Welcome to the World Cup!
It’s been a long, long, long anticipation but the first match is finally set to take place in Seattle (hint: not at Lumen Field but Seattle Stadium): Belgium vs. Egypt on Monday.
That Belgian player is so wonderful, that guy, you know, who kicks a lot of goals. And that fellow from Egypt! What a force!
For all you folks playing hooky, the game starts at noon and will be broadcast at viewing areas all over the region. The rest of us will have to contend with fear-of-missing-out and phone-scrolling.
This summer, every sports bar, tavern, winery, pub and gin mill will have soccer — oops, fútbol — on the screens so there’s plenty of opportunities to catch a few minutes of the action.
Of course, not all has gone smoothly. The American Hotel & Lodging Association published a report last month that determined Seattle and other host cities had limited World Cup impact, with nearly 80% of respondents reporting bookings below expectations and behind a typical summer.
Many hoteliers described the tournament as a “nonevent” in these cities. Yikes!
Mayor Katie Wilson promised to build 500 units of shelter before the World Cup but put up only 75 by the first game. And last week, the mayor reversed course and turned on security cameras in the Stadium District after determining there were “general but credible threats to safety and security during the games.”
The fact that Wilson would turn on the cameras was obvious from the moment she announced in March that she was going to turn them off. Nonetheless, extra security is a good thing. Should people feel apprehensive about attending the matches? No one can answer that. There is risk in anything.
Beyond all the hype, this is a particularly fraught time for international competition.
The world is on edge and in conflict. And here comes Iran, playing Egypt on June 26. This also happens to be the Pride Day Match in Seattle.
To these teams — to all the people who have traveled so many miles and worked so hard — Seattle can be expected to cheer and yell and enjoy every minute of the contest. Every pass, every steal, every goal. Because the art of sport is trying to find something in common amid so much discord.
If the Seattle World Cup is to be anything memorable, it will be that for 90 minutes or so in a match between Egypt and Iran — between every country in competition — this city showed what grace and sportsmanship is all about.
The World Cup may not come here again for many years. Let’s have some fun, even if we don’t know for whom the heck we’re rooting.
