I went to a World Cup match this week. In my own country. I still can't quite believe I get to type that sentence. The 2026 tournament is being co-hosted across North America, and for those of us who usually watch the World Cup at 3am squinting at a stream from halfway around the planet, having it here, in our time zones, in our cities, is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. The atmosphere is unreal.
The numbers back it up. This tournament shattered a 32-year-old single-day attendance record, then shattered the new record again just six days later, with 288,007 fans packed across stadiums in a single day. Let that sink in. Nearly 290,000 people, in one day, going to watch football in person. The appetite is enormous, and being inside one of those stadiums, you feel it in your chest.
Let me try to describe what it's actually like, because the TV doesn't capture it. I went to a match between two countries that aren't even mine, and the stands were a riot of color, two sets of fans who'd traveled across the world, drums, chanting, flags the size of cars. I sat next to a family who'd flown in from the other team's country and ended up swapping snacks and broken-language jokes with them by halftime. That's the World Cup in person. You don't just watch a game. You get dropped into a temporary city of people from everywhere, all there for the same ninety minutes.
The host-country thing is what makes it special for me, though. For my whole life, the World Cup has been a thing that happens far away, at inconvenient hours, in places I'll probably never go. You love it, but at a distance, through a screen, often alone in a dark room while everyone around you sleeps. Having it here means I can actually be in the room. I can take my niece to a match and have it be a memory she keeps forever, not a 3am blur I tried to explain to her later.
There's a downside I'll be honest about, because not everything is rosy. It's expensive and it's chaotic. Tickets, travel between far-flung host cities, accommodation that's tripled in price, the logistics of a tournament spread across an entire continent. Not everyone who wants to go can afford to, and that stings, because the magic shouldn't only be for people with deep pockets. The record crowds are wonderful, but they also mean demand way outstripped what a lot of fans could actually access. I got lucky with one match. Plenty of locals got priced out of all of them.
And the spread-out nature of a continental World Cup is genuinely tiring for the teams and the traveling fans, long flights between group games, jet lag, the romance of "one host city" replaced by a logistical marathon. The bigger tournament has costs, and I don't want to pretend the experience is flawless just because I'm excited.
But here's the thing. Even watching from home this year is better, because it's in a sensible time zone for once and the whole country is buzzing about it. Bars are packed at reasonable hours. People who don't normally care about football are suddenly asking who's playing. There's a collective energy when the World Cup is in your backyard that you just don't get when it's a distant 3am event. The sport becomes a shared local moment, not a solitary one.
What I keep coming back to is how rare this is. A home World Cup happens, what, once in most people's lifetimes, if that? I was determined not to let it pass as something I merely watched. So I went. I spent more than I probably should have on one match. And it was worth every cent, because I'll be telling people about that atmosphere for the rest of my life.
If the tournament is anywhere near you and you can possibly swing it, go. Even one match. Even the cheap seats for a game between two countries you have no stake in. The point isn't the result. It's standing in a stadium with tens of thousands of strangers from every corner of the earth, all roaring at the same moment, and realizing this is happening here, now, in your lifetime, in your backyard.
288,000 people in a day understood the assignment. The World Cup came to us. I wasn't going to watch this one only through a screen, and if it's near you, you shouldn't either.
Go make the memory. The stream will always be there. The home World Cup won't.