World Cup Experience in Los Angeles: A Unique Perspective

Los Angeles doesn’t so much welcome you as swallow you whole. Freeways hum, palm trees lean in the heat, and somewhere between West Hollywood and Santa Monica a World Cup is happening on television screens while life in LA carries on, unbothered and bronzed.

It’s been 20 years since I last found myself in the host country of a major tournament outside England. Back then it was Germany 2006: four of us in a car, no real plan beyond locating the next stein, dancing with Trinidad and Tobago fans, and dodging Brazil v Australia tickets because the hangover and the midday sun formed a ruthless high press. This time there’s accreditation round my neck, deadlines on my phone and a podcast to file. Marginally more professional. Marginally.

Back home, the question drops into every message thread: “Is there World Cup fever in the States?” As if you step off the plane and are immediately mobbed by people in replica shirts chanting for a 0-0 between Slovenia and Serbia.

The reality is closer to a local TV crew wandering around Cambridge city centre in 1990, on the eve of an FA Cup quarter-final with Crystal Palace, asking passersby what they thought of the game. Most of them didn’t even know Cambridge had a football team. That same shrug exists here. Unless you’re in the right bar at the right time, the tournament can feel like something happening in a different timezone, on a different continent, even when it’s in your backyard.

World Cup vs real life

The other reality sits 5,000 miles away. Partners, families, people doing the actual work while we gad about North America pretending watching football is a hardship. My own house is usually a scene of Ashes-on-in-the-background chaos, me on my knees with wet wipes scraping rice off the floor while two under-fives remain blissfully unaware of Bazball’s flaws.

To the people at home dealing with all of that while journalists, players and officials hop between games and hotel lobbies: there’s an unpayable debt there. If my 18‑month‑old, Willie Rushden, ever stumbles across this, he’ll discover that now was not the ideal moment to come down with hand, foot and mouth. Timing, as any striker will tell you, is everything.

The scale of the US hits you first. It’s not a country; it’s a cartographer’s flex. Los Angeles just sprawls. One afternoon I tried to LimeGlide – think a bike, but without the pedals and with the looming threat of humiliation – from West Hollywood to Santa Monica. One minute I’m coasting in the sun, breeze in my hair, feeling almost Californian. The next I’m in a non-cycling zone on a dual carriageway, dragging a dead lump of metal through a hedgerow like an extra in a low-budget survival film. The American dream, reimagined.

Between matches, the radius shrinks dramatically. An hour’s gap means the world is essentially Trader Joe’s, the café across the road and the hotel pool. The pool is its own ecosystem: influencers with washboard stomachs workshopping new TikTok series and debating whether they’re on the guest list for the opening of Nylon nightclub. Football, here, is background noise to content creation.

And yet, in the bars of West Hollywood, the games are on. US shirts dot the crowd. A Bosnian wanders past and someone offers a casual “Good luck later.” It’s not the all-consuming mania of a host nation like Germany or Brazil, but the tournament has a pulse. You just have to know where to feel for it.

Basketball’s shadow

The first few days, though, belonged to basketball. You don’t so much choose an NBA team as have one seep into your bloodstream by osmosis. Knicks or Spurs? I went Spurs. It felt right. Naturally, they then contrived to blow the biggest lead in NBA Finals history, or something close enough to it to feel inevitable.

The most stirring moment of the trip so far didn’t come from football at all, but from Guardian Football Weekly listener – and, less importantly, mayor of New York – Zohran Mamdani, delivering a speech at the Knicks parade. I barely recognised a single name he reeled off, but the hairs still went up on the back of my neck. Sport does that. The names don’t always matter; the cadence, the conviction, the sense of shared belief do.

Football’s fragile foothold

When the US beat Paraguay, the reaction told its own story. Not the tourists or the curious neutrals, but the lifers – the journalists, analysts and fans who have been pushing this sport uphill for years in a country that prefers its balls oval and its games packed with timeouts. Their joy wasn’t just about three points. It was about validation.

If England win the World Cup or disappear meekly in the last 32, the Premier League will still sell out, kids will still wear shirts, and Match of the Day will still roll on. The sport’s place is secure. For the US and Australia, tournaments like this carry more weight. A quarter-final, a semi-final, something that cuts through the noise – that can shift the conversation. It’s a pressure the players could do without, but it clings to them anyway.

Those scenes in Fed Square in Melbourne, my adopted home, cut straight through the jet lag. Flares, limbs, that raw, unfiltered sound when a crowd realises something special is about to happen. Then Nestory Irankunda, a refugee, takes that touch and scores that goal. In a time when politics leans towards walls and borders, there’s a simple, stubborn beauty in someone whose family fled conflict now representing Australia – a country built on immigration, much like the US.

Connor Metcalfe, watching his own goal back in the mixed zone, responded in the only way a proper Aussie can: a breathless tangle of “Far out that was far out, that was ick!” or something in that ballpark. It was perfect. I can’t fully explain why I love the Socceroos in a way that utterly contradicts my emotions when Australia’s cricketers appear, but there it is. Football has a way of bypassing logic.

Distance from England, clarity on England

Being this far from England brings an unexpected gift: you don’t have to listen to people fretting about whether Thomas Tuchel sings the national anthem. Imagine King Charles pacing Buckingham Palace, deeply troubled by a manager’s lip-syncing. Who cares?

From here, England just look… good. And fun. Harry Kane finally has pace around him. Noni Madueke is smiling his way through games. Elliot Anderson is in the right spots. Djed Spence is suddenly moving like the Road Runner. There’s hope, but not the usual tight‑chested, terror‑laced hope that has defined so many tournaments. Not yet, anyway.

Life with Barry and Fox

The day-to-day reality is a mix of watching Fox Sports and sharing a roof with Barry Glendenning, my friend and co-host. The central question of the trip is less “Who wins the World Cup?” and more “Will Zlatan Ibrahimovic kill Alexi Lalas on live television before Barry kills me in the kitchen?”

The US coverage is, on the whole, decent. There’s plenty of “soccer 101” stuff, but the BBC and ITV do the same when England play. A World Cup match pulls in people who don’t know their low blocks from their high presses. Not everyone wants a tactical thesis. That said, I don’t ever need to see Christian Pulisic selling Wells Fargo during a hydration break again. Some images stay with you for the wrong reasons.

As for domestic harmony, let’s say Barry and I are unlikely to sign a long-term cohabitation deal. That said, I can’t think of a single moment where I’ve annoyed him. Aside from, deep breath: eating an apple too loudly, failing to screw the lid back on a bottle of Coke Zero, offering unsolicited chilli-chopping advice, asking if he needed the big saucepan, decanting yoghurt into a bowl, doing too much laundry and objecting to his unapologetic flatulence. Both ends.

Minor details.

Apparently, people enjoy this nonsense. The Instagram updates, the podcast tangents, the YouTube clips, the endless “OR WHEREVER YOU GET YOUR CONTENT” refrain. It’s edging into pilot-season territory. Barry has already helped a star of Selling Sunset with her key fob – not a euphemism, just LA admin.

Maybe this is how you crack America in 2026: one World Cup, one shared flat, one malfunctioning LimeGlide at a time.