When I was fourteen years old, my mom bought me a new drawstring backpack in preparation for summer camp. The Adidas bag I chose had a unique design: an ascending silver bird with triumphantly spread wings of red, gold, and black. I’d picked it out because I thought it was pretty. With its austere pose and nobly hooked beak, like a falcon or a hawk, the bird, I thought, would set the bag apart from the more mundane backpacks sported by my peers.

But after arriving at camp, I learned that this was no arbitrary design. Many of my fellow camp-goers were rabidly talking about the exciting prospects of the Uruguayan team and the dominance of Spain; they turned to me as if I was part of their conversation. This was June of 2010, and I was carrying around a logo for the German soccer team. The other soccer-obsessed teenagers asked if I was rooting for Germany—it was coincidentally the team of choice for many of my peers at the summer camp in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, which placed more pressure on me to respond knowledgeably to the question.

It is relevant to note here that I was deeply unpopular at school, so I eagerly grabbed at any scrap of acceptance that blew past. Flattered by the attention, I confirmed that, yes, of course I was rooting for Germany. I had definitely bought the bag for that purpose. I claimed this was because of my German heritage, which is in reality rather negligible.

I began to actually root for the German team, my backpack a proud token of my loyalty. I watched the games playing on the cafeteria televisions during lunch with a not-totally-feigned fervor; I didn’t particularly enjoy the sport, but I did like the sense of community, of belonging. 

Those three weeks of summer camp, overlapping with the World Cup, were momentous for me: I got my first boyfriend, my first kiss, and my first real sense of what it was to be popular. The 2010 World Cup is forever bound up with my recollections of those major pubescent life events.

To this day, I still have a fondness for the German soccer team, who I’m pretty sure came in third place that summer. They didn’t win, but I felt like I did.

I still find soccer pretty boring. The players just run back and forth across a big field for an hour and a half. When you think the game is over and you’re finally free, there’s overtime, and you’re stuck watching for another ten minutes, or at least the ten minutes that I can bear to keep going before I no longer can.

Given that, it’s hard to be very interested in the administration of it. My knowledge of FIFA as an organization largely begins and ends with “they’re super corrupt.” I know they gave a peace prize to Donald Trump, but with a gun to my head, I could not tell you the name of the FIFA president. (I want to say Michael Imperioli, but that’s the name of the actor who played Christopher in The Sopranos.)

The foremost recommendation I have for enjoying the game is a purely aesthetic one. Soccer players are often very handsome, and they have nice legs. But any visual pleasure is offset by the players’ whininess. They are overly dramatic when they fall, gripping their allegedly injured limbs with an unattractive exaggeration. And unlike with the Olympics, another sporting event I watch only once every few years, I do not have a particular sense of patriotism regarding the World Cup. I know that the American women’s team is very good and the men’s team is much less good, and that’s about it.

The foremost recommendation I have for enjoying the game is a purely aesthetic one. Soccer players are often very handsome, and they have nice legs.

Nevertheless, every four years since 2010, I have monitored the World Cup with varying degrees of attention, because it’s a useful avenue for connecting with others. I will pick up intermittent pieces of soccer knowledge, storing them away for four years to gather dust in a shelf in my mind, ready for when they will next be needed. This sometimes requires a certain amount of research, which does seem counterintuitive; sometimes I feel like the student who spends more time figuring out how to cheat than simply studying for the test.

The tournament cycle is also a vehicle for memory, almost like a mnemonic device. I find myself tracing the passage of time via World Cups, remembering milestones from each of those years. I can tell you exactly what I was doing during various World Cups, because the games are embedded within my experiences of those summers.

In 2014, four years after summer camp, I was between my freshman and sophomore year of college, and I watched the World Cup from two locations. The first was the basement of a building located across the street from the United Nations headquarters. The second was from behind the bar of a country club on Long Island.

At that time, I was an eighteen-year-old intern at the Presbyterian Church (USA) mission at the UN. This job largely involved me taking occasional notes at Security Council meetings and surreptitiously watching Lost on my laptop in the tiny ministry office. The ministry’s building primarily housed religiously affiliated nonprofits and held weekly worship services, hosted by a rotating cast of its various interfaith offices. Just as sacred were the regular gatherings to view World Cup games, which occurred in a meeting room in the basement, near the Mennonites and their mission office. The viewing audience was composed of people of multiple faiths and nationalities, united in their dedication to international peace and to interrupting the workday to watch a soccer game. I loved sitting with this eclectic crew of do-gooders, cheering or booing a half-second too late as I followed their lead. Because they hailed from so many countries, there were no particular allegiances that dominated the group. I found myself choosing a different team to support each game, based on the preferences of my fellow viewers. If the person sitting to my left was rooting for Brazil, then so was I, out of solidarity; they were always so pleased to have another fan by their side.

To supplement my unpaid, resume-boosting internship—which was costing me hundreds of dollars in Long Island Rail Road commuting fees—I also worked three days a week as a waitress at a country club on the north shore of Long Island, not far from where I lived. At the country club, no one stopped work to watch the World Cup. But the games played on the myriad televisions at the bar, where patrons would gather to watch. Every time I ducked to grab a glass of wine for some wealthy club member—white wine with ice in a “bubble glass” for the women, red wine for the men—I would sneak a glance at whatever game was playing.

Many of the busboys and kitchen staffers had immigrated from the Dominican Republic, and they rooted for the Central American teams, which were getting knocked out one by one. I told them I was supporting Germany, because I still remembered the names of some of the players. This was not a very popular stance among the staff, who seemed to believe it was a boring take. Still, it gave me something to talk about with my coworkers during our breaks—when they would gently rib me for my support for Germany—and even, occasionally, with patrons. I was not a very good waitress, so building rapport was a crucial means of maintaining good relationships with members who might otherwise be annoyed that their salad had romaine when they had specifically requested mesclun. And when Germany won, I felt a totally unearned wave of triumph, informing every table I served that night of the result. I might have been exhausted and overworked, but my team was victorious. 

In July 2018, I was preparing to move from New York City to Washington, D.C., after getting a new job at CBS. I was now a journalist, and thrilled that I would soon get to live my dream of covering politics from the nation’s capital. As far as I can remember, I did not watch the World Cup at all that summer, too busy with packing and saying goodbyes to friends. But I can tell you who won—France—because that was the year I learned how to pronounce “Kylian Mbappé.” It never hurts to know the name of the most exciting player in any given sport, especially when you actually know very little about that sport. It also didn’t hurt that Mbappé has a lovely smile and a sexy French accent.

That knowledge came in handy four years later, when Mbappé was once again the player to watch. I was reporting on Congress for The New Republic at this point, and spent most of my time at the United States Capitol. The games played on one of the two televisions in the Senate Press Gallery; the other was still faithfully tuned to C-SPAN.

Reporters would watch casually in between votes, standing in a cluster, heads tilted upward at the screen. Congressional reporting is a taxing gig, and making friends with your fellow reporters is the best way to survive. Talking about the World Cup was another way for us to connect during the grueling hours standing around on hard marble floors, waiting for members of Congress to pass by so we could ask them questions. I was writing a newsletter at the time, and did a fun interview with Senator Todd Young of Indiana, a soccer superfan, about the games. (Later, when I would have to ask him more difficult questions, I would remind him of the soccer interview to soften him up.)

I had abandoned Germany and was rooting for Morocco. Young called the team “inspiring,” and supporting them seemed like the cool thing to do. I found myself disappointed when they were defeated by France in the semifinals, but France’s victory gave me another opportunity for conversation around the press gallery television. Mbappé was the player, I would say confidently. But we shouldn’t rule out Argentina, because they had the great Lionel Messi. Luckily for me, the two teams that made it to the final that year were the ones that had the only players I knew. Or, sort of knew: I remain grateful that no one has ever pointed at a TV screen and asked me which one was Messi. 

This year’s contest marks the fifth World Cup that I will be vaguely watching. I am thirty years old, with a spouse and a mortgage. My drawstring backpack with the Germany logo is shoved somewhere in our coat closet; it has a large hole, and is thus unable to carry anything but sentimental value.

I love the World Cup because it makes me feel like I’m a part of something global. It creates a sense of solidarity that I simply don’t feel when I watch such provincial contests as the Super Bowl or the World Series. With the World Cup, I’ve joined a community that can be counted in billions. Even though I don’t really care about what’s happening on the field, just having the TV tuned to a game gives me the feeling of connecting across distance and time zones, bonded by the shared experience of watching a bunch of men running around and pretending to be injured.

Given my decade and a half of experience, I consider myself an expert in casual viewing of the World Cup. I am thrilled to share my knowledge for the infinitesimal sliver of this magazine’s audience that does not actually know anything about soccer.

I love the World Cup because it makes me feel like I’m a part of something global. It creates a sense of solidarity that I simply don’t feel when I watch such provincial contests as the Super Bowl or the World Series. 

First of all, do not just say that the players are handsome and have nice legs. People will assume you are doing a bit, rather than engaging in legitimate commentary. Note instead that their nice legs are due to sprinting up and down a field for an hour and a half or more. Choose a midfielder with particularly shapely calves to compliment; those ones run a lot. You do not need to know what the positions do, but you should at least learn some of their names.

Wikipedia is the fake fan’s best friend. I currently have a tab opened to the Wikipedia page for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Apparently, this will be the first tournament to be hosted by three countries, and the first with an expanded roster of forty-eight teams. I will be formulating an opinion on the expanded number of teams—probably a positive one, because, with my lack of context, it sounds like a good idea. ESPN’s somewhat inconsistent commentary indicates that Spain has the best odds this year, so I’m memorizing the name of their best player, as well as a few key facts.

I don’t know yet how I will file away this year’s World Cup in my memory. I work from home now, so there is no immediate community I will be able to share my knowledge with, except in Slack conversations with my soccer-fiend editors. 

Fortunately, I will be seeing my brother-in-law this June, and he’s a total jock. Maybe we can talk about Lamine Yamal. It’s crazy how young Yamal is—born in 2007! He can do that kick with the outside of his foot, which really makes him such an interesting player. He can play either right-winger or midfielder. It’s probably why he has such nice calves.