Does waning interest in the World Cup signal a thinning of genuine nationalist sentiment?

David Wallace-Wells, Why Does No One Care About the World Cup This Year? NYTimes, June 3, 2026.

They used to call the World Cup, unequivocally, the planet’s biggest sporting event. But it is about to start, right here in North America, and no one much seems to care. Thousands of tickets remain unsold, and just weeks ago, others were being resold well below their official price. [...] And I actually do think this might be telling us something, beyond the world of sports, about the global landscape of politics and culture.

In the States, the indifference might not be surprising, even though the event is being played mostly on U.S. soil. The U.S. team is more talented than in the past but hasn’t looked impressive for years. Soccer is still a growth sport rather than a dominant one in this country, and many Americans aren’t exactly feeling the flush of simplistic patriotism these days. On top of which, the tickets have been priced punishingly high.

What is more striking to me is the muted interest of the rest of the world, which every four years for decades seemed almost to pause for a month to engage in a truly global but appealingly low-stakes performance of tribal nationalism. [...]

What makes this shift so striking is that it has happened alongside a rising tide of political nationalism around the world, which you might think would produce a great surge in soccer nationalism, too. Instead, the age of global populism has coincided with intense interest in the biggest club teams — for-hire rosters assembled largely from international talent by megacorporations boasting jersey sponsorships from foreign conglomerates. [...] But no one could even pretend to illustrate the age of global populism by talking about the intensity of popular feeling about national teams.

That’s from the beginning of the article. After this, that, and the other, Wallace-Wells concludes:

Namely, that what we identify as nationalism in global affairs might be better described as a form of parochialism, with populists making particular claims not about the nation per se so much as the ways it should be reformed — presumably toward some reactionary ideal, its contours often more local than genuinely national. In this reading, globalization hasn’t just generated a backlash among those who resent deindustrialization, capital flight and the stateless lives of the world’s billionaires. It has also made the nation itself seem like a somewhat untrustworthy unit of political and social organization to many people on the right. For them, what might once have served as a source of patriotism and pride now produces feelings of resentment and regret. Not that liberals aren’t queasy about nationalism these days, either. For all of us, rooting for Arsenal or P.S.G. might now be more appealing precisely because it’s essentially meaningless.