Jim Geraghty
Foreign soccer fans marvel at features of U.S. life we take for granted.
Today at 14:00 United Arab Emirates Time
Scottish fans celebrate in central Boston ahead of the World Cup soccer match between Haiti and Scotland on June 13. (Martin Meissner/AP)
Sometimes it takes outsiders, seeing us with fresh eyes, to remind us of who we are and what we have.
By now, you’ve probably seen social media videos of foreign tourists coming to the United States for the World Cup — co-hosted with Canada and Mexico — and marveling at features of American life that we tend to take for granted. As the Japan Times put it, visiting fans are discovering “a distinctive culture of 24-hour retail, free soda refills, chicken wings dipped in ranch dressing and a warm welcome from Americans.”
The now famous German soccer fan Freddy is getting the most enthusiastic welcome since Neil Armstrong returned from the moon. It’s an apt comparison; he and his traveling friends have already gotten a personal tour of NASA from astronaut Anne McClain and stepped into the Orion capsule that flew around the moon in April. When Americans roll out the red carpet for visitors, we do it on an epic scale.
At a time when our president can’t resist destroying his relationships with even the most like-minded European leaders, it’s wonderful for the world to interact with real Americans and enjoy our hospitality, and for us to be reminded of how the world sees us.
The implausible accusation that Americans are xenophobic always had to wave away little details, such as the fact that we welcome 650,000 to 1 million legal new citizens each year. (That’s not undocumented migrants coming over the border; that’s naturalized citizens.) In a xenophobic country, would the University of Kansas marching band welcome the Algerian World Cup team with its national anthem? Would Bostonians throw joint parties for Scotland’s visiting “Tartan Army” and the Haitian diaspora? Would Providence, Rhode Island, have welcomed the Ghanaian team by raising that country’s flag at city hall and holding a concert at a nearby park?
“Americans haven’t changed,” Yahia El Awady, an Egyptian medical student in the United Arab Emirates attending a game in Seattle, told the Canadian newspaper the Globe and Mail. “Americans haven’t changed. They’ve always been welcoming. Maybe even more welcoming now, because the World Cup is happening.”
Note that almost all the World Cup tourists are, by nearly any standard, quite well-off. The cheapest World Cup tickets theoretically start at about $140 each and go way, way higher, now starting at about $900 on resale sites. Flying to the U.S. from a foreign country was never inexpensive, and that was before all the higher jet-fuel costs drove up airfares even more. It also doesn’t count the costs of staying in a hotel, local transportation, food, souvenirs, etc. And yet these tourists marvel at how wealthy America is, which appears to give us an answer to the question of why Americans think Europe feels richer when the statistics say the poorest U.S. states have a per capita gross domestic product significantly higher than European states. Our wealth is visible in ways that are mundane and ordinary to Americans.
American wealth manifests in some expected ways — larger houses, more spread-out suburbs, bigger cars, wider highways — but also in unexpected ways, such as ubiquitous water fountains and free public restrooms, nearly universal air conditioning, free glasses of ice water when you sit down at a restaurant, complimentary chips and salsa at Mexican eateries. Europe has its own convenience stores attached to gas stations; it just doesn’t have anything like Buc-ee’s.
The U.S. didn’t have to build any new stadiums to host the World Cup; the 11 NFL stadiums being used are first-rate large facilities. It’s wonderful to see fans from Curaçao and Germany marveling at NRG Stadium — renamed “Houston Stadium” for the World Cup. But we can honestly tell them that with 72,220 seats, it isn’t even one of our big stadiums. There are eight stadiums in this country that hold more than 100,000 people, and the World Cup didn’t use any of them because they’re college football stadiums, too far from major cities and transportation hubs.
Oh, and gas prices. Americans are understandably disgruntled at the higher gas prices triggered by the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. The national average is finally below $4 a gallon, but that still feels expensive when a year ago we were paying $3.22 per gallon. By European standards, however, American gasoline is unbelievably cheap. As of June 18, the average price in dollars for a gallon of gas in Europe ranged from $5.88 in Malta to $10.49 in Denmark.
We get some big things wrong in this country — too much poverty and crime, too many homeless people, too many obstacles to achieving the American Dream. But we’re still the country that people jump onto rickety rafts and try to sail through miles of shark-laden ocean to reach, in hopes of living their own American Dream. And when foreigners visit for a soccer tournament, we show them the time of their lives.
Jim Geraghty is National Review’s senior political correspondent, where he writes the daily “Morning Jolt” newsletter, among other writing duties. He’s the author of the novel “The Weed Agency” (a Washington Post bestseller), the nonfiction “Heavy Lifting” with Cam Edwards and “Voting to Kill,” and the Dangerous Clique series of thriller novels.