4 hours ago
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The ball is magic, remember. Just keep watching the ball. On a lovely soft powder blue night in Los Angeles the World Cup produced an opening act on its US front that might have been conjured by the whirling hands of Gianni Infantino himself, a Fifa president who increasingly has the air and the mannerisms of an elite celebrity stage magician. Or at the very least, of a man who appreciates the power of the show.
It turns out California really does know how to put on one of those. There was even a moment before kick-off that seemed to capture the cosmically strange nature of the entire Fifa multiverse. A little later the headline act Katy Perry would appear in a silver bustle and perform on a podium alongside a 10-year-old TikToker.
Before that we got the Korean pop sensation Lisa, who has 105 million Instagram followers, or 102.5 million more than the USMNT, backed by a troupe of men performing surprisingly sexualised hip thrusts and groin grabs that no doubt express, on some deeper level, the value of international team sport.
Adjacent to this a man in a tracksuit appeared holding aloft a golden ball, like some ancient deity hoisting God’s gonad on his shoulders. At which point an enormous golden Fifa sign appeared, all four letters at least 50ft high, winched down out of the ether like a vision of divine grace – if not the most ludicrous sporting spectacle of all time, then surely the most ludicrous yet.
What is the vast golden Fifa sign even supposed to signify? Behold: the acronym of an administrative organisation! What power is it expressing, what legitimacy? How should we worship it? How do we escape its wrath?
The Fifa sign did eventually re-reascend, grudgingly. And by the end of the night a USA team that came into this tournament with fingers crossed had run all over a disappointing Paraguay, scoring three times in the first half en route to a breezy 4-1 win.
Every World Cup needs its hosts to start well. Even more so in the US, where there is always the lurking fear the president might decide to sulk or lose interest, like an angry toddler overturning his train set.
Mainly Fifa needed it, at a World Cup that has been stretched thin and made strange, converted into a politicised public leisure-tainment product, in a nation that seems to be constantly at war with itself.
A single fun, distracting day on the Pacific coast might still turn out to be the equivalent of turning up the music to mask the sound of the neighbours arguing through the wall. But we know how the spectacle works. And this was irresistible in a Los Angeles kind of way, on one of those nights when even the air seems to turn soft and blue.
Before kick-off the main rump of USA fans had come sweeping down the boulevards in a rush of flares and pageantry, like the massed reserves in a civil war re-enactment. There is a slight misconception these fans see themselves as hard core ultras. In reality this is more like a costume party, an Uncle Sam-ish show of Americana, stars and stripes dungarees, twirling flags, pom-poms, straw hats, bow ties that spin around.
The stadium here is stunning, all swooping lines, cooling fountains and funnelled breezes, a place that looks like it was designed by people in robes on some far-flung Star Trek planet. It really should be staging the final, even if it will still cost you a scandalous $23.50 for a beer on the concourse.
Fireworks flared. There were deafening roars of “Yoo Ess Ay”. Mauricio Pochettino appeared on his touchline in a blue grey suit and white trainers, hair rakishly long, looking like a 1980s cop whose work takes place exclusively on speedboats filled with diamonds.
And the USA started in a whirl of high pressing and forward movement, impressively fearless on a day that represents the biggest moment in any of these players’ international careers.
The opening goal was made by Weston McKennie’s driving run and a cutback deflected into his own net by Damián Bobadilla. Paraguay had beaten Brazil and Argentina in qualifying. Here they spent the opening hour in a sullen defensive crouch, fulfilling Gustavo Álvarez’s brief to become “the team no one wants to face”, if only because this involves watching them play.
Folarin Balogun got the second on the half hour mark. And there is a significant point here, even a note of grace through the fog. A certain version of America is being punted around the place right now. This vast democracy, a place of immigrants and liberty, has been rattling down its fences, pursuing its own citizens, parroting a divisively insular rhetoric.
This USA team does represent something else. It is a hugely mixed and diverse group of dual nationals, people with roots in places from Liberia to Croatia. Balogun, the decisive presence on the pitch, is of Nigerian descent, a place Trump has insulted, bombed and excluded. And here that diverse and spirited team did the thing sport does, modelling an ideal of harmony and fellowship, making a stadium and wider sporting nation happy. Moments like this don’t solve anything. But sport is always trying to tell you something, if you can be bothered to listen.
Balogun got the third too, leaving two defenders splayed on the turf and spanking the ball into the top corner as the crowd cooed and gurgled and tumbled over itself. There was time to cheer the celebrity reel on the giant screen, David Beckham and Tom Cruise beaming like a nuclear-grade twin celebrity megalith, IShowSpeed gurning and gesturing, excited to a preternatural level just to see himself reflected in a camera lens, startled every time to find he still exists.
Trump was absent here, and replaced by Marco Rubio in the seat next to Infantino, who looked a little grudging and sad, like that scene in Goodfellas where Henry Hill is forced to endure a double date, then rushes off before the coffee comes.
Perhaps Rubio can now stay on for the next game here, which features Iran, and a dramatic gear change into war, dissent and geopolitics.
But this strange, bloated three-part tournament did at least take on some kind of shape in California, the place where the land ends and America fades into the blue. And suddenly the next five weeks do at least look and feel a little more like a World Cup.
