Sportsball, Collective Effervescence and Systemic...everything!

And if you must know, I'm supporting Keyne Yamal's team 😍⚽️

Jul 15, 2026

Regular readers know I do not care about sportsball and am not a fan of any team, more a fan of vibes/ enemy of your history as a colonizer. And yet I keep writing some version of this essay, usually around the Olympics, because these mega-events expose the same fascinating contradiction. With the Men’s World Cup and the Knicks taking over my city and the world, I’ve been thinking about it again.

These events offer a glimpse of the world as it could be: interconnected, curious, collective, animated by something other than business strategies, politics and borders. (Even if politics, business strategies and borders are never very far away.)

The Knicks did this on a city scale. For a few delirious weeks this spring, strangers nodded and smiled at each other. People lingered outside after games. Entire blocks erupted at once. A city famous for cool indifference bordering on hostility was the definition of Collective effervescence.

The Men’s World Cup has done something similar, all over the world, but especially here in the United States, where, because of our immigration history, we have diaspora communities from every country in the Cup - and diaspora who has beef with every country in the Cup!

The world feels bigger AND more accessible. People discover places they’d never thought about before and suddenly care deeply about what happens. (Looking at you, Cape Verde) For all of FIFA’s many, many flaws (see below), the tournament still manages to open up worlds and bring joy! And we need it!

And of course, it’s all political, always has been.

The Knicks belong to New York. They also belong to a billionaire owner. Madison Square Garden’s mythology exists with power run wild and decades of tax exemptions and a friendship with Trump, who EVERYONE agrees is why NY lost that one game that time he came, and also why the US got knocked out the Cup.

The Men’s World Cup sells a story of global unity and joy while carrying FIFA’s decades-long baggage of corruption, misogyny, unequal power, and the ways some nations are welcomed (and given preferential treatment by the FIFA refs and VAR🤷🏽‍♀️👀) while others are treated as problems. This year’s tournament is also unfolding inside the United States, where the Trump administration has used immigration and visa policy in ways that disproportionately burden people from countries it deems adversaries or that are majority Muslim, Brown, or Black. They follow familiar racial, imperial and geopolitical fault lines. Don’t even get me started on the unique racism that this sport brings out across all hemispheres. And also don’t get me started on, how many players are under investigation for sexual assault and rape.

In that spirit, below are a few recommendations, articles, and, yes, memes to keep the conversation and the joy going.

Thanks for reading Sujata Said...! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Movie: Bend it Like Beckham (Streaming): Don’t care about Beckham, def don’t care about England, but this is an iconic and great movie, and Parminder Nagra should have had the career that Keira Knightly does.
Movie: Next Goal Wins (Streaming) and Documentary: Next Goal Wins: Movie about the American Samoan soccer team directed by Taika Waititi based on the documentary.
Documentary: Copa 71 (Streaming): FIFA was so threatened by the first-ever women’s World Cup, held without its sanction at Mexico City’s Azteca Stadium in 1971, that it shamed the tournament, buried its history, and erased it from the sport’s story. Even some of today’s biggest women’s soccer stars had never heard of it. Neither had I. This documentary was equal parts uplifting and infuriating. The interviews with the players in that tournament were heartbreaking, joyful, and moving. The final, played in September 1971, still holds the record for the highest attendance ever at a women’s sporting event.
Art: No Ice in the Cup: Trump used visa and immigration and border patrol to harass and turn back players, fans, referees and more for the Men’s World Cup, and as all the joy of gathering has happened, ICE is still working at full pace in its cruel mission with the increased pace of detentions up across the country AND in the past two weeks multiple murders in Texas and Maine. Before the Cup began artists came together to prepare visitors and locals alike and call for No ICE in the Cup. You can download selected, amazing art here.
Houston @Kill.Joy.Land
Podcast:
- Our Copa (Limited Series): “Former US soccer player Merritt Mathias and journalists Musa Okwonga (a favorite of Sujata Said) and Julio Ricardo Varela … trace the history of how global power has tried to influence the game….” (The Guardian, 6/8/2026)
- After the Whistle: This is the third season and focused on the Men’s World Cup and has expert Soccer sportscaster Rebecca Lowe and Ted Lasso’s Brendan Hunt chatting about all the things.
- Burn it All Down: I recommended this during the Winter Olympics and they have just a few episodes on the Men’s World Cup and more for their paid subscribersKeyne Yamal's. They do a great job of the on and off the field issues from a feminist point of view.

**a world cup reading list for the politically-inclined fan**

Soccer Romance Recommendations: I have read many of these! But missing is a new great one, Futbalista by Jonny Garza Villa.
@gettinglostinthepages

Newsletters:

World Cup Recap No. 4: the last four and anyone but [REDACTED] by Hmm That’s Interesting: A favorite newsletter for books and culture (she also used to do those fake PR videos of celebrities in crisis), she’s an actual soccer fan, and I have loved her takes, like “My friend is nursing a debilitating crush on Jude Bellingham and sends me approximately fifteen Jude-related memes a day, which has in turn convinced the algorithm that I am nursing a debilitating crush on Jude Bellingham who, in fairness to him, I do like more than Harry Kane…”
Joey D’urso: D’urso is a journalist who writes about how football explains global politics, money and power and I’ve been thinking about a lot of his pieces the last few weeks.
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