20 Hours Inside America’s World Cup Fever Dream
Two hundred fifty years and two days into the American experiment, a 55-year-old bespectacled bald man from Liverpool enters a sterile hotel conference room in Atlanta, shaking his head. “It’s all gone to hell, hasn’t it?” he mutters. In 14 hours, the United States men’s soccer team is scheduled to play Belgium in the World Cup Round of 16, a match that ought to be a celebration of the U.S.’s triumphant, and somewhat unexpected, run in the world’s biggest sporting event. But Folarin Balogun, Team USA’s star striker, was given a red card during the previous match with Bosnia-Herzegovina—he stepped on another player’s ankle—that made him ineligible to play. This led President Trump to petition FIFA to review the penalty, which, of course, triggered allegations of collusion and corruption: International lawyers were summoned to draft appeals, and a joyous sporting event started to look more like a legal drama. For Roger Bennett, the scandal threatened to overshadow every value he has been working 16 years to promote. “This is not why we watch,” he told …
