Before the World Cup, a beautiful game for U.S. Ivorians | Will Bunch Newsletter

This should be a moment for sports fans to be insanely happy. The finals are underway in both the NHL and NBA, and the match-ups and the games so far have never been more compelling. Soccer’s World Cup — always the greatest show on Earth — starts Thursday (see below). Yet something seems off. If you wanted to attend Monday night’s Knicks-Spurs Game 3 at Madison Square Garden, it would have cost about $4,500 — not courtside, but in the last row. Equally insane and opaque ticket pricing has ruined the World Cup for many fans. Sports is supposed to be an escape from life’s problems, not a PowerPoint demonstration of them.

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The cosmic vibes were not great on Monday night. On the car radio, the news brought a new cycle of bombs dropping across the Middle East and yet another on-screen meltdown from an American president who is stumbling toward his 80th birthday in confused anger. Reports from the eve of the much-anticipated return of soccer’s World Cup to North America were less about the game and more about U.S. immigration outrages, including a Somali referee turned away at the airport.

Then at about 6:59 p.m., I walked through a long tunnel in suburban Chester and into an undulating orange sea of pure joy.

On the green soccer pitch of Subaru Park, the national team from Cote d’Ivoire lined up in rapt attention as “L’Abidjanaise,” the national anthem of the West African nation, blared from a loudspeaker. But in the stands, fans wearing their native country’s iconic orange jerseys could not sit still, laughing and waving their cell phones, confirming with videos that their heroes were actually here, on U.S. soil.

For a you-can’t-beat-it ticket price of zero dollars, in a year of maximum sports greed, members of an African diaspora scattered along the Eastern Seaboard had driven up or down I-95 for hours to watch Cote d’Ivoire — also known by the anglicized Ivory Coast — easily win its World Cup tune-up match against the young American prospects of the Philadelphia Union II, 2-0.

Fatim Toure, 27, in her Cote d’Ivoire jersey, and her 26-year-old sister Ferima, wearing her headwrap like many women fans at the stadium, had driven down from North Jersey to see the match and were now beaming as they watched the kickoff from the tunnel as the sun set on a crisp, perfect June evening.

Fatim said the sisters “were filled with nationalism and pride, so we’re excited to see how it goes.”

The cheerfulness of the Cote d’Ivoire faithful who turned the 18,500-seat stadium bright orange — drowning out scattered dots of Philadelphians in the Union blue of the regular home squad — was infectious. It was truly what the world needs now.

Soccer fans like me have been waiting since 1994 with patience, then anticipation, and finally something bordering on dread for the World Cup — Planet Earth’s ultimate sporting event — to finally return to U.S. grass. With the opener in Mexico City (75% of the matches are in the United States, with the rest in Canada and Mexico) slated for Thursday, news about the World Cup and soccer’s corrupt, authoritarian-loving governing body, FIFA, has been dominated by grim headlines.

Formerly hopeful fans turned disillusioned by astronomical and often inscrutable ticket prices. Local tourism officials dismayed at empty hotel rooms, as the expected international fans either balked at the cost, feared airport encounters with hostile U.S. immigration agents, or felt general revulsion at America’s autocratic turn under Donald Trump.

Indeed, the political rise of Trump — the stuff of cartoon satire not long after the first World Cup matches were played here 32 years ago — and his hostile border regime has sparked the greatest angst, and on the eve of the kickoff these fears are coming true.

Top soccer referee Omar Artan from the African nation of Somalia was turned away at Miami International Airport on Saturday, denied the pinnacle of his profession by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents for reasons still unknown. The star striker for the Swiss national squad was also initially denied entry (since reversed), while a star player from Iraq was interrogated for hours.

Players from Iran — the nation that Trump decided to bomb back in late February and is still engaged in a murky war — are going ahead with matches in Los Angeles and Seattle, but U.S. officials are forcing them to immediately return to their base camp over the Mexican border in Tijuana and not stay here overnight.

Cote d’Ivoire, an ethnic melting pot of 32 million people on Africa’s Atlantic coast where French is the official language, hasn’t been immune from the xenophobic U.S. turn on immigration. The nation is one of several under a restrictive travel ban by the Trump regime, and efforts to allow visas for some soccer fans have been plagued by confusion, including a $15,000 bond that was announced, then cancelled.

While Monday’s free friendly match was a gleeful coming-out party for a diaspora that’s rooted in East Coast urban neighborhoods such as Southwest Philadelphia, most acknowledged that fans back in their native Cote d’Ivoire, where soccer is the national obsession, could never afford the cost of coming here — or the risk.

“The ICE situation has killed the entire momentum of the World Cup,” a Liberian-born woman from Southwest Philly who said she came out to support her African neighbors told me. “America could have used this to boost the economy and generate income, but because of the whole ICE situation, a lot of people are afraid to come.”

No World Cup squad will be more deeply tied to Philadelphia than Cote d’Ivoire, which plays two of its three matches at the temporarily unbranded Lincoln Financial Field, starting against Ecuador on Sunday night. The team is training in Chester at the Union’s facilities, and staying in Delaware. But with the cheapest tickets on Stubhub for that Ecuador showdown starting at $836, few that I spoke with will be attending the matches that actually count for Cote d’Ivoire’s longshot dream of becoming the first African nation to win the World Cup.

“I wish, but I couldn’t get any tickets, unfortunately — it was too expensive," Audrey Yao, a 32-year-old Ivorian-American researcher from the University of North Carolina who was visiting Philly from Chapel Hill, told me. “So the opportunity to see the team today — that’s why I’m here.“

For many Ivorians, Monday’s free friendly was essentially their World Cup, and they partied accordingly — swaying and gyrating to piped-in African Zouglou music between breaks and celebrating wildly as keeper Alban Lafon stopped a penalty kick for Les Éléphants against rising young Union star Cavan Sullivan.

As a die-hard — emphasis on the word “die” — Union supporter for their 16-year tortured history, I’ve seen some great matches in Chester, but I’ve never had so much fun.

Monday night wasn’t just how the World Cup should have, could have been. It was very much the way that America is supposed to be — with people who were proud and happy to be here, with one foot still planted in their bright-orange African heritage as they lived and breathed that Philadelphia freedom, with no masked goon squads there to hassle them.

By the setting-sunlit banks of the Delaware River, there was no Immigration and Customs Enforcement, no need to raid the ATM, no bad news from outside the stadium walls. Just 90 minutes of The Beautiful Game.

Question: You recently wrote about data centers. Have there been any groups who have successfully gotten data center plans aborted? What do you think are the most effective ways for communities to fight back? — @silvermoonfafo.bsky.social via Bluesky

Answer: There are already signs that the backlash against these massive, noisy, energy-and-water-sucking data centers powering the AI revolution is becoming one of the most successful grassroots movements in American history. I wrote this spring about how everyday folks in rural Montour County, Pa. successfully blocked an Amazon-backed site that started with a lot of support from elected officials. How’d they do it? I wish there was some big secret, but basically it was: showing up. They organized petitions and got big crowds to speak at county commission and zoning board meetings, and the politicians had little choice but to listen. They have money but we have people. Never forget that.

Well, you won’t know it from today’s soccer-heavy newsletter, but not all readers share my deep passion for The Beautiful Game. Most questions that aren’t some variation on how much do you hate Trump or Fetterman or the media get low responses, but my World Cup question about a favorite team besides the U.S. set a record for reader non-participation. Andrew Ross is rooting for Portugal because he moved there from Philly three years ago (and we are all jealous). Weekly correspondent Mary Ann Petro isn’t rooting for anyone and hopes the Yanks “go down in flames.” I’m rooting for the U.S. and Cote d’Ivoire but you knew this.

📮 This week’s question: Few things are more outrageous these days than Donald Trump’s expensive desecration of Washington, starting with that $1-billion-or-whatever proposed ballroom at the White House. So what happens to the ballroom when the good guys retake power? Tear the whole thing down or blow it up on national television? Or repurpose it, as a community health center or midnight basketball court or something else? Please email me your answer and please put “Ballroom future” in the subject line.

Everything about the doomed bid of a B-list reality-TV star Spencer Pratt to become a Republican mayor in the ultra-liberal enclave of Los Angeles has been utterly predictable. That includes his campaign that was big on the kind of social-media stunts that an entertainment-oriented L.A media loved, and short on substantive ideas for a city with big problems that are both chronic (its incurable homelessness) and acute (violent immigration raids, the 2025 wildfires). It also includes the fact that Pratt wasn’t likely to get more than the roughly 27% that his highest-profile fan, Donald Trump, received in 2024 from America’s second-largest city.

And now the least surprising thing of all: The right-wing conspiracy theories that Pratt’s apparent defeat by two Democratic women of color — incumbent mayor Karen Bass and progressive upstart Nithya Raman — is their long-sought proof of massive voter fraud, after Pratt had started the lengthy vote counting in second place.

It’s not just the usual loudmouths on X. Trump is taking the lead role, again, in spreading election lies, telling Kristen Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press in their now-notorious Wisconsin interview that the California voting was rife with fraud and — when asked for any proof — blurted angrily, “No, they’re crooked...Just like you’re crooked.” When House Speaker Mike Johnson was asked about these lies on Capitol Hill, he only amplified them, stating that “everybody knows instinctively that something is wrong.” No proof, just “instincts.” Trump’s hand-picked and apparently incompetent top prosecutor for Southern California is now threatening an investigation.

Here’s the thing. California’s elections are among the most democratic and inclusive in America. There is extensive opportunity for the convenience of mail-in voting, and voters are allowed to send these ballots right up until Election Day. Local officials then have up to 30 days to meticulously count all the votes. That means a) it takes longer to declare a winner in California than anywhere else and b) it unexpectedly turns out there are significant differences between who votes by mail instead of in-person, and the shape of the race can change dramatically from Election Night to the end of the lengthy counting. To today’s GOP, any fair and measured vote-counting must be a conspiracy.

Why does it matter? Pratt loses and — according to some reports — moves out of L.A. End of story, right? Not exactly. We don’t know yet what ridiculous claims that California’s trainwreck federal prosecutor will make about supposed election fraud, but it’s almost guaranteed that the Trump regime is looking to make California the bogus argument for extreme measures to influence the general election in November.

Sending in troops? Seizing election machines? Invalidating results? It will all be on the table for Team MAGA in November, and the fact that the former bad boy from MTV’s The Hills couldn’t get elected mayor of one of the nation’s most diverse and liberal cities will be cited as a reason. Spencer Pratt has landed a starring role in the worst reality show ever.

Even though it was only three short years ago, memories of this week in early June back in 2023 are a little foggy — because the skies here in Philadelphia and around the Eastern Seaboard were filled with suffocating, thick smoky haze from wildfires up in Canada. Before digging up my column, I’d forgotten that a Phillies game at Citizens Bank Park was cancelled because of the horrendous air quality. I wrote: “In a perfect world, [President Joe] Biden would have donned an N-95 mask Wednesday and spoken in front of the orange blur of the Statue of Liberty to declare unconditional war on fossil fuels.” Read the rest: “America sleepwalks through a climate crisis. Will this smoke alarm wake us up?”

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