There is no denying the unifying power of sport.
After a week that felt heavier than most — the kind measured in deadlines, hard conversations, and the quiet exhaustion that gathers when you move from one responsibility to the next without stopping — I spent Saturday doing what millions of people around the world were doing.
Watching games.
What surprised me wasn’t how much I enjoyed them. It was how much I needed them.
In the span of a few hours I went from watching my forever team, to watching my homeland, to watching a city I love finally get its moment.
Brazil.
Haiti.
New York.
Three teams. Three stories. Three different ways of belonging.
The day began with Brazil.
My forever team.
The 1–1 draw with Morocco left me wanting more — more precision, more invention, more of the brilliance Brazil has taught generations of us to expect. Morocco struck first; Vinícius answered. But World Cups are marathons disguised as sprints, and the opening match is rarely the whole story.
Hope tends to begin there. Not in certainty. In possibility.
Then came Haiti.
For the first time since 1974, Haiti was playing in a World Cup.
Fifty-two years.
Scotland won 1–0, but the score felt almost secondary. There were moments when the equalizer seemed right there — one final pass, one decisive touch, one opening that never quite arrived. And still, for those of us who carry Haiti with us wherever we go, watching the team walk out onto that stage was emotional in a way that is hard to explain.
The anthem. The flags. The understanding that generations had waited decades for this.
For ninety minutes, Haitians scattered across continents stood in the same place, holding the same hope.
Sometimes presence is its own victory.
Then there were the Knicks.
Here the words fail me.
Anyone who has spent real time in New York understands that certain teams get woven into the identity of the city itself. They absorb decades of loyalty and heartbreak and stubborn belief. A championship is never only a championship.
It belongs to the people who stayed. The fans who kept showing up. The generations who passed allegiance down like a family heirloom.
It belongs to the city.
What struck me most was how easily I moved between all three.
A Brazilian. A Haitian. A New Yorker.
Different teams, different histories, different outcomes — and underneath them, the same feeling.
Hope.
That is what sport delivers better than almost anything else. The possibility that this year is different. The belief that decades of waiting might finally be repaid. The sense that something larger than yourself can still gather people into one place.
For as long as there have been rulers, there have been games — funded and celebrated and leveraged to hold people together in uncertain times. Sometimes to inspire. Sometimes to distract.
The formula is ancient.
Give people a team. Give them a tournament. Give them a championship to chase.
For a while, the divisions soften.
But today the spell feels less complete.
The cost of being there — a World Cup seat, a Finals ticket — keeps climbing past the very people who give those moments their meaning. We notice now. We celebrate anyway. The old tricks are no longer fooling anyone.
And nowhere does the spell feel thinner than here, in the country hosting it.
There is the obvious discomfort of the moment — a tournament built on the idea of welcome, arriving in a version of America that does not feel especially welcoming. You feel it before you can name it.
But there is something simpler underneath, and it is almost stranger.
America does not care.
From the big cities to the Midwestern suburbs, you can move through an ordinary day and find no sign that the largest sporting event on earth is unfolding on this soil. No hum in the streets. No flags in the windows. Here they call it soccer, and they file it under childhood — a thing you do on Saturday mornings as a kid and quietly outgrow before you finish middle school. The rest of the world organizes its grief and its joy around this game. Here it is an after-school activity.
So the world has come to a country throwing a party it cannot feel. The stadiums fill — but with us. The diaspora. The visitors. The people who carried these flags across oceans to get here. Step outside the gates and the energy thins to nothing, as though the tournament were happening in another country entirely.
Maybe it is.
And still — I have no doubt the national teams will give us an unforgettable championship. The world’s best will arrive at the peak of their powers and hand us a tournament we’ll be replaying for years.
It is only a shame they’ll do it as unwanted guests.
Haiti is on the list of countries barred from the very nation hosting the tournament. A referee landed in Miami with a valid visa and was put on a plane back. Fans who bought their tickets months ago couldn’t get the papers to use them. Even Haiti’s jersey — the one carrying the battle that won its freedom — was judged too political by the tournament’s own organizers and pulled before a ball was kicked.
The world arrived, and the door was only half open. Asked to perform their brilliance in a country that never quite wanted them here.
Because sport still reveals something true about us. It shows what we value together: community, belonging, excellence, perseverance, the simple wish to gather around something larger than ourselves.
But the unity is temporary.
Eventually the final whistle blows. The trophy is lifted. The parade ends. And we return to whatever was waiting outside the gates.
Still, the feeling lingers — not because we have been distracted from the world, but because we have been reminded of what is missing from it.
For a few hours, millions of people cheer as though they share the same dreams, the same hopes, the same future. Then the game ends, and we meet the harder truth: what unites us so effortlessly inside the stadium stays just out of reach beyond it.
Perhaps that is the real power of sport.
Not that it helps us forget who we are.
But that it reminds us, however briefly, who we could be.
Isabelle Alerte is the writer behind In Written Word, an editorial site on place, taste, and lived experience. She lives in Miami.
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