KENNESAW, GEORGIA – The very start of this World Cup trip, and the grand idea to find out whether and how hosting the World Cup resonated in smalltown USA, did not go well. I landed in Seattle, a large World Cup host city, and sidled up to the desk to pick up my hire car, waiting in line with a group of Belgium supporters who were touring before their first group game in the city.
Not only did the kind gent at the desk not know that a World Cup was coming, he had no idea which sport it involved when prompted by a colleague (there was bunting in the terminal building, but not at car hire). Nothing like really cutting through your search for a World Cup buzz.This always promised to be a World Cup of host cities. I am attending matches in nine of the US’s 11 – I left Seattle too soon and the Miami semi-final was just too far south for the car. In each of the six cities I have visited so far, I’ve found an unshakeable major tournament identity that has surpassed my expectations.All the usual hallmarks are there: electronic road signs warning of soccer traffic, the bars with bunting and promises of watch parties and drinks deals. The walking, talking Epcot-ification of downtowns with umpteen different nations represented by home or away shirts. This is normal. This is how it always is.And the vast hordes of travelling supporters have been aided by something I’ve not experienced before: locals choosing a team for each match and offering their dedicated support, if only for one day. That doesn’t feel twee – it’s uplifting.
The difference with the US, and the element of the tournament and its politics that fascinated me just as much, is the vast expanse in between those cities. In Qatar in 2022, the two stadiums furthest apart were separated by a 48-minute drive, give or take traffic. This is basically the opposite. I wanted to find the World Cup ghost towns.They are everywhere and I have seen only a fraction and a snapshot. In Grants Pass, Oregon, I went to a quiz in a bar where one of the questions asked for the identity of the US’s first opponent and almost nobody guessed Paraguay. In Ottawa, Kansas, a lovely lady named Sam – almost all of my conversation comes at the motel buffet breakfast – said her nephew was “probably” into soccer but had no concept of the tournament itself.In Guthrie, Oklahoma, I spoke with Liam and Jennifer – a young couple who had six young children and a puppy with them. As a childless man who got a migraine just by thinking about the noise in that minivan, it was some surprise when they seemed to think I was the unusual one for travelling the US to watch soccer. Maybe they had a point.In Pleasant View, Tennessee, the only real show in town was selling fireworks for a special 4 July celebration marking the USA’s 250th birthday.A Canada game was on the television in a barbecue restaurant, but I was very much the only interested customer. When I asked the barman if he’d had much interest, he laughed (and I won’t attempt the drawl): “We have it on, but we have to have something on.”This information will draw rolled eyes in some quarters – typical Americans not caring about football and thus unworthy of hosting the World Cup. Predictable insularity to the point of national solipsism. And yes, there is plenty of that about.You are never more than 10 miles on a freeway from seeing an American flag large enough to cover an office building fluttering on a 100ft pole. That’s just how they roll, I’m afraid.
Have reached Columbus, Texas. Great smalltown Americana. And a Scotland away shirt. pic.twitter.com/U9UGVvMx8E
— Daniel Storey (@danielstorey85) June 19, 2026It’s also an absolutely forgivable scenario to not care – or not even know – about a tournament that has little to no impact upon your life. Lots of Americans rarely leave their state, life in smalltown USA can indeed feel parochial and a little claustrophobic and football tournaments don’t come to your backyard. The US has 11 host stadiums in an area the size of continental Europe and seven of them are close to the east or west coast.My favourite fact is this (and I learned it in the state itself): Kentucky doesn’t just not have a World Cup stadium, but only one of the seven states it borders has a World Cup stadium too. That state is Missouri, which shares a 60-mile border with Kentucky. And here’s the kicker: that 60 miles does not include a road crossing. I met a guy named Paul in a diner in Bowling Green, not too far from that wild border, who wasn’t bothered about the World Cup. I’d have had a job convincing of its relevance to him.Even state secularity is overplayed. I spent a day and night in El Paso, Texas and went to a winghouse inside converted train carriages. It is true that there were a group of Panamanians watching their match against Ghana (and within the immigrant experience is where the World Cup interest really shines), but I also sat at the bar next to a couple who inquired what I was doing in the US.
When I asked them if they had considered going to a game at either of the Texas stadiums (Houston and Dallas), the guy gently pointed out that the closest of the two was a round trip of 1,270 miles. Which is further than driving from Munich to Istanbul.There have been towns where I’ve struggled to even find the World Cup matches on, but then these are often interstate stop-offs where fast food joints and motels are the usual fare and most local places shut early.
Anthonino's in The Hill, St. Louis. Where they have a mural on the outside to the USA beating England in the 1950 World Cup pic.twitter.com/z0eFt7qKze
— Daniel Storey (@danielstorey85) June 26, 2026The main staple – in Williams, Waco, Columbus, Warrensburg and Gainesville, small towns dotted across the south – are bars that have sport on TV because they always do. Often this is white noise to most of the clientele, but the matches are shown because they fight only with baseball and horse racing. In the evening you might get the sound turned up louder, but very rarely does the World Cup win that audio tussle.And yes, to answer the obvious accusation, most Americans do prefer other sports. This is a sport-obsessed country, it’s just that they have so much choice and so much of that choice is brought closer to their own world.Let me explain, using the El Paso example again. The nearest MLS club to El Paso is Austin FC, whose crowds are 20,000 and made up largely of locals. Austin to El Paso and back is an 18-hour drive. You simply aren’t going to interact with the sport in the same way as Europeans do.What El Paso does have is UTEP and their college football team, whose Sun Bowl stadium has a capacity of 52,000. This is an unfair fight and pretending otherwise is foolhardy. This same scenario plays out across smalltown USA. You see more outward support – shirts, signage, car stickers – for high school football teams than anything to do with soccer.The one exception to this rule, particularly in the south but it survives elsewhere too, is the Mexico shirt. I have seen perhaps 20-30 men’s national team – or USMNT as it likes to brand itself –shirts in the wild. I have seen 2,000-3,000 Mexico shirts. The white away kit is the accessory of this World Cup and the Mexican population in the US.As I make these mini-judgements on an entire country, I continue to remind myself how much of this is projection. For all the criticism of the US’s interest in men’s soccer (and it’s both clearly growing, clearly led by the immigrant population and clearly led by interest in European leagues), is that unusual? If you had driven into the town of Pudozh in Karelia, Russia in June 2018 and chatted up locals with talk of Harry Maguire and the England lovetrain corner routine, would anyone have cared? I think not.There’s another theory, and it came from Brian, one of my many new acquaintances. We began chatting at breakfast in Chesterfield, a suburb of St Louis, Missouri, and I asked him why the fervent support for the US national team appeared to come mainly from larger cities. His explanation was illuminating. Americans are a pretty patriotic bunch as a rule, but sport tends to localise loyalty.
Soccer, and its World Cup, is the exception. American football has no established World Cup – the NFL is enough. Baseball has the World Classic and basketball the Fiba World Cup and Olympics, but neither are the pinnacle of the sport – MLB and NBA are all you need. According to Brian, smalltown Americans just aren’t used to caring about global sporting events because they simply don’t need them.
He doesn’t mean that as criticism. In the major cities, support was fervent. Elsewhere, I found pockets of intense excitement, but typically when meeting those who call the US home now but have footballing ties to hereditary nations.The support grew as the US national team continued to impress – success is always the easiest driver of legacy. The marketing machine is rolling: Pulisic, Robinson, Adams and McKennie are on every other advert that doesn’t have David Beckham in it. It will also take time and in great swathes of the country it may never happen – it’s OK to admit that.
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There is a line in Alan Sillitoe’s story “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” about the silence of an early morning: “Everything’s dead, but good, because it’s dead before coming alive, not dead after coming alive.”That’s how I feel about those countless small towns I’ve visited where I’ve heard brief references to the World Cup: a group game that catches a half-interested eye, stickers for sale in a provincial store, a kid in a Netherlands shirt in the middle of halfway to nowhere that makes you double take.
These are not World Cup ghost towns because something died, but because it didn’t come alive yet. One day it might. Football usually finds a way.
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