The World Cup provides an opportunity for teams and fans from around the world (well, most of them) to discover America. Our spacious skies. Our amber waves of grain. Our purple mountain majesties. Our fruited plain. Our policies about tipping. Our Buc-ee’s.
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The world’s most watched athletic competition is a huge sports story. But it’s also a story about economics and culture, as millions of self-appointed foreign judges descend and evaluate every aspect of a country many of them only know through television, movies and music.
And it lands at a time when fewer folks are coming to the United States from abroad because our political climate is seen as unwelcoming. Even the Cup has struggled, with exorbitant prices and visa hurdles leading to lower-than-expected hotel bookings and slow ticket sales. Whether it succeeds financially is secondary to most sports fans, but that’s an important piece of this puzzle.
What the European Mind Comprehends
I’ve played host to enough European friends and family that I’m familiar with the sorts of things that typically surprise them. The geographic distances, the sheer amount of stuff we can buy, the sizes of the cars (cheaper gas = bigger vehicles), the fact that we tip our servers and the friendliness of Americans (mostly outside our largest cities).
So it’s with a sense of familiarity that I follow a breakout social-media star named “Freddy,” whose Germany-based account features a German flag and tags him as a fan of Danish club FC Midtjylland and Saudi team Al-Nassr – superstar Cristiano Ronaldo’s current home.
It seems Freddy landed in New York, flew down to Atlanta and from there has been taking his followers on an epic road trip featuring not just natural sights but also slices of Americana like Waffle House, Wendy’s, Chili’s and, yes, Buc-ee’s. Lots of Buc-ee’s.
They’ve also seen some “Stranger Things” filming locations and marveled at an eagle flying around a stadium. Freddy has also expressed charming bafflement when confronted by a state-of-the-art soda machine.
It’s not just the wholesomeness of the posts. It’s the sense of childlike wonder and discovery. (As far as I can tell, the only thing he has not liked was Atlanta mass transit. “One person next to us taking off his shirt and declaring war on Donald Trump while another person is moonwalking across the platform.”)
There have been other engaging social-media moments. There’s the Swedish fan who “screamed” when she saw a typical yellow American school bus because it was like “seeing something from movies in real life.”
(It’s also not just Europeans. Japanese soccer journalist Tatsuya Takeuchi has been posting his appreciation of places like Nashville.)
My favorite World Cup-themed social-media post might be the video of the American guy in Lawrence, Kansas, saying “thank you” to Algeria’s national team for picking “our town” as their home base.
Asked what he knows about Algeria, he replies: “We just know Algeria is on the Mediterranean Sea, then the south part is in the Sahara Desert. And we know that it gained its independence from France … so we don’t know too much, but we want to welcome you here!” (Honestly, that’s not bad!)
Tips About Tipping
Freddy has been getting a lot of American advice, including restaurant guidance apparently from U.S. Men’s National Team defender Chris Richards.
Which gets me to tipping. I cannot speak for all of Europe, but in my native France, service is almost always included in the price printed on the menu. You can add a little if you want to reward truly exceptional service.
And that poses a World Cup problem for American restaurant owners, whose servers often receive a pauper’s minimum wage and depend on tips for most of their income.
One solution? Add mandatory service charges for the duration of the World Cup. The idea has been popping up in news coverage for more than a month – perhaps to brace the local clientele for higher prices.
“It would be a real bummer for it to be super busy and for our tipped employees to not benefit from that in any way,” one Philly restaurant owner told The Washington Post. “We just want to make sure all of our tipped employees are seeing the same benefit as the business, hopefully.”
No word yet on whether we’ll offer soda-machine tutorials.
The Week in Cartoons June 8-12
