By a man who queued behind three Scotsmen at a Boston bar and watched them order the last of it.
So. The World Cup. Held, for reasons that will be argued about by men in pubs for the next forty years, in the United States of America — a country that, until roughly six weeks ago, half of Europe had convinced itself was a sort of heavily armed theme park run by people who think a salad is something you put gravy on.
And then everyone turned up. And a funny thing happened. They fell in love with the place.
It started, as these things always do, with a supermarket. Somebody wandered into a Costco looking for a bottle of water and came out three hours later having bought a kayak, forty pounds of rotisserie chicken, and a television the size of a tennis court, and they have not been the same since. Walmart did similar damage to the collective European nervous system. Grown adults — solicitors, dentists, men who own tweed — stood in the aisles filming trolleys the size of golf carts like they’d stumbled across the Ark of the Covenant. The Norwegians, magnificently, saw all this coming and packed their own food. Sensible people, the Norwegians. Turns out you can take a Viking out of the fjord, but you cannot get him to trust a country that sells cheese in a can.
Then there was the patriotism, which the Europeans had been told, repeatedly, by their own newspapers, was something to be embarrassed about. Instead they found Texans on horseback, actual horses, carrying flags the size of bedsheets down the street before kickoff, and rather than recoiling in horror, everyone just thought — well, that’s brilliant, actually. Why don’t we do that. Why do we stand around in the rain looking sheepish while somebody’s flag hangs limply off a pole, when we could be doing this.
Which led, inevitably, to an outbreak of public contrition of a sort not seen since the Reformation. TikTok and YouTube filled up with earnest young Europeans looking down the barrel of a phone camera to apologise to America — genuinely, tearfully — for years of being told that the entire country was one long queue for an AR-15 and that nobody there had ever smiled without an agenda. Well. We accept your apology, world. Grovel a bit more if it makes you feel better.
Elsewhere, Japan did what Japan always does, which is quietly demonstrate that the rest of us are animals. They won, they lost, it didn’t matter — after every single match, out came the bin bags, and the Japanese supporters cleared their own section of the stadium like they were tidying up after a mildly disappointing dinner party. Meanwhile the rest of us can’t be trusted not to leave a kebab wrapper in a rented car.
And Team USA — say what you like about the football, which people did, loudly and often — knew how to ignite a stadium. Seventy thousand people bellowing “Take Me Home, Country Roads” is not a small thing. It should not work. It absolutely worked.
The Scots, meanwhile, arrived in Boston and, through what can only be described as a logistical masterpiece, drank the city dry. Not a pub. Not a neighbourhood. The city. Bar owners were seen weeping, not from loss, but from something closer to awe. Nobody has ever been more furious and more delighted at the same time as the man who runs the brewery that had to shut early because Scotland turned up.
Norway, for a while there, were the story of the tournament. Haaland went through defenders the way the Scots went through lager, and for about three glorious weeks it felt entirely possible that a Viking invasion of the trophy itself was on the cards, which would have been magnificent, because nobody wants to see them fail, they’re just too much fun to root against. And then England turned up and stopped them stone dead, which, frankly, is typical. If only you lot had shown that kind of organisation the first time you turned up on a longship, we’d have saved ourselves a great deal of bother in the ninth century.
Still. Here we are. America hosted the world, the world showed up expecting a punchline, and left looking faintly ashamed of itself and enormously well fed. Not bad for six weeks’ work.
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A Kings 
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