Why Everyone Cares About This World Cup

What It Covers

NYT correspondent Tariq Panja examines how the 2026 World Cup, hosted across the US, Canada, and Mexico, is generating unexpected cross-cultural connection despite significant geopolitical tensions, while producer Anna Foley profiles Iranian-American father and son Farhad and Kevin navigating dual national identity during wartime.

Key Questions Answered

• •Diaspora identity at sporting events: When two nations a fan claims allegiance to compete directly, the experience splits rather than resolves identity. Kevin, Iranian-American since childhood, describes cheering simultaneously for both the US and Iran across three World Cups spanning 1998 to 2026, finding the tension not paralyzing but defining — a permanent condition of hyphenated identity that intensifies rather than disappears over time.
• •Host city base camps as cultural exchange mechanisms: FIFA's 48-team format disperses squads into smaller American cities — Spain in Chattanooga, Norway in Greensboro, Algeria in Lawrence, Kansas — creating localized cultural encounters that major host cities never generate. Lawrence's University of Kansas marching band learned Algeria's national anthem; locals wore Algerian jerseys. Small-city placements produce deeper community investment than stadium-city assignments alone.
• •Fan culture as deliberate reputation strategy: Scotland's "Tartan Army" consciously built a loud, celebratory, non-violent fan identity in direct opposition to English football hooliganism from the 1980s and 1990s. The strategy — maximize noise and alcohol consumption, leave host cities with positive impressions — worked so effectively in Boston that the Boston Globe dedicated a full newspaper page to thanking Scottish supporters.
• •Visa restrictions as competitive disadvantage: Iran's players were restricted to US territory for only one day at a time per match, forced to base themselves in Tijuana, Mexico. This logistical disruption — traveling internationally for each game day rather than training and recovering domestically — represents a concrete, measurable competitive disadvantage that geopolitical conflict imposed directly onto athletic performance across Iran's three group-stage matches.
• •Diaspora communities as World Cup's hidden audience: The tournament's most emotionally invested spectators are not tourists but decades-long immigrants watching their birth nations compete on adopted-country soil. Farhad, who arrived from Iran in 1979, and a Jordanian-American named Farooq, in the US 46 years, demonstrate that diaspora fans experience matches as simultaneous expressions of gratitude toward America and unresolved love for their countries of origin.