl. Or doing too much laundry. Or questioning his unapologetic flatulence, at both ends. Minor details. We’re coping.
Somehow this domestic nonsense has become content. People lap it up on Instagram, on the pod, on YouTube, or wherever you get your distraction from the real world. Maybe it’s pilot season. Maybe this is how we finally “crack the States”. Barry has already helped a star of Selling Sunset with her key fob – not a euphemism, just Los Angeles being Los Angeles.
Big things might be coming. For now, though, it’s football, freeways and the faint feeling that somewhere in this sprawling city, the sport we love is fighting for a permanent place in the American story.
