Published July 21, 2026
America’s hosting of the World Cup was clearly good for FIFA and the cause of promoting football (soccer) to Americans. The fact that hundreds of thousands of European fans also come home with a wider personal view of America may also prove to be good over the long term for conservative populists, too.
Europeans who travelled to watch their home countries’ squads had to go to parts of America few often visit. Games in Dallas, Houston, Atlanta and Kansas City brought fans to some of America’s largest and growing metropolitan areas, places with no traditional downtowns and utterly dependent upon automobiles. Even stadia in places like Boston, Philadelphia and New York are either in suburban locations like the cities mentioned above or are surrounded by massive parking lots to accommodate tens of thousands of cars.
Fans often were awed by the sheer size of these places. Every one of the 11 stadia which hosted matches could seat 64,000 or more fans. Only 24 stadia in all of Europe could accommodate that many, and many of those are not often used for club football. The American stadiums were also on average newer and had many more food and souvenir concession stands than their European cousins.
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Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a globally recognized expert on American elections and policy as well as global populism.
