World Cup
From our World Cup newsletter: Stories, Scots, and one Foxborough skunk.
July 23, 2026 | 11:38 AM
4 minutes to read
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I’ve been trying to recap the World Cup experience in my mind for days, with no success. Not unlike a prickly Argentine defense, my brain simply refused to yield to everyone else’s reality.
How can the World Cup be over? How can a tournament composed of so many games, fans, players, moments, ever be spent?
After investing months (and really, years) planning coverage, nervously navigating FIFA accreditation hurdles, and committing most of my brain’s capacity to studying and internalizing as much detail as possible, my mind seems to short circuit when confronted with the jarring reality that the next (men’s) World Cup game won’t take place until 2030.
Attempting to process everything that I’ve seen also feels like an impossible task, but here’s my best effort.
My working thesis after a month of covering the tournament firsthand is this: Almost everything that had to do with the fans, players, and on-the-ground staff was not just great, it was memorably awesome. Everything that had to do with FIFA itself and high-level officials was, to put it diplomatically, problematic.
It was perfectly distilled into a two-word phrase by a Paraguayan journalist as we navigated FIFA’s laughably circuitous route to the postgame press conference following the Round of 32 matchup. Despite the path being a straightforward walk during Patriots and Revolution games, FIFA somehow sent us trekking briefly outside the stadium.
The journalist shrugged and said, “Siendo FIFA,” or “being FIFA.” I took it as the soccer equivalent of “Manny being Manny” — a perfect shorthand for FIFA’s many inexplicable and yet unavoidable decisions.
So many of the best parts of the local World Cup experience seemed to happen in spite of FIFA. That’s probably why all of the pre-tournament discourse — ticket prices, accommodating the Trump administration, even renaming the stadium due to purely sponsorship reasons — was wholly negative. At that point, it was just a story of FIFA and Trump-related decisions.
But as soon as the games started — and all of the fans, players, and actual atmosphere entered the picture — the experience shifted 180 degrees, and iconic memories were made.
It was a tournament that produced more moments than I could write about even if I’d been given a word count 10 times beyond the one I’m operating under here. The silliest and strangest story (and therefore the one that I’ll share) happened following the memorable press conference of Paraguayan head coach Gustavo Alfaro.
Having listened to Alfaro wax poetic for more than 50 minutes following his side’s historic upset of Germany — as I noted at the time, he probably said more words in that single press conference than Bill Belichick did in that same room over 20 years — media members finally made our way back to the shuttle buses.
I walked there with a friendly Scottish journalist who was in Boston for all of the local games. As we chatted about Alfaro and some of his memorable quotations, I spotted a black and white shape scurrying up near us on the Patriots practice field. My Scottish colleague remained unperturbed, even as I realized (bleary-eyed as I was at midnight) that it was skunk!
“Um, we should probably run,” I said as the skunk moved deliberately in our direction. Looking utterly bewildered, he eventually began to jog next to me. After we successfully escaped the skunk’s territory (the soon-to-be highly trafficked training camp area on the hill), we exchanged glances. He looked confused, but relieved. Had I just saved this Scottish man from being sprayed by a skunk? Is that, in a way, one of my World Cup legacies?
This, from start to finish — the games, the goals, the controversies, the penalty kicks, the charismatic press conferences, and even helping a foreign journalist evade a local skunk — was the inimitable Foxborough World Cup experience.
— Hayden Bird, Assistant Sports Editor
Topic:
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Trivia
Spain’s men’s team are now simultaneous champions of both the Euros and the World Cup, achieving a feat they also accomplished in 2010. What is the only other nation to do this in the last 50 years?
Hint: They won the World Cup in 1998, followed by the Euros in 2000.
(Keep reading for the answer).
Stoppage time
It is our final World Cup newsletter, and — to borrow a phrase — I am loath to close. We have no idea if or when the U.S. will get to host again, but I’ll leave you with this: The time between the 1994 World Cup and this year’s version was 11,652 days. If you add another 11,652 days onto the end of this tournament, it stops at June 13, 2058. Try to picture where you might be at that time — eight World Cups from now — and where the game might be. Impossible as it is to imagine the circumstances, it’s fascinating to once again look to the future of U.S. soccer, and dream of what might be coming next.
Trivia answer: France
