{"id":191008,"date":"2026-06-03T11:41:13","date_gmt":"2026-06-03T19:41:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=191008"},"modified":"2026-06-03T12:05:42","modified_gmt":"2026-06-03T20:05:42","slug":"nyt-why-does-no-one-care-about-the-world-cup-this-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=191008","title":{"rendered":"NYT: ‘Why Does No One Care About the World Cup This Year?’"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Wallace-Wells writes<\/a>: <\/p>\n

What is more striking to me is the muted interest of the rest of the world, which every four years for decades seemed almost to pause for a month to engage in a truly global but appealingly low-stakes performance of tribal nationalism…<\/p>\n

In theory, national teams should offer a different appeal, one that is less arbitrary. And a way for those who feel their countries have been drained of patriotism and national identity to enact their fantasy of replenishing those feelings. In the time of Marine Le Pen, you might expect French football fans to be especially animated about Les Bleus, for instance, rather than raging about criticism from the team\u2019s Black star Kylian Mbapp\u00e9. In Britain\u2019s Reform era, you might expect a kind of national revival of the proud hooliganism of earlier, less globalized eras. You might see that hooliganism on the streets of Tommy Robinson\u2019s \u201cUnite the Kingdom\u201d rallies, but when it comes to soccer London seems more worked up about Arsenal than about the Lions. <\/p>\n

…what we identify as nationalism in global affairs might be better described as a form of parochialism, with populists making particular claims not about the nation per se so much as the ways it should be reformed \u2014 presumably toward some reactionary ideal, its contours often more local than genuinely national. In this reading, globalization hasn\u2019t just generated a backlash among those who resent deindustrialization, capital flight and the stateless lives of the world\u2019s billionaires. It has also made the nation itself seem like a somewhat untrustworthy unit of political and social organization to many people on the right. For them, what might once have served as a source of patriotism and pride now produces feelings of resentment and regret. Not that liberals aren\u2019t queasy about nationalism these days, either. For all of us, rooting for Arsenal or P.S.G. might now be more appealing precisely because it\u2019s essentially meaningless.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He’s describing something real. As of June 3, 2026, I feel no excitement about this World Cup, and I love the World Cup. I don’t know why I currently don’t feel anything.
\nMy thoughts are jumbled.
\nI like his point about the turn from nationalism to parochialism. Wallace-Wells notices that the populist right does not trust the nation as it exists, because the nation’s team now looks like its diasporas, so the right retreats into a fantasy of a reformed nation that no eleven men on a field can represent. Mbapp\u00e9 and Le Pen carry the point for him. That observation cuts against the lazy assumption that political nationalism and soccer nationalism rise together.
\nWallace-Wells is really writing about the collapse of national belonging as spectacle. The World Cup used to convert national identity into harmless collective theater. This no longer works because the nation has become contested terrain.
\nWhat we identify as nationalism in global affairs might be better described as a form of parochialism.
\nThe World Cup depends on a shared fiction that \u201cFrance,\u201d \u201cEngland,\u201d \u201cAmerica,\u201d or \u201cArgentina\u201d can still appear as one body. That fiction is harder to sustain when national identity has become internally litigated.
\nClub fandom is easier because it asks less of the fan. Arsenal does not require metaphysical agreement about nationhood. It offers style, stars, colors, weekly rituals, and low-cost belonging.
\nA Frenchman watched France because France felt partly constitutive of who he was. The national team represented an extension of the self. The victory belonged to him in some symbolic sense.
\nA buffered self<\/a> approaches the nation differently. Nationhood becomes one affiliation among many. The person can be simultaneously an Arsenal fan, a software engineer, a vegan, a resident of London, a member of an online gaming community, and a citizen of Britain. No single identity necessarily dominates.
\nThe contemporary right often calls for stronger national identities, but many of the social conditions that produced porous national identities have weakened<\/a>. Religious participation is lower. Local communities are weaker. Geographic mobility is higher. Intermarriage is higher. Social life is more online. Consumer choice saturates everyday life. As a result, nationalism often becomes ideological rather than lived.
\nPeople talk about the nation constantly while feeling less embedded in national institutions and traditions.
\nIf the right feels betrayed by the multiethnic national side, that explains alienation from Les Bleus or the Three Lions. It does not explain why club soccer fills the gap. Club teams are more multiethnic, more for-hire, more corporate, as he says himself. His two examples of club passion, the New York mayor and Dave Portnoy, are not aggrieved populists pining for blood and soil. They are men who picked a foreign team for no reason and enjoy it.
\nThe empirical base is thin. Unsold tickets at punishing prices, canceled hotel blocks, a boycott aimed at Trump. He admits interest will surge once the games begin. None of that shows a worldwide decline in national-team feeling. A boycott of a US-hosted tournament is a host-country effect, not evidence about how Brazilians or Argentines or Englishmen feel.
\nThe largest gap is the format. This is the first 48-team World Cup. More teams, more mismatches, more filler in the early rounds. That dilution explains pre-tournament apathy better than any theory about the nation, and it sits right in front of him. He writes “drained of meaning” and then reaches past the structural answer for cultural ones.
\nHe says rooting for Arsenal appeals because it means nothing. But he spent the essay arguing club tribalism carries real feeling, and he cites Foer to call club loyalty a check on globalism. Both cannot stand. Either club fandom is empty and the World Cup’s fade is a loss, or club fandom is full and his frame about displaced nationalism needs rebuilding.
\nHe reads the political weather well. The right quarrels with the nation as it is, not with the idea of nations.
\nThe new club fandom Wallace-Wells describes is buffered. Portnoy picks Tottenham. The New York mayor picks Arsenal. Nothing in birth or blood hands him the team. The self selects it and assigns it whatever weight he likes. Wallace-Wells calls this arbitrary and treats the arbitrariness as a puzzle. Arbitrary intense attachment is the mark of the buffered self, which makes its own meaning and knows it made it.
\nWallace-Wells asks why political nationalism rises while soccer nationalism does not. Charles Taylor<\/a> might say that modern men are buffered, even the nationalists, and a buffered self cannot relate to his nation porously no matter how badly he wants to. The right-wing dream of national replenishment is the buffered self trying to will porousness back into existence. It fails by its own form. Enchantment you select is not enchantment. Belonging you design is not belonging.
\nWallace-Wells says populists make claims about how the nation should be reformed rather than about the nation as it stands. A buffered self relates to the nation as a project, an object held in the mind and measured against an ideal. The porous self has no project. The nation inhabits him. So the program of reform gives away the buffered character of the men running it. They crave porous belonging and can produce only a buffered blueprint.
\nThe Mbapp\u00e9 episode reads the same way. A porous nationalism takes whoever wears the shirt as the nation made flesh. Le Pen’s people judge the team against a template in the head and find Mbapp\u00e9 wanting. That judging stance, holding the real team at arm’s length against an interior ideal, is buffered to the core, even while it wears the costume of blood and soil.
\n He says club fandom appeals because it means nothing. The buffered self cheers hard and stays detached at once, because it knows the meaning is its own and could have landed elsewhere. Intensity and arbitrariness sit together with no strain.
\nFIFA\u2019s corruption, host politics, ticket pricing, and corporate bloat are not side issues. They drain the sacramental quality from the event. A World Cup that feels like an extractive mega-event cannot easily serve as popular nationalism.
\nThe modern buffered individual treats identity as a project of personal curation. Fandom is no longer a matter of geographic or tribal destiny; it is a choice. A fan in Los Angeles or Lagos can choose to support Arsenal or Paris Saint-Germain based on tactical aesthetics, a specific player, or a digital subculture.
\nBecause the buffered self relies on autonomy, this choice feels authentic precisely because it is arbitrary. It carries no inherent moral duty or existential risk. If the club fails, or if its corporate ownership becomes unpalatable, the individual can detach or recalibrate his consumption. Club fandom satisfies the modern need for connection without compromising individual sovereignty. It is a controlled, low-stakes simulation of community.
\nInternational football operates on an older, porous logic. It demands that the individual surrender his curated identity to the accident of birth. You do not choose your national team; you inherit it.
\nDuring a World Cup, the boundaries of the buffered self temporarily dissolve. The individual is re-embedded into a collective body, vulnerable to a shared national fate that he cannot control. This porous experience requires a thick, underlying social consensus to function smoothly. The collective ritual only works if everyone agrees on what the national emblem represents.
\nThe current friction surrounding the World Cup reflects the difficulty modern individuals face when trying to inhabit this porous state. When national teams become battlegrounds for domestic culture wars, the shared social matrix fractures. The individual can no longer easily slip into the collective identity because the definition of that identity is contested.
\nWallace-Wells notes that rooting for a corporate club is appealing because it is essentially meaningless. In Taylor’s terms, club soccer is the ideal playground for the buffered self because it offers the thrill of tribalism without the weight of belonging.
\nThe muted anticipation for the World Cup is not a sign that nationalism is dead, but rather that the porous demand of international sports is increasingly difficult to sustain in a hyper-individualistic, buffered age. When the tournament begins, the raw visceral pull of national alignment may still break through the buffer, forcing a temporary return to that older, porous reality. Until the whistle blows, however, the modern fan prefers the safety of a self-constructed, corporate alignment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Wallace-Wells writes: What is more striking to me is the muted interest of the rest of the world, which every four years for decades seemed almost to pause for a month to engage in a truly global but appealingly … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43015,29615,43016,29731],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-191008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-buffered","category-nationalism","category-porous","category-soccer"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=191008"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191008\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":191023,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191008\/revisions\/191023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=191008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=191008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=191008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}