Ken Early: Packed World Cup stadiums project American prosperity. But the reality is starker

On the third day of the World Cup I went with a colleague from another paper to an evening some Curaçao fans had organised in Houston. My friend was there to meet the legendary Curaçao fan influencer Captain Blueface; I was just tagging along.

As we watched Scotland against Haiti we got talking to a guy next to us who turned out to be from Turkey. He looked to be in his 20s and had moved to the United States a few years ago. He was looking forward to seeing Turkey play Australia later that night.

“This is the best bar in Houston,” he said, somewhat to my surprise. (It was The Flat on Commonwealth Street, if you are planning to be in Houston any time soon.)

He said he was a music producer, but right now he was actually working with Open AI, helping them train the AI how to be a music producer.

I said, “So aren’t you putting yourself out of a job?”

“Yes, but they pay really well, and if I don’t do it someone else will.”

A very American case of a guy making the best of a bad situation over which he accepts he has no control.

Today the United States celebrates its 250th birthday. Travelling around the republic of “government of the people, by the people, for the people”, you get the sense that hardly anybody feels in control of their lives, and that few expect things to improve.

The packed stadiums at the World Cup offer up to the world an image of American celebration and prosperity. The huge crowds show that there are millions of Americans who think nothing of dropping one or two or three thousand dollars on a ticket for a football match. It’s amusing to wander the concourses looking at the watches the fans are wearing. Even the players would be impressed.

Something you notice about these new American stadiums is how many different little levels they have – how many shelves and boxes and different tiered classes of seating.

These stadiums gave the Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel the name for his concept of “Skyboxification” – the pervasive phenomenon whereby the rich can access premium versions of everything, gradually eliminating the need to share spaces or experiences with the not-rich. (Not that there would be much chance of running into the latter at a 2026 World Cup game.)

The everyday example most people encounter is in the airports. Before a recent flight from Miami to Boston I saw that my airline’s app was offering me the chance to buy “priority boarding” for $44 (€38). Used to Ryanair, where priority boarding means the chance to get on the plane about three minutes before non-priority passengers, I figured I would keep my $44.

But it turns out that in the US “priority boarding” also entitles you to the (much faster) priority security check line. Frequent flyers can join a programme called “Clear Plus”, which for $219 a year allows you to use an even faster line.

When you see the regular security line winding and snaking through the terminal, you understand why people are paying to avoid it. You also see that not only is there no incentive to improve the basic experience – there is an active incentive to make it as grim as possible so that more and more people buy the premium version.

(That said, even Skyboxification has its limits. A video circulated the other day of a laughing Lionel Messi submitting to a thorough security search and pat-down on the airport tarmac. The person taking the video commented: “Just remember, next time you get annoyed at TSA – even Messi has to do it.” Is this the closest thing to actually-existing democracy in the US – equal powerlessness before the machinery of state? When you hear an official intone the dread word “Sir ...” you know you must prepare to comply.)

Downstream of Skyboxification, we have MadMaxification. In Houston, I watched Ted Cruz perform essentially a standup routine against transgenderism for his audience at the Texas GOP Convention. (Anti-trans rhetoric is one of the only things that still reliably unites an increasingly fractious Republican Party base. At one point there was a scuffle between delegates as the convention debated the wording of the party line on anti-Semitism.)

A few blocks south of where Cruz was cracking gags about “six genders”, mentally ill homeless people lay on otherwise deserted streets in front of boarded-up houses and vacant commercial lots.

The threat of lethal violence is never far away. As exhausted Scotland fans marched down Ocean Drive in Miami, hoarsely gasping out their Tartan Army chants, they were watched from the roofs of the pastel hotels by sniper teams in mirrored Oakleys.

It adds up to brutal disciplining of the population. In the US you have the freedom to make money or die.

The US men’s national soccer team coach Mauricio Pochettino likes to butter up his American audience by talking about their historic national achievements – “you arrive first to the moon”, and so on.

Right now the closest thing the US has to a great national project is “winning the AI war with China”. The government, the markets, they’re all-in on AI.

[ The World Cup has split people into three buckets. In one, the maniacsOpens in new window ]

What does this AI revolution promise? Either it’s real, in which case godlike powers will be conferred on a small group of tech trillionaires (at least until the superintelligent AI has other ideas), while the basis of the economy as we know it dissolves, leaving the rest of us to figure out where we fit in to a new world none of us asked for.

Or maybe the revolution turns out to be a fraud, in which case we can look forward to a market crash and an economic crisis worse than 2008. We might even get the second outcome, followed by the first.

Already harbingers of the revolution can be seen in the driverless Waymo taxis that are coming for everyone’s second job, in the DoorDash robots trundling down the streets, in the airport cameras that read your face like a boarding pass, in the inscrutable drones that buzz lazily around public spaces, in the dead robot language that stares back at you from every screen.

Again, it feels like hardly anyone actually wants any of this. But nobody gets a say. This is happening, you just have to deal with it like you deal with everything else.

With such a gap between the republic’s official rhetoric of freedom and democracy and the reality in which its people live, it can hardly be a surprise that so many Americans believe their government to be a scam.

That distrust and resentment drives the process by which – as private wealth balloons to historic proportions, with the US recently celebrating the birth of its first trillionaire – the public sphere has been systematically stripped of resources.

Many US downtowns are empty and abandoned. An institutional example can be seen in a recent New York Times Magazine investigation which concluded that Jeffrey Epstein ... well ... probably did kill himself.

[ The US at 250 is an edgy, doom-stalked place, not much in the mood to celebrateOpens in new window ]

As the piece lays out, the theory that Epstein was murdered “seemed to assume” that the prison where he was being detained, the Metropolitan Correctional Centre (MCC) “was a state-of-the-art fortress, its administration vigilant and all-seeing, where the death of an inmate as significant as Epstein would be inconceivable under normal circumstances”.

But the real MCC (which was closed in 2021) was a typically crumbling and understaffed US public institution, where exhausted guards, who often worked consecutive shifts and even multiple jobs, were sometimes to be seen sleeping at their posts wrapped up against the cold in orange prisoner sheets. Its reputation for strict regulation and high security was essentially fictional.

Freedom’s Land at 250: where people at the mercy of brutal imperatives far beyond their ability to control, restrain or even understand, are doing their best to survive, while on the near horizon glows the strange light of a transformation towards something even more alien and threatening ...

And what does any of this have to do with the World Cup? You’ll have to read part two on Monday to find out.

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