One of my earliest memories as a soccer fan is the Budweiser frame. In the early ‘90s, when you’d need to turn to Univision to watch the matches that weren’t on English-language TV, the network would compensate for the lack of ad breaks by briefly shrinking the picture and wrapping it with a thick red border featuring the Budweiser wordmark. The beer giant’s slogan, “Auténtico como tú,” remains a part of my limited Spanish knowledge some 35 years later.
It feels like a good time to expand that vocabulary.
Telemundo holds the Spanish-language U.S. rights to the 2026 World Cup, with all matches streaming on Peacock. Am I going to tell you that the NBC/Universal/Comcast conglomerate is an awesome corporate citizen committed to freedom and democracy? Of course not. But is it better than Fox? Hell, yes.
Like a lot of people, I’m conflicted about this entire tournament, but I know I’m going to consume a decent amount of it. For all of the ugliness in pro sports, the games we watch have continued to provide fun, release, and distraction amid the nation’s self-inflicted unraveling. They’re one of the last sources of widespread civic pride, a reminder of the joys of human accomplishment, and a quaint throwback to a time when the concept of shared facts and reality still existed. (Seriously, consider if Mitch Johnson or Gregg Popovich had called Adam Silver last night and told him to just “find two points, which is one more than we have, because we won the game,” and then imagine what the consequences of that might have been.)
It’s normal and it’s healthy to love sports (within moderation). The problem is that so many of these games are aired or streamed by some of the worst people in the country. Yes, basically all of them have paid the piper, bent the knee, and/or licked the boot. But they’re not all the same. Jeff Bezos has gutted and defanged one of the nation’s most iconic newspapers, and every Prime stream (and Amazon purchase) fuels his empire. At Paramount, the Ellisons are destroying CBS News and will soon do the same to CNN — all while they rake in the ad revenue for the NFL, March Madness, and the Masters. They’re following the Putin playbook, taking a hatchet to as much of the free, independent press as possible, just so a strongman can do whatever he likes.
And then we have Fox. Established 30 years ago to be the conservative bulwark to the (supposed) left-wing media machine, Fox News Channel is now authoritarian state media, serving as the farm team for Donald Trump’s second term, destroying innocent lives and reputations, constantly fueling bigotry and hatred, and leaving much of the country misinformed and enraged. You can try to separate the news division from the sports or entertainment sides, but again, the money from “Bob’s Burgers” and the World Series doesn’t look any different than the money from “Hannity” — and it all funnels to the Murdochs.
We don’t have an alternative option to watch the World Series, or the NFC championship, or Ohio State-Michigan. We do have one for the World Cup. I’ll take the lesser evil, el mal menor.
■ If this World Cup is a logistical nightmare, much of the blame will likely lie at the feet of whichever geniuses decided to sharply curtail parking access at the stadiums while also making it ridiculously difficult and expensive not to drive.
In Foxboro, organizers slashed the number of stadium-controlled parking spaces by 75%, leaving only 5,000 such spots for a venue with a listed capacity of over 64,000 for this tournament.
Organizers cited safety concerns for the expanded secure perimeter, and it’s true that over the past 30 years, major sporting events have discouraged on-site parking. As I recall, at the 2002 Olympics, you could drive directly to just one venue; all the rest required parking in a satellite lot, then taking a shuttle bus. But the shuttles were free if you had a ticket. Four years later, at the World Cup in Germany, the cost of your match ticket included local transportation to and from the stadium. Even more visitor-friendly arrangements were in place at the last two World Cups.
The difference between those events and this World Cup is sort of like the difference between New York and Boston roadways. The $175 cost for the parking spots that are available, exorbitant prices for commuter rail tickets (all of which require you to go into downtown Boston in order to go out to the suburbs), and the strangely decentralized “express bus” system are, in keeping with the theme of this tournament, a massive middle finger to visitors — especially foreign ones who aren’t as independently wealthy as one might assume.
It didn’t have to be like this. It wasn’t like this last time. In 1994, you could drive to the old Foxboro Stadium and pay $15-20 to park without a prepaid reservation. And upon the match’s conclusion, you’d wait in the parking lot for a good two hours before even making it onto Route 1.
Yes, it broke your spirit, but it didn’t break the bank. It was an authentic New England experience.
■ As a postscript to yesterday’s piece on how the politicization of U.S. soccer has shifted, here’s a quote from a recent essay that caught my eye:
“The game is as beautiful as ever. And the players are still extraordinary. But somewhere between Zurich’s backrooms and a $10,000 ticket to watch the final from the crow’s nest, the people’s game stopped belonging to the people.”
It’s got a bit of a Eduardo Galeano vibe, a sentiment you might hear from Dave Zirin, the executive board at St. Pauli, or the old hippie at the pub who loves to quote Bill Shankly.
The author’s name is Spencer Neale. The piece appeared in The American Conservative.
Go figure.