The book is partially a personal history, but I also hope it will be used as a permission slip for the entire nation to cut work for a month. Let We Are the World (Cup) be encouragement for us to do what we do better than any other nation in the world: Savor the circus. After you read, I hope you are compelled to slink out of your office cubicles en masse, day drink, watch, revel, and inhale the World Cup in its full glory.
--Roger Bennett, author of We Are the World (Cup): A Personal History of the World's Greatest Sporting Event (Dey Street Books)
I had to come back to the FIFA World Cup, which has finally--after a month of great matches and one embarrassing political interference foul by a certain unnamed host nation's president--reached its quarterfinals stage. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about indie booksellers celebrating the global tournament, and they've continued to have fun:
Aaron's Books, Lititz, Pa., noticed that the U.S. team uniforms bore a striking similarity to a certain book character ("Is it just us, or is finding Waldo front of mind for the whole country these days?"); while Magic City Books, Tulsa, Okla., weighed in on a headline-making red card ("Talk about timely. Those folks @penguinclassics are on it!"); and Book Larder went into full rooting mode ("Good luck to @usmnt today! Plus in our home city of Seattle no less!").
Then came, as the song goes, the day the music died. After the U.S. team's humbling defeat to Belgium, I recalled the opening line in Peter Handke's The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick: "When Joseph Bloch, a construction worker who had once been a well-known soccer goalie, reported for work that morning, he was told that he was fired."
The U.S. team was fired. In the wake of the final whistle, Roger Bennett (see quotation above) hosted a post-mortem Night Cup edition of his Men in Blazers podcast, featuring frequent guest and bestselling author John Green, along with women's soccer legend Becky Sauerbrunn, who played on U.S. teams that won Olympic gold and two FIFA Women's World Cups. Their conversation in the shadow of defeat had an almost healing vibe that turned bookish near the end, including this exchange:
Bennett: "John Green, take us home you beautiful human being. Deliver some lesson I can hold onto, a tiny handhold as I'm dangling from the cliff."
Green: "Well, I would say two things. First we have a Women's World Cup coming up, which is exciting. Always exciting. The second thing I would say is we were reminded today that hope isn’t always rewarded, but hope is always justified. Hope is always the correct response to consciousness. And I'm reminded as I always am in tough times of that great Emily Dickinson poem that 'hope is the thing with feathers/ that perches in the soul/ and sings the tune - without the words/ and never stops at all.' And we do have reason to be hopeful. We still have football to enjoy whether or not the U.S. is part of that football and we still get to watch the World Cup together and we still get to be together and ultimately that's the point you know. To love and lose together is the point. And today we lost together, but at least we were together."
Bennett then mentioned that Sauerbrunn had something to say to Green:
Sauerbrunn: "I've got a beef with you, man. Your books have just haunted me through the years."
Green: "Oh that's so nice."
S: "I know. It's such a compliment, I'm sure, for an author to hear, but, yeah, you just live rent free in my mind. There are some lines that...."
G: "That's amazing!"
S: "Yeah, yeah, well done."
G: "You live rent free in my mind because I've watched you play for so many years. This is like if God came down from heaven and was, like, you know, what I think about sometimes is your books."
S: "I don’t even know how to respond to that."
G: "Yeah, no, just say thank you. But that's so great. I'm sorry that they're sad. The new one comes out on September 22 [Hollywood Ending, Dutton Books]. It's a little sad as well."
S: "Yeah, I'm sure I'll read it."
Now the World Cup circus moves on without the U.S. squad. I'll keep watching the matches, however, because (don't tell anybody) I'm an almost lifelong England fan, both by heritage (my last name's a clue) and personal experience. I played soccer in high school and college with an English/American teammate. An international flair was added during summer league play on teams that included Italian and Polish immigrant marble workers in our area.
Just before the 2026 World Cup began, I learned that my high school coach had died at the age of 83. When we were all young, he launched a club team at my school. We would become an official state league team in the fall of 1966, which also happened to be the year that two other significant moments occurred. England won its only World Cup that summer, and on Labor Day our coach invited a few of us to join him on a road trip to Yankee Stadium to watch the Brazilian legend Pelé and his Santos FC club beat Inter Milan of Italy 4-1 in something called the NY Champions Cup.
So, soccer is kinda in my blood, but I'll let Guardian cartoonist Tom Gauld take the last shot with his brilliant creation of the FIFA Prize for Literature. Congratulations, Haruki Murakami.