Today is the big day for me, my first World Cup game ever. It’s definitely the biggest soccer game I’ve ever attended, and almost certainly the least I’ve ever cared about the specific outcome. It’s got the most riding on it, and if I was covering it, I’d have to work the hardest to construct any sort of internal narrative about the match itself.

It is, in short, a paradox.

Neither Belgium nor Egypt is one of the true megawatt teams of world soccer. Of the two, Belgium is the most successful at the World Cup, especially since 2014, when their much-ballyhooed “golden generation” started coming through. They’ve reached the quarterfinals once and the semifinals once, which - when combined with two quarterfinal appearances at the European championship - is, generally, about as well as any non-superpower European team could be expected to do.

Egypt is more successful continentally, with a bunch of African Cup of Nations titles, but they are relative World Cup neophytes. This is just the third time they qualified, the fourth time they have taken part, and if they win today it’ll be their first-ever World Cup win.

Egypt has the most famous player, now-former Liverpool winger Mo Salah. Belgium has the most Guys, headlined by former Premier League star Kevin de Bruyne, but all those guys are on the wrong side of 30 now. Egypt’s supporting cast is Manchester City striker Omar Marmoush, plus two dozen guys who all seemingly play for Egyptian giants Al-Ahly; Belgium’s supporting cast members (and honestly probably their main Guys at this point) are a bunch of young bucks who play in the Premier League (Jérémy Doku, Amadou Onana, even the somehow-still-under-30 Youri Tielemans).

Belgium is probably the favorite; Egypt is probably the fan favorite, unless you love mayo on fries, or hate Liverpool.

To write about it this way, to construct some sort of set of storylines, is like missing out on staring at the majesty of Mount Rainier, solely because you’re trying to figure out how many feet tall it is.

People have described this World Cup as the USA hosting four Super Bowls a day, but part of what makes the Super Bowl the Super Bowl is that everything is on the line. And that’s not true of these group stage games, at least until the final day of each group, and even then there’ll be some ambiguity.

Win or lose today between Belgium and Egypt, nobody goes home, and neither team would be too down on their chances of moving on to the knockout round even if they lose 5-0.

It’s not the stadium atmosphere that makes this feel big, unless you’re talking about a game involving one of the host nations. (This is arguably the greatest home advantage the USA has ever had, for example; they’re probably the only national team in the world that regularly plays in front of hostile crowds in their own country.)

But the one thing that does jump off the screen in every one of the games I’ve seen so far, even those in which I didn’t have a rooting interest, is just how emotionally invested every one of the participants is, in a way that is - surprisingly - almost never true in sports.

Call soccer “the beautiful game” all you want, but it kind of doesn’t matter what game is being played, at times like this. You could put almost anything on TV - darts, pickleball, bowling, whatever - and if it is very clearly an event that’s considered the pinnacle, by all the participants involved, that sense of drama and conflict is going to jump right into your living room or mobile device or makeshift outdoor viewing party.

This is the same principle that makes the Olympics so universally popular, despite many of the sports involved being the very definition of niche sports for 47 out of every 48 months. It’s why Little League baseball gets on ESPN and why the Club World Cup last year seemed so soulless, and it’s why one of the highlights of the World Cup so far was Curaçao scoring its first-ever World Cup goal, even though they lost 7-1.

Look at those guys! Look what it means to them! Even guys like Salah, the top foreign-born scorer in Premier League history, the top-scoring African in UEFA Champions League history, a man who won the Champions League and the Premier League and the FA Cup and every trophy that matters for Liverpool, and who I suspect will play today like a man who would trade it all to lift just one trophy with Egypt.

Everywhere in sports, we make an effort to imbue the games with meaning. Sometimes it’s “storylines” for the media coverage; sometimes it’s just meaning for us, the fans. Sometimes the leagues try to pile on the meaning themselves (see: the NBA Cup; anyone who’s ever suggested cash prizes for the winners of the All-Star Game in baseball).

But nothing can ever compete with when the games truly mean something to the participants themselves. And for that, there are few events that can match the World Cup.

See you, as it were, at the stadium. Let’s see what this is like in person.

The general experience of watching the U.S. Men’s National Team at the World Cup, over the past 30 years, has been the experience of cheering for a team that appears to be playing on a field that is always tilted, ever so slightly, uphill.

I expect this is how Paraguay fans felt last night.

Especially in the first half, it was if the USA had an extra man on the field, possibly one who had the same player ratings as Tecmo Bowl Bo Jackson might have had. Every time Paraguay tried to break the pressure, there was a USA player there. Every time a USA player took on a defender, he beat him. Every time a USA player tried a line-breaking pass, it was on the money.

I’ve watched the USA play a lot of different teams, in CONCACAF, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen the USA look quite like that. Not against Grenada, or St. Vincent and the Grenadines; not even in games the USA ended up winning 6-0.

And certainly not against a team that ended up tied with Brazil and Colombia and Uruguay in CONMEBOL qualification.

I think it’s fair to say, this morning, that there has never been more excitement about a USMNT performance. They have beaten better teams, even at the World Cup, but those victories always landed in the “somewhat improbable” category. Never in my memory, at a major tournament, have they had a victory that had to be put on the “comprehensive beatdown” list.

Like Mexico the day before, the USA already has one foot in the knockout rounds. I guarantee you there are now those that are scouting potential knockout-round matchups (Belgium in the round of 16 in Seattle, anyone?)

Because I am bad at scheduling, I was on a plane when the match kicked off, meaning I got to attempt to watch the game via some of the balkiest Wi-Fi it’s possible to experience in 2026. I can’t remember what we had before we had standard definition TV, but that was the approximate quality; it was a throwback.

Plus, the flight attendants made me put away my laptop for landing, something that has never once bothered me before yesterday.

The result was that I saw the first USA goal on the plane, but pretty much the rest of the game via recording at my cousin’s house (who will be receiving sainthood, for not only letting me stay with him and picking me up from the airport, but tape-delaying the game and watching it with me.)

I was on Alaska Airlines, which (at least on this flight) does not have seat-back entertainment screens, and so I couldn’t look through the cabin to see if Americans had been united by their love of soccer. I was the only one I saw pumping a fist after the first goal, but that could have been the Wi-Fi.

It was halftime when we landed. Every TV in the airport was tuned to the game, for sure, but there were no gatherings of people that appeared to be watching the game (and the commercials meant that nobody spoiled the score for me). I saw a few ads that referenced the World Cup, and I did hear one soccer-themed PA announcement (possibly from Jordan Morris?) welcoming visitors to Sea-Tac.

Plus, the bollard at the pickup lane you see in the photo above was soccer-themed. So I would say that Seattle is ready for the World Cup.

Some of the pillars for the monorail have flags on them, too; this may qualify as going all-out.

I don’t know what I expected, I guess; the Space Needle is not decorated to look like the Jules Rimet trophy, at least not yet. But so far, the experience of being At The World Cup is pretty familiar, in the sense that it’s pretty much just Being In Seattle.

When I saw that Mexico had beaten South Africa 2-0, in a game that featured three red cards, I didn’t even bat an eye. This kind of thing happens at the Azteca. Who among us, nationally speaking, has not finished a game at Estadio Azteca with nine players on the field?

It wasn’t until this morning, when I saw articles pointing out this leaves the 2026 edition of the men’s World Cup just one red card short of the total for the entire previous tournament, that I realized that not everyone is used to this.

So, to the world, may I offer a hearty welcome to CONCACAF! This is your life now: referees at the video monitor, carefully deliberating the most insane refereeing decisions you’ve ever seen. Players who have never punched another human being in their life punching an opposing player in full view of God and the referee, as if compelled by a magic spell. Operatic celebrations, theatrical dives, the whole panoply of human emotions expressed by a single CONCACAF midfielder in a ten-second spell, striking down the opposition only to then be struck down himself, retribution and karma via the helpful metric of the referee’s book.

The result also leaves Mexico with one foot in the quarterfinals, as it were. Only the 1994 World Cup, in the three-points-for-a-win era has been mathematically equivalent to this one; that year, 24 teams entered and 16 qualified for the knockout round. Four points was enough to see everyone through, except for in a historically insane Group E, where Mexico, Ireland, Italy, and Norway all finished with the exact same record: one win and one draw, with a goal difference of zero. Norway was the unlucky fourth-placed team, having scored just one goal in three games.

Should the hosts win Group A, they’d be lined up to play their first two knockout games at the Azteca, and no matter who the opponents are (perhaps England in the Round of 16!), American fans know that at the Azteca, Mexico is not to be trifled with.

One of the biggest changes for me over the past dozen or so years of being a soccer fan is that I find it increasingly difficult to reach the same levels of Mexico hatred that I once reached as a matter of routine. For decades, the most important thing about American soccer was not only that the USA win, but that Mexico lose; the “Dos a cero” series were some of the greatest soccer fan nights I’ve ever had.

Some of that changed with the USA raising its competitive level; it has ceased to be a historic event to see the USA come out on top against Mexico. With the advent of the Nations League, it’s also become less rare to see the countries play; in the last five years, the countries have played for a trophy four times and in a semifinal once, with the USA winning all but one of those games.

The true tipping point, though, might have come in November 2016, when - in the aftermath of an election in the United States in which it seemed to become a shibboleth, in certain quarters, that Mexico was some sort of evil empire that represented everything to blame about the United States - the two teams posed for a joint team photo before a World Cup qualifier.

If you didn’t agree that Mexico, nationally speaking, was some irredeemable monster - and I didn’t, and don’t - then it suddenly seemed needlessly bellicose to hate El Tri, to treat them as anything but an occasionally annoying neighbor.

It’s also impossible to see soccer culture in the United States as anything but Mexican-flavored. By many estimates, the most-watched soccer league in the United States is Liga MX. El Tri draws better in the USA than the USMNT does. To pretend that there’s some essential American spirit, one that sets the leagues and national teams apart from their southern brethren, feels virtually impossible.

I can’t say that I want Mexico to win, not exactly. About all I can say is that I feel a certain defensiveness about Mexico, a certain CONCACAF-solidarity protectiveness, the same way I feel about Canada - and to put Mexico on a level with Canada represents a huge shift in my feelings.

Speaking of Canada, today represents the last semi-calm day of the group stage, with both Canada and the USA kicking off their campaigns, against Bosnia-Herzegovina and Paraguay, respectively. I suppose this is the natural thing to happen, when a tournament has three hosts rather than just one; FIFA, which loves to stretch things out, gets to stretch out its host-kicks-off-the-tournament celebrations to two full days.

I’ll be on a flight for half of USA-Paraguay, because I am bad at planning, but I’m excited to see what the flight is like. The flight doesn’t have seat-back entertainment screens, so it won’t be an apples-to-apples comparison, but I’ve been on flights during NFL conference championship games, and seen planes where 85% of all the in-flight monitors are watching the exact same thing. It’ll be fascinating to see whether USA-Paraguay hits that level, whether the entire plane starts trying to stream the game at 8pm central time… or if it’s just one guy with a laptop, cursing a poor connection, a scene straight out of 2002.

Given everything that’s happened since, it can be hard to remember that there was a widespread fear, maybe even a widespread expectation, that the 1994 World Cup in the USA was going to fail abjectly.

It had been a decade since the country had even had a nationwide professional league, and even that league had been the sort of burn-bright-then-fade-away operation that had been widespread across American sports in the 1970s and 1980s. This was a period in which the ABA, WHA, and USFL had all briefly challenged established leagues, then imploded with varying blast radii; that the NASL had briefly brought Pele craziness to New York, then disappeared, was in keeping with the times.

The 1994 World Cup was FIFA’s attempt to break into the world’s largest commercial market, one that came probably eight years after they originally intended. The 1986 World Cup was originally set to be in Colombia, but when the Colombians bowed out amidst a tournament expansion, the US (and Canada) were among the frontrunners to host the tournament. Many at FIFA wanted the USA to be the replacement, but a combination of incompetence at the U.S. Soccer Federation and an entrenched old guard at FIFA ended up putting the tournament back in Mexico, for the second time in 16 years.

Even by 1994, there was a general sense among certain quarters of the American public (chiefly led by crusty old sportswriters) that holding the soccer World Cup in the USA was approximately equivalent to holding the Cricket World Cup in the USA, that soccer was a game for foreigners played by foreigners and of no importance or interest to any American who was not in some way foreign themselves.

You could sense that FIFA agreed on some level, demonstrated by their scheduling. The vast majority of games began between 12:30pm and 4pm Eastern time, the better to make them late-evening events in Europe, even though this meant things like “Mexico and Ireland played in midafternoon in Orlando in June, which is like scheduling a game on the surface of the sun.”

The fear was that the games would be played in front of empty stadiums. What ended up happening is that the tournament set an attendance record that’s still never been broken; three and a half million people went to a game that summer, with an average attendance of nearly 69,000, mostly because they played a bunch of games at the cavernous Rose Bowl.

For a 12-year-old watching his first soccer games, it was intoxicating.

I was aware that the USA had made the 1990 World Cup, and was certainly more interested in soccer than the average outstate eight-year-old; we even had the enthusiastically-titled NES video game “Goal!”, its gameplay chiefly focused on attempted slide tackles.

(It also had a “Shoot Competition,” in which the player had to try to beat two defenders and score against a defective goalkeeper who would regularly dive out of the way of your shot. You picked one of three players for this mode: Hansen, Roko, or Juarez. I think the important thing to remember that this was definitely NOT Scotland defender Alan Hansen and the center player was definitely NOT Pelé with letter shifts, so just get those thoughts out of your head right now.)

We even had a soccer ball at our house, which had to be one of fewer than five soccer balls in my entire hometown at the time. I can remember pretending to be Paul Caligiuri, trying to score goals under the clothesline in the backyard (Caligiuri was the only player I knew for sure, thanks to him scoring the fateful goal in qualifying against Trinidad and Tobago, which I had seen on the news or on Wide World of Sports or something.)

But, for me, those 1990 World Cup games might as well have taken place underwater at midnight. The games were on ESPN and TNT; I’m not at all certain we even had cable TV in 1990. I didn’t see a single minute of any of the games, and - except for Goal! and occasional backyard soccer pretending - I’m pretty sure I didn’t think about soccer again until 1994.

That 1994 World Cup, though, was front-and-center in my consciousness. Thanks to the soccer-loving folks at Sports Illustrated for Kids, and ESPN and ABC showing all the games (we definitely had cable by then), a nascent pre-teen soccer fan could finally put up his first World Cup wall chart and follow the USA through its attempt to - unlike the 1990 World Cup - not get destroyed.

So I remember being in the basement, watching Eric Wynalda carve up the Swiss from a free kick. (I also remember my dad, who I’m pretty sure was also watching his first soccer match, saying, “Wow, there’s a lot more action than I thought.”) And I remember being in my grandparents’ kitchen in Hopkins, watching on the tiny kitchen TV as the USA somehow beat Colombia. And then, at my other grandparents’ house, watching Brazil’s Leonardo break Tab Ramos’s jaw and get himself sent off, but ten-man Brazil still beating the USA in the knockout round.

Since then, I have never not followed the USA soccer teams. And I promised myself that, someday, I would do the thing that 12-year-old me couldn’t do, and go to the men’s World Cup.

In a different world, I’d have become a die-hard that has traveled the world, following the USA, but life hasn’t worked out that way. For years, I didn’t have near enough money to think about crossing the globe for soccer; then, I got married and had kids, and going to Brazil or Russia or Qatar for soccer was out of the question. And besides, the USA had been in contention to host the tournament again since at least 2018, the selection for which began in 2009; for most of my adulthood, it’s been less of a question of whether the USA would host the tournament, and more of a question of when.

It’s finally happening, and - thanks to my cousin and his family in Seattle, who are too kind to say no to their lunatic relative from the Midwest - I’m finally doing what 12-year-old me wanted to do.

I wish, of course, that the tournament wasn’t getting underway with some of the sourest vibes of any worldwide sporting event in history. FIFA has taken CONCACAF’s price-gouging to a next level, and has focused on extracting every possible dollar from every ticket. The USA government has started a war with a tournament participant and made getting to the USA difficult-to-impossible for fans, and in one case, a referee.

I’m used to these events causing disasters - remember the dueling toilets at the Sochi Olympics? Discovering that the hockey rink was too small at the Milan-Cortina Olympics, just this year? Brazil’s stadiums failing to get completed in time for the 2014 World Cup? - but I had, naively, hoped that the USA and its already-completed infrastructure would avoid all of these pitfalls.

It was, in the end, too much to hope for that a soccer tournament would somehow rise above the murk.

None of which is stopping me from going, of course. I’m utterly fascinated to see what Seattle during the World Cup is like, whether it’s the equivalent of the town hosting five Super Bowls in two weeks, or whether it’s like a run-of-the-mill Seahawks game week - noteworthy, but not all-consuming. I’ll be in town for all four group-stage games that the city is hosting. It currently seems unlikely that I’ll be able to afford to sell all of the body parts I’d need to sell to get a ticket for USA-Australia, which leaves three games: Belgium-Egypt, Bosnia and Herzegovina/Qatar, and Egypt/Iran.

None of them will be showpieces, and the middle one might be in contention for worst game of the tournament, but I don’t really care.

32 years later, the men’s World Cup is back. Sour vibes or no, I couldn’t be more excited.

Hard as it might be to believe, Minnesota United is already more than halfway through its offseason, with players returning to Minnesota for the beginning of preseason in the second week of January.

So far this offseason, though, the biggest Loons headlines have been about goalkeeper Dayne St. Clair and midfielder Hassani Dotson — two players that won’t be in St. Paul come 2026.

Read more: Minnesota United set to begin new era after offseason departures of Dayne St. Clair, Hassani Dotson

GAME STORY: Minnesota United lose in MLS Western Conference semifinals to San Diego FC 1-0

SAN DIEGO — There are two ways you can look at Minnesota United’s 2025 season. On one hand, the team set a club record for points in a season and hosted a playoff round for the first time, in a full non-COVID season, since 2019.

The Loons beat Inter Miami. They beat San Diego. They beat Seattle — twice, plus twice more on penalty kicks in the playoffs. Their prowess from set pieces earned them worldwide recognition, and for the first time, it felt like the club had a distinct identity.

On the other hand, just like 2024, their season is over after the Western Conference semifinals. They again haven’t qualified for the Concacaf Champions Cup, which was viewed somewhat as a potential consolation prize for the season. And once again, they haven’t required the construction of a trophy case at team headquarters.

A good season, but not a final destination.

Read more: Loons eliminated in Western Conference semifinals

Minnesota United may be playing in the conference semifinals Monday night in San Diego, but despite advancing past Seattle in the first round of the MLS playoffs, the Loons are in the midst of what might be their worst stretch of their entire year.

Count their shootout victories against the Sounders as draws, and the Loons are mired in a four-game winless streak, with just one win in their last eight games across all competitions. This swoon comes at the end of a year in which Minnesota had only one regular-season winless streak that stretched as far as three games.

Read more: MNUFC tries to solve slow starts in MLS playoffs

The way Major League Soccer figures it, the league schedule already starts in February and ends in December.

Why not flip things around and hold the playoffs in the balmy light of May rather than the frigid dark of winter?

The MLS Board of Governors voted Thursday to reverse the league calendar starting in the summer of 2027. After a shortened transitional season in the spring of 2027, the 2027-28 season will begin in July and run through the following May.

Read more from the Star Tribune: MLS aligns calendar with top soccer leagues

You could go a decade as a soccer fan and never see a result quite as hard to believe as Minnesota United’s playoff victory over the Seattle Sounders on Saturday.

It had everything. Early goals. Late goals. A red card. An improbable comeback by a team playing a man short. And, in the end, a penalty shootout that had to be seen to be believed, one in which one goalkeeper scored the eventual game-winning penalty and then watched the other goalkeeper kiss his own penalty off the crossbar.

GAME STORY: Minnesota United advance in MLS playoffs after winning 10-round shootout vs. Seattle Sounders

There is simply not a good place to begin with a game like Saturday’s Minnesota United penalty shootout victory over the Seattle Sounders to decide their first-round playoff series.

Not in a game like that. Not in a game with six goals, with Seattle scoring twice in the first eight minutes and once in the final three, with the Loons going down to 10 men while down a goal and, impossibly, scoring twice in the second half to turn a certain loss into a second-half lead.

Read more: Minnesota United’s 10-round playoff shootout with Seattle Sounders had a bunch of subplots

As Minnesota United and the Seattle Sounders head into the deciding Game 3 of their first-round playoff series on Saturday, the fifth game between the two teams this season, neither has much in the way of tactical surprises left to spring. It’s less about wrong-footing the opposition, and more about execution and intensity and energy. The Loons, despite knowing what was coming in Game 2 on Monday, ended up on the wrong side of that.

Read more: MNUFC wants to bring intensity to Game 3 vs. Seattle

GAME 2: Sounders 4, Loons 2

SEATTLE – It was almost impossible to find a player, coach, or staff member from Minnesota United that had anything positive to say about the best-of-three format of the first round of the MLS playoffs.

After the Loons dropped Game 2 to the Seattle Sounders 4-2 on Monday night at Lumen Field, though, the entire club might be a little more positive about having a Game 3 still to play.

Ed. note: I’m inordinately proud of that SEATTLE dateline - it worked out perfectly that my family trip to Seattle coincided with Game 2.

Read more: Minnesota United lose to Seattle Sounders 4-2 in Game 2 of first-round MLS playoff series

Dayne St. Clair is Goalkeeper of the Year

Minnesota United has become known for its defense, and goalkeeper Dayne St. Clair is getting some recognition for his contribution to that reputation. MLS announced Monday that St. Clair is the 2025 Goalkeeper of the Year, an honor for a keeper who reached another level this season.

Read more: MNUFC’s Dayne St. Clair is MLS Goalkeeper of the Year

EARLIER: MNUFC faces Seattle Sounders in Game 2 of MLS playoff series