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Fans of soccerball love to complain about America. With its unbridled capitalism, it has the gall to treat football as a business. “Hydration breaks” have been introduced in this year’s World Cup. Fans suspect these are the first step to more frequent advert breaks for TV viewers, a grubbily commercial innovation that changes their game. Going to a matchcosts a fortune. Dynamic pricing may work in the NFL or NBA, where the market in tickets resembles the market for any other luxury good. But soccer, with its roots in teams of men who worked in the same factory, has different values. In economics terms, these countries consider football to be part of the commons.
In many of the big football countries there is an expectation that the games will be carried by channels that are available to everyone. Were the rights sold to the highest bidder, in profit-maximising fashion, and large numbers of people unable to watch, that would become an existential issue for the government of the day.
There’s the fact that Donald Trump’s America would seem singularly disinterested in being hospitable. Foreign fans who followed the operations of ICE in Minneapolis earlier this year wondered whether America actually wanted the world to visit. Then its government denied entry to Omar Artan, one of Africa’s best referees, simply because he was from Somalia. America’s president will help present the trophy to the winning team, which will make it harder for athletes to say that the tournament has nothing to do with politics. For all these reasons, the argument goes, America doesn’t understand the World Cup.
There is truth to this grumbling, but it misses a big reason why America is, in fact, a spectacular place to host the tournament. This struck me powerfully while I was watching Brazil v Haiti last week at a bar in lower Manhattan.
Yes, ticket prices are high: that reflects demand and also how much richer America is on a per person basis than other developed countries. New Jersey’s mass-transit system is indeed annoying. The Trump administration has attempted to spoil the vibe. But it has not succeeded. That is because of American exceptionalism.
The country’s population size and history of immigration means almost every nation competing in this World Cup has a sizable diaspora in the United States (see chart).
That is something Americans take for granted, but it means that you could run a pretty good World Cup in America without inviting any foreign visitors at all. My bar in SoHo was so full of Brazilians that we took over the sidewalk and spilled into the street. (I lived in São Paulo for three years, so they are my second team.) Football-crazed Brazil, which has won the championship five times, boastsa population of 220m, so it’s not hard to find a bar in London or Paris taken over by yellow and green shirts whose wearers, it turns out, can samba while carrying drinks.
More unusually, there were a bunch of Haitian fans in the bar, too. Haiti’s population is only 12m. But there are about 850,000 Haitian migrants in the United States. Add in those who claim Haitian ancestry and you get a bigger number. This is an “only in America” thing.
In fact, pretty much every nation represented in the World Cup will have a bar just in New York City that is designated as home turf. A dedicated football fan could travel the world, attending home games for every country from Algeria to Uzbekistan, using only the subway. And then there is the way that American cities have adopted nationalities—think of the Scots in Boston or the Bosnians in St Louis. If you had to pick one country as the permanent host of the World Cup, America would surely be it.
PS the final two episodes of my“Tocqueville Road Trip” podcastare now out. Please do write tochecksandbalance@economist.comand let me know what you think of it.
