How the ‘beautiful game’ is deflecting America’s political turmoil

On Sundays, protesters in the United States assemble on the corner near the ACME Hot and Fresh T-shirt store in Lawrence, Kansas, incensed by an expanding array of causes: The Iran war, the war in the Gaza Strip, the White House, immigration enforcement.

The protests draw honking horns of approval and the occasional jeers from the other sides of the debates.

But these days, there is just one dominant team to cheer in Lawrence, which is a boon for Hot and Fresh. “Everybody wants an Algerian shirt in Lawrence,” said David Sauter, a co-owner of the shop.

The small city, home to the University of Kansas, had a notable, if brief, surge in Algerian arrivals over the last few weeks as the Algerian national football team made Lawrence its World Cup headquarters before it exited the tournament. The university marching band played the Algerian anthem. The players received dignitaries’ escorts from police, on motorcycles.

“Trying to get the democracy back hasn’t stopped,” Sauter said. But in the meantime: “Viva L’Algerie!” as they say in Lawrence. “The distraction is lovely,” he said.

Yes, the “beautiful game”, as the great Pelé called football, is a lovely distraction from the rancorous noise that has become a national anthem.

If the face Americans show to each other lately – and that America often flashes the world – seems to be a scowl, its World Cup face is a wide, welcoming smile.

It is 60,000 fans in Miami watching tiny Uruguay and minuscule Cape Verde valiantly battle to a tie.

It is Dallas police officers sitting on the tarmac at the city’s airport, showing off their best “Viking row” to greet the Norwegian team’s plane.

It is Chattanooga’s only tapas joint providing sangria, bacon-wrapped dates and watermelon skewers to the Spanish athletes in Tennessee.

It is a Scottish fan in Boston, taking to Instagram to say, “We were expecting to be met by ICE agents, aggressive policing, the political climate we see on the news. That could not be further from what we are experiencing.”

The expectations were understandable. The celebration of the nation’s 250th birthday has been a layer cake of contention and conflict. And the country is in the midst of the harshest campaign to detain and deport immigrants since World War II.

Berto Aguayo, a Mexican American lawyer and community organiser from Chicago, was in Los Angeles for a knockout round match between Spain and Austria. Spain won 3-0.

In 2025, as Aguayo knows well, federal immigration agents swarmed neighbourhoods in both Chicago and Los Angeles and often scuffled with protesters. But on July 2, Aguayo said he felt a sense of joy as he rode a shuttle to the game with a Taiwanese American friend from law school and his Korean American partner, surrounded by people from across the country and the world.

“To me, that reflects the pluralism the tournament can represent and the kind of country we should aspire to be,” Aguayo said. “One where people from different backgrounds come together despite our differences.”

Simon Kuper, a British journalist and author of books on football, warned that these World Cup “kumbaya” moments rarely lead to lasting shifts in politics or culture. He recalled that after France won the World Cup in 1998 with a team of Black, white and Arab players, some predicted – wrongly – that it would spell the end of the French far right.

“The World Cup almost never changes anything; it illuminates the world,” Kuper said. “It shows us countries more clearly and what it is showing us about the United States is that it is a multicultural country and a lot of Americans take joy in that.”

They sure are taking joy in America’s multicultural team, whose roster reflects the current immigration laws that are the subject of such fierce debate and legal combat. The game on July 1 between the US and Bosnia and Herzegovina was a tableau of national identities, with lines as blurry as the distinction between yellow and red card penalties.

Folarin Balogun, who scored the first of two US goals and later was ejected with a red card, is American thanks to the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship clause, which a divided Supreme Court upheld in the face of a challenge by President Donald Trump. He was born while his Nigerian parents, who lived in London, were visiting family in the United States.

The second US goal came on a free kick after a foul against Sergino Dest, who holds dual citizenship. He was born in the Netherlands to a Dutch mother and a Surinamese American father who served in the US military.

And the player who scored that goal, Malik Tillman, was born in Nuremberg, Germany, to a US service member and a German mother.

Cross-border stars are not unusual in football, which is by far the world’s most popular sport. And its globalist theme has previously turned off some on the political right. Glenn Beck, a right-wing commentator, once said of the sport, “I hate it so much, probably because the rest of the world likes it so much.”

But winning wins fans. Republican Nathaniel Moran, who has backed Trump’s assault on birthright citizenship, applauded the US team on the social platform X after its victory on July 1 for its “grit, determination, perseverance, and strength”.

Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, a tough-on-immigration Republican, hosted Shaun Alexander, a Scottish fan whose World Cup travel videos have gone viral, at Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami on the governor’s less-viral “Diners, Drive-ins & DeSantis” video series. When the prospect of a US championship came up, DeSantis said, “it would be pretty neat if they were able to do it”.

Blue states and red have welcomed the brief foreign visitors. When the Iraqi team arrived in West Virginia, Senator Jim Justice, a Republican, called it “a really special day”.

The United States, of course, did not throw its arms open for everyone. A Somali referee was denied entry, and some fans were denied visas.

The Iranian team was permitted into the country for only about 48 hours to play its matches, and had to stay across the Mexican border, in Tijuana. Still, after playing their last match in Los Angeles, home to a large Persian diaspora that includes many fans of the Iranian team, the players left a positive message in the locker room via Post-it notepad.

“From the ancient Persia of thousands of years ago to the civilised Iran of today, the spirit of Iran remains alive and steadfast,” it said. “We came to Los Angeles with pride, competed with honour, and leave with dignity.”

Salvador G. Sarmiento, a Mexican American attorney in San Diego and a football fan, said the contrasting treatment for teams on each side of the border was striking, but not surprising.

“The World Cup is a global phenomenon, and like in any global phenomenon, it sharpens the contradictions we live in,” he said. “It makes them more visible.”

The dissonance between the country’s multicultural embrace of the World Cup and the administration’s hard-line isolationist policies is particularly challenging for those active in the immigrant community, such as Andreina Malki.

Malki, who left Uruguay as a teenager, now works as an immigrant rights organiser in North Carolina. She’s had football games playing in the background these past few weeks while she answered calls reporting Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity across the state, and dispatched people to verify the sightings.

“It is very hard to see people celebrate the game on one stage but then to have people afraid to go to a pickup game on the other,” she said.

Malki loves the sport. Among her earliest memories of football is watching a match with her grandfather in her native city of Paysandu. When her family resettled in South Carolina in 2003 after the economy in Uruguay fell apart, football became one of the remaining ties to her native country.

The beautiful game resonates powerfully, for her and many others around the world, as an expression of struggle and hope.

“Things we might not be able to achieve in the real world, we can achieve on the field,” she said. NYTIMES

• This article originally appeared in The New York Times.