I THINK IT MOVED
Alt Title: Ah shit, it really was about the friends we made along the way
I had a long conversation with a friend in May about how surprised we were that we weren’t all that excited or interested in the World Cup this summer. I was not firmly in any camp, but I was softly in the camp of ‘I guess I’ll support the US, I’ll pull for Scotland and Canada, but from afar, I’m not gonna get that into it. I certainly won’t pay to attend any of the matches at Arrowhead or go to any watch parties or anything.’
This followed a now years-long sense of malaise I’ve felt with what is nominally my favorite sport, with a decline starting in the summer of 2024 and steadily continuing into and through the spring of 2026. I can pinpoint the beginning of that downward slope to the decision to buy season tickets for Sporting KC right as the team fell into complete disarray and the harrowing experience of attending the final match of the Gregg Berhalter era between the United States and Uruguay during the 2024 Copa America. It’s not like I’d completely turned away from it, but I couldn’t gin up the energy to care when the two teams I was most interested in both shambled along without any sense of destination.
Around this time, it also became a profoundly lonely experience, watching soccer. It is hard to convince people to drive to KCK to watch the worst team in the league. It is hard to convince people to go to a bar to watch a national team that can’t beat Panama and Canada, let alone Mexico. I sensed that, if I were to care about this, I would have to care about it alone, which created an unfortunate neural connection between soccer and loneliness during a time in which I was plenty lonely already.
2025 was spent in bitter apathy. Save for the Sporting/St. Louis match immediately following the firing of Peter Vermes (which I attended alone) and that insane Vancouver/LAFC match in the Western Conference Playoffs, I had few moments of joy with soccer. I tried attending a Minnesota United/LAFC match in July last year and just found myself lonely, allergenic, and miserable, quietly sniffling through a single unobstructed nostril as I recognized how much fun this sport wasn’t bringing me anymore. Perhaps, I thought, this just wasn’t something I cared about like I used to. Maybe I grew out of it. Maybe my thirties are supposed to be spent disinterested in soccer, disinterested in sports in general.
This turned around completely for me throughout the last two months:
I credit five main things:
My dad asked me if I’d be interested in getting tickets to one of the Arrowhead games with him. I decided to get him tickets for his birthday, which made me feel good as a son and also crystalized the event as something that was really going to happen and that I was set to participate in. We went to the Algeria/Austria match at Arrowhead, which was such an affecting experience that I’ve been working on an essay about it ever since.
In late-May, my friend Mike invited me to drive down to a bar in Kansas City to watch Crystal Palace FC and Rayo Vallecano in the UEFA Conference League final with a group of other Palace fans. I really like those guys, they’re all humble and funny people who got to see a long-suffering team finally pull through
The Algeria national team set up camp in my little town during the Group Stages, giving us a team to rally around and support.
I got to watch the first half of the Mexico/South Africa opening match during my lunch break and take in the atmosphere of that stadium
I brought my girlfriend and one of my friends, neither of whom particularly cares about soccer to a downtown watch party for the USA/Paraguay match, and I went out with those friends to see every USMNT match that followed.
I’m finding myself enthralled and overcome by the game in a manner that I haven’t felt in a long time. I’m feeling the frisson that accompanies a midfield duel, a great through-pass, or a great save in a manner that I only know when I’m fully captivated by the sport. I’m back to listening to the podcasts, watching the breakdown videos, reading the articles about it – I printed out a binder-full of articles about the USMNT’s loss to Belgium, I’m so fascinated by it. I’ve found myself pulling up the USL PRINX Cup matches late on Saturday nights and the NWSL matches on Sunday afternoons again. I’m genuinely excited for my stupid team to play MLS matches again.
I notice that the through-line between each of those points is something to do with connection and community, be it familial, through new friends, through my community, through observation, or with the friends closest to me. My favorite soccer memories are all based in communion: Watching Dom Dwyer score from 30 yards out against Vancouver in March 2016 with my friends in the Cauldron for the first time, traveling to Los Angeles to see Sporting play LAFC with the Roaddron in 2019, attending the first match of San Diego Loyal SC in 2020 with The Locals, standing through the shootout of the 2023 MLS Western Conference Wild Card game against San Jose with those same friends.
The question now becomes this: How do I keep it going now that the World Cup has ended?
Attendance is the most obvious answer. It’ll be about driving to Kansas City to support Sporting and the Current. It’ll also be about driving the half mile or so out to Rock Chalk Park to support KU soccer.
I also want to take the opportunities to attend matches that come to me. For example, my girlfriend and I are going out to Denver in August for a concert and we’re going to attend a Rocky Mountain Cup match between the Rapids and Real Salt Lake while we’re there. I’m going to be in Boise later this year, and I want to take the time to attend an Athletic Club Boise match when I’m there. I’ll be in the UK in September for, oddly enough, an American Football game between Kansas and Arizona State, and I’d like to make it to a match while I’m there.
I also find myself interested in retreating to the more solitary, studious approach I’d taken to the sport beforehand, primarily through reading books on the sport and writing little essays about it. I’ve been reading Filip Bondy’s Chasing the Game all summer, about the USMNT at the 2010 World Cup, and I think it’s my first non-fiction soccer book that I’ve dug back into in a few years. I want to read the new US soccer-focused books by Leander Schaerlakens and Paul Tenorio too.
I mean, shit, there are off-the-wall ideas that I’m thinking about too. Maybe try to join a team in the local adult soccer league. Maybe I try to get a press credential to practice taking pictures at college soccer games. Maybe I go out to KC to watch Crystal Palace more! Who knows! There’s a world of opportunities out there.
I suppose today that I’m trying to dip my toes back into the discursive space around this sport as well. It’s been hard to admit to myself that I’ve felt this disconnected from it for the past few years, and it’s been even harder to try to come up with a reason to admit that to you, reader. But here I am, right back in the thick of it! We’ll see if this renewed drive continues after a date with the damnable Loons viewed from the Cauldron tonight, but for now I’m happy to be in love with this sport once again.