The quadrennial World Cup  will be over tomorrow, and either Spain or Argentina will emerge as champions. I just want to make three observations. 

Ticket Prices

Ticket prices have really gotten out of control. We saw some games back in 1994 when the old Foxboro stadium was one of the venues. We saw Maradona’s last game before he was thrown out of the tournament after testing positive for ephedrine. We saw Baggio squeeze Italy past Nigeria and again against Spain. My sister and I went to Giants Stadium to see Germany lose to Bulgaria. For tickets we paid between $45 and $65; we paid $85 for play-off tickets and we paid $125 apiece (the most we had ever paid for a sporting event) for the game in Giants stadium. That was 32 years ago, but those prices were reasonable and we could accommodate them.

Now?

Around $1250 on StubHub for Haiti vs. Scotland. More for the better games.  No thank you.

Can you imagine paying for the Brazil-Norway game and discovering that Erling Haaland wasn’t playing because Norway had already qualified for the second round?

My sister and I decided to go to the “Road to 26: Brazil v France” friendly at Gillette Stadium to have a substitute experience. Cost us $270 a piece. Expensive, but doable. It was a great game. Mbappé scored. Vini Jr. played. And that was our substitute “World Cup” experience. If you add the cost of flying to the United States, acquiring accommodations, paying for parking or the $80 roundtrip from South Station to Foxboro, you have to be willing to spend quite a bit of money for the World Cup experience.

Who has that kind of money?

Enough people, apparently.

One other thing that has changed between 1994 and 2026 is that we now have extraordinarily televisions, through which you can see the action much more clearly than in many cases when you’re out there live. Oh sure, you miss the energy, but you’ll save $1500 or thereabouts.

The Browning of European Countries

The browning of European countries has been obvious for a while when you’re talking about national teams like France and England, but there are now other national teams that have joined the club. Take Switzerland. I lived there in 1975-76 during my father’s sabbatical, and it was the most rigid, lily-white little country you could imagine, albeit in a spectacular location. And look at them now.

The national team is a mixture of black and brown, with lots of players who were either born in another country (Breel Embolo or Yvon Mvogo, for example) or whose parents were refugees from somewhere else (Albania, Turkey, Macedonia, Senegal, the Congo, Angola, Tunisia, Nigeria, etc.). No matter what Donald Trump and MAGA want, black and brown people are coming, even to places like Switzerland. Eastern European countries are currently less integrated, but if it happened in Switzerland it will happen in those countries as well.

National Pride

One of the lovely things about the World Cup is the exhibition of national pride. I remember back in 1979 when Marvin Hagler first fought Vito Antuofermo, and a column that a Boston Globe writer wrote about sitting at a bar in South Boston watching the fellas there cheer for the black Hagler (who was from Brockton) instead of the white Antuofermo (from New York) because he was “our guy.”

And so it is with the World Cup.

People can cheer for their teams without reservation. It turns out that the “tartan army” of Scotland conquered Boston to cheer on their team, and Boston loved them right back. Many visitors found that — divorced from the politics of Donald Trump — they really like the United States, with our bottomless cups and ranch dressing and easy parking and gigantic sandwiches.

The Brazilians and Argentinians make every game involving their teams feel like a “home” game because of the passion and number of their fans. People actually enjoyed being with fans of other nations, as they bonded over the love of soccer.

Imagine that.

The whole thing has gone much better than I anticipated, frankly, ticket prices and Donald Trump’s interference with Folarin Balogun’s red card notwithstanding. Americans will likely never become fans of the game — there’s too much histrionics and not nearly enough scoring — but our women will continue to outperform our men and at least provide opportunities for female athletes.

And it will happen all over again (this time in Spain, Portugal, and Morocco) four years from now.