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World Cup 2026: No Scotland, no party
23/06/2026
John Williams, University Fellow in Sociology, continues his look at the 2026 World Cup.
After all the pre-tournament grief about FIFA, ticket prices, Trump, and the sheer unwieldly size of the competition (48 countries and many thousands of air miles to travel) what has been most striking so far about the 2026 FIFA World Cup finals, co-hosted by America, Canada and Mexico? It has indisputably been visiting fans, but perhaps especially the response of local people – the hosts – to them.
Anybody scrolling Instagram or other sites over the past week would have come across the many hundreds of posts from ordinary people – often women – talking about the joys of having Europeans, South Americans and people from all parts of the world visiting their country and cities. This has been an especially strong view in the USA, where so many posts have stressed, quite unapologetically, their feelings of aggressive isolation and hopelessness around recent events in the world involving America. It is as if the World Cup has allowed liberal Americans to rediscover the sheer joy of diversity and mixing with people from other cultures. Connecting and partying with ‘the other’ had been so difficult recently in the USA, especially perhaps since Covid. Last week’s events have seemingly lifted everybody’s spirits there – even among those who were cynical, a little afraid, or who knew little or nothing about football before the competition began.
For once, FIFA’s favourite tag line about football’s capacity to ‘unite the world’ seems to have had some credible force. So, what exactly has been going on here? Well, we need a little context to start with. Firstly, the NY Knicks basketball franchise won the NBA title for the first time in 53 years, producing mass spontaneous celebrations in Manhatton. But it also provoked some expected violence and looting – and plenty of overly-enthusiastic policing. A contrast was drawn between this and scenes later in New York where thousands of visiting Norwegian football fans – women and men alike, many cloaked in red – sat down together in Time Square to send themselves up by reinventing, in peace, the choreographed rowing antics of their Viking forebears. Or, those Norwegians who gathered together in very large numbers to enthusiastically support and spoof some local outdoor yoga sessions.
In Monterrey in Mexico the locals were astonished, not just by the ease at which Japan swept aside their opponents Tunisia in a 4-0 romp, but by the fact that Japanese fans cleaned up their own stadium rubbish after the game. This expression of gomi hiroi – taking on responsibility for maintaining public spaces – might be expected in a country somewhat limited spatially and where tidiness is taught in schools. But why does it work so well in sport? In fact, it has long been part of the Japanese fan tradition in international football. It helps define them. Meanwhile, In Houston over 10,000 overwhelmingly orange-clad Dutch fans danced together, along with supporters drawn from all over the world, in a joyful procession to the stadium to see their side defeat Sweden 5-1.
But it has been in Providence and Boston where the World Cup love-in between the locals and their visitors has been especially pronounced. The Scots have long-invested their national pride in not being mistaken for the sometimes violent and disrespectful English on their football travels, so their aim is always to self-police and to connect well with local people. (And at these prices nobody wants to end up in a cell.) But this trip so far has been off the scale. At the World Cup finals for the first time in 38 years, up to a reported 50,000 bagpipe-playing, friendly, hard drinking Scotland fans have descended on ‘cold’ Boston on a mission and with a vengeance. Some bars in this Irish-American city reported sold four times more beer than they did for St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. Beer ran out in a number of locations across the city. Local people caught buying bottles of water in local hyper-markets were good-naturedly booed by Scotland fans.
Thousands of Scots also effectively took over a Red Sox baseball fixture at the famous Fenway Park, where they sang and drank the night away at a sports event little known for its collective fan involvement. ‘What a night this is!’ exclaimed local radio commentators in delight. Statues across the city have been performatively topped with traffic cones. Governor Maura Healey even humorously signed an executive order ‘legalising’ Haggis in Massachusetts All this hokum has been cloaked in a deep respect for local people and their traditions; there has been little disorder or violence. Senior local police officers said that they had been invited to get their own musical instruments out to join the party. Some did. A reported $10,000 was also raised and donated by the visitors for paediatric cancer research, and bagpipe playing events were organised by the Scots to entertain local homeless children. The kids, their carers and pretty much everyone else in Boston, have been charged with joining in chants of ‘No Scotland, no Party’ the unofficial anthem for traveling Scottish fans.
The terms most used online by Bostonians to describe the Scots are ‘kind’ and ‘fun.’ ‘They have taught us how to have fun again’ is a common refrain. Such has been their friendly, festive impact, that few people in the city seemed to want Scotland and its supporters to leave. But leave they will, on their way to Miami to face the great Brazilians. Events off the field, in bars and squares there, may be at least as interesting as this game is for matching northern European football culture with that supplied by monied travellers from South America. FIFA will be hoping that Scotland and their fans can stay involved deep into the finals.
The lessons so far? That, notwithstanding the power grabs and the greed of many of those involved in managing the game internationally, and despite the politics that interweave football these days with unseemly matters around the globe, the game’s supporters can still find meaning and pleasure in following their country abroad, meeting with others, and, through football, celebrating themselves without harming or demeaning anybody else’s national connections. In fact, perhaps rather than building an ugly UFC cage in violent celebration of his 80th birthday and 250 years of American independence, maybe Donald Trump could better have invested in a five-a-side football arena? After all, the USA is still a key player in this elite tournament designed to celebrate the world’s greatest – its most universal – sport. And in Boston, of course, it is clear that local people will never forget those wonderful Scots.