NY times: Why Does No One Care About the World Cup This Year?

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They used to call the World Cup, unequivocally, the planet’s biggest sporting event. But it is about to start, right here in North America, and no one much seems to care. Thousands of tickets remain unsold, and just weeks ago, others were being resold well below their official price. In cities around the United States, air traffic isn’t materializing, and hotels that had counted on millions of dollars in additional revenue are watching it trickle instead. FIFA has had to cancel block reservations of rooms, and there’s talk of a global boycott as a kind of protest against President Trump — his wars, his border policies, his imperial vulgarity. When the games actually begin, interest will surely surge. But at the moment it seems as if there is less anticipation than there was for this past weekend’s club soccer Champions League final between Arsenal and Paris Saint-Germain. And I actually do think this might be telling us something, beyond the world of sports, about the global landscape of politics and culture.

In the States, the indifference might not be surprising, even though the event is being played mostly on U.S. soil. The U.S. team is more talented than in the past but hasn’t looked impressive for years. Soccer is still a growth sport rather than a dominant one in this country, and many Americans aren’t exactly feeling the flush of simplistic patriotism these days. On top of which, the tickets have been priced punishingly high.

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. These days the World Cup no longer seems to tower over the rest of the sporting universe quite so much, with club soccer building a new global ubiquity over the past dozen years or so — if not quite displacing the World Cup at the top of the soccer pecking order, then at least taking a place right beside it.

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Why would this be? One simple answer is just that club soccer has gotten too big and too important to too many people, sometimes demonstrating play at a much higher level than international competition can offer. Others have argued that FIFA’s 2015 corruption scandal had taken a toll, that the organization’s off-putting president has steered FIFA in the wrong direction or that the recent run of host sites — Russia, Qatar, the United States — has come with a cost. And because national teams rarely play together, with players from many different leagues sometimes parachuting in for a weekend to play a World Cup qualifier, the spectacle itself feels a bit drained of meaning — a bit more corporate, thin, pallid.

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