Not Even Trump Could Kill the World Cup Buzz

The tournament gave weary Americans something to think about other than explosive diarrhea.

Donald Trump tried to co-opt Spain’s World Cup victory Sunday by photobombing the trophy ceremony and repeatedly ignoring polite attempts to usher him off the stage.

But Spain wasn’t going to let the narcissist in chief spoil their moment of triumph: the country’s national football league edited the president out of the victory photo entirely. Even FIFA — the very organization that gave Trump a sham “peace prize” last year — carefully cropped him out of photos shared on social media.

Just as Trump wasn’t able to overshadow Spain’s big win, nor was he able — despite his disastrous meddling — to dampen the infectious joy of the World Cup, which has provided weary Americans with a welcome distraction during the Summer of Explosive Diarrhea. Spanning 39 days and 104 matches, the event also reminded us how much we can learn from our friends across the globe, with their excellent chants, fabulous fashion, and impeccable manners.

The World Cup drew record ratings in the U.S. and brought tangible good vibes (and plenty of money) to cities like New York, where raucous watch parties spilled onto the streets. In fittingly American fashion, this year’s tournament was super-sized, including 48 teams who played in 16 cities across the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. Soccer fans from abroad may have loudly booed Trump at MetLife Stadium on Sunday, but they also found things to cheer about in the U.S. Videos of international tourists marveling at American innovations like Popeye’s chicken and ranch dressing started going viral on social media before the tournament even began.

Likewise, Americans have fallen for the beautiful game, or at least its most beautiful stars. The World Cup has been a ratings hit for Fox and Telemundo: a combined total of 50 million people tuned in to watch the U.S. lose to Belgium, setting a record for most-watched soccer telecast in American history. But even games lacking the U.S. team have drawn huge audiences. Because the U.S. men aren’t that great at soccer and there are so many other matches to watch, the World Cup forces us to look beyond our borders and find other countries to root for. Shockingly, the tournament even managed to bridge America’s yawning partisan divide, with comparable numbers of Democrats and Republicans tuning in, according to a CNBC poll.

Argentina captain Lionel Messi came into the World Cup with an already huge fanbase in the U.S. But the tournament turned many other athletes previously unknown to most Americans into breakout stars, like Lamine Yamal, the nineteen-year-old Spanish wunderkind who appeared with Messi as an infant in one of the weirdest, most fortuitous photo shoots in sports history.

Then there’s Erling Haaland, the towering Norwegian striker — who somehow resembles both a scallion and Russian model Anastasia Kostromitina at the same time — became a social media darling by nonchalantly scoring dazzling goals and enthusiastically embracing American kitsch.

After a narrow loss to England in the quarterfinals, he returned home to Oslo bearing a gin-swilling, taxidermied raccoon he’d acquired during a shopping spree in Texas — endearing him forever to a large swath of the public.

Likewise, Josimar José Évora Dias (commonly known as Vozinha), the relentless forty-year-old goalkeeper for Cape Verde, saw his Instagram following explode from 30,000 to more than 29 million over the course of the World Cup.

The enthusiasm wasn’t limited to the athletes on the pitch: Lamine Yamal’s three-year-old brother charmed fans with his adorable sideline antics (including licking the World Cup trophy).

The success of this year’s tournament can be seen as a legacy of the 1994 World Cup, the first hosted by the United States, which marked a turning point for the sport on this side of the pond.

Prior to 1994, the World Cup was viewed as a niche event by American TV executives, who didn’t know what to do with a sport that doesn’t have built-in ad breaks. Ratings for the 1990 tournament on U.S. television were so anemic that, for a while, it wasn’t clear that the next World Cup would end up on a broadcast network. It ultimately aired on ABC and ESPN, drawing an audience that was larger than expected. Likewise, stadiums across the country were filled to capacity, laying the groundwork for the successful launch of Major League Soccer in 1996. The league now brings in billions every year, with teams in 30 cities.

Of course, you can’t talk about soccer’s growth in the U.S. without mentioning the American women, who have won the Women’s World Cup four times, or the highly competitive National Women’s Soccer League, the gold standard for women’s professional sports.

Soccer is an increasingly popular spectator sport in the U.S. But the World Cup became Americans’ favorite pastime this summer because TV audiences are now more accustomed to watching all manner of entertainment from around the world — and often prefer it. The success of this year’s tournament reflects the globalization of popular culture. Just as our taste in music, film, and TV has grown more international over the last few decades, so has our taste in sports. (See: curling, once viewed as a Canadian curiosity, now a Winter Olympics sensation.)

Technological advances like streaming and smartphones have made all manner of culture accessible to people regardless of where they live. In 1994, the last time the World Cup was held in the U.S., Americans interested in foreign films needed to live in a metropolitan area or college town with an arthouse cinema. If you were lucky, your local video store or library might have a copy of Cinema Paradiso. You could find some British TV on PBS or in reruns on cable, but that was about it.

Now, with the click of a few buttons, people around the world can summon a quirky Japanese game show or an edgy Polish drama. International movies are readily available to audiences in America and beyond — and enormously viable in the marketplace. Last year, K Pop Demon Hunters, a clever animated film about a South Korean girl group battling sinister supernatural forces, became a global phenomenon and the most-watched original film in Netflix history, largely propelled by the fervor of children who have never set foot on the Asian continent. Similarly, the Oscars are increasingly dominated by international films (like Parasite and Sentimental Value) and filmmakers from outside the U.S. (like Bong-Joon Ho and Alfonso Cuaron.)

The much-derided halftime show during Sunday’s final match was criticized for trying to Americanize the World Cup by making it more like the Super Bowl. It featured two iconic American blondes — Madonna and Miss Piggy — performing alongside Burna Boy (from Nigeria), Shakira (Colombia), BTS (South Korea), and Justin Bieber (Canada). There was even a cameo by Jason Sudeikis as Ted Lasso, the character he plays in the hit Apple TV sitcom about an American college football coach put in charge of an English soccer team (a series with international appeal that couldn’t have existed before streaming).

In its own highly chaotic, aesthetically questionable way, the halftime show demonstrated just how borderless popular culture has become in 2026. For that — if not for Bieber’s downbeat acoustic performance — we can all be happy.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian

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