Jeans with a Blazer

Why We're ACTUALLY Obsessed with the World Cup (From a Non-Sports Fan)

• Melody Beuz • Season 2 • Episode 13

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0:00 | 15:31

Our obsession with the World Cup is not just about soccer.

I'm breaking down why the FIFA World Cup 2026 feels bigger than sports. From the psychology of sports fandom to social identity theory, national pride, underdog stories, and the need for shared connection, we’re exploring why the World Cup matters on a deeper cultural level.

This is a World Cup explained for the non-sports fans, the casual viewers, the “wait, why is everyone screaming?” observers, and anyone curious about why sports create community. I'm talking about why people love sports, why the World Cup is so popular, how soccer and football become global rituals, and why cheering for a team can feel like belonging to something bigger than yourself.

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Music: “Sugar Groove” by INPLUSMUSIC — Licensed via PremiumBeat (License #6849247, Order #5428551) for Jeans With a Blazer podcast. Used with permission.

SPEAKER_00

Every few years, the whole world loses its mind over soccer. FIFA. And as a non-sports person, I find this both fascinating and mildly alarming because one minute, everyone is living their normal lives, answering emails, buying oat milk, pretending to understand their insurance policies and 401ks. Then suddenly, some guy who has no business being that handsome or athletic scores a goal and an entire country starts sobbing in the streets. Now the US for some reason doesn't like soccer like the rest of the world. We tend to prefer an almond-shaped ball as opposed to a ball-shaped ball. So I think there's a collective confusion as to why this is such a big deal. And while part of that answer has to do with understanding what makes sports so intriguing, which I'll get into. But the FIFA World Cup taps into something much bigger than that. The biggest soccer tournament in the world, yes. But it's one of the last great collective rituals we have, and we so desperately need it right now. Now, as a whole, you may be asking, so what makes you so qualified to speak on this topic? Valid question, please step into my office. Now, am I looking at the World Cup from the perspective of someone who does not spend her weekends analyzing sports? Yes. However, I do spend a concerning amount of time analyzing why people care about things. Oh, and from the ages of five to eight years old, I played on a soccer team. And I got a trophy every year. Yes, I am a millennial, and yes, everyone on the team got a trophy, regardless of performance. Not the point. I was a forward Anagalie, in case you were wondering, your girl had range. Additionally, I have a minor in psychology from the esteemed Florida State University. I am also a foreigner. France is my home country, I was born there, and French is my first language. So because I did not become an American citizen until the ripe age of 14, I feel that adds to the breadth of my qualifications to discuss this topic at length. Alright, so my dear fellow Americans, if you are clueless about why we are obsessed about the World Cup, I got you on this. Do you trust me? Good. So the World Cup is doing something powerful on a pretty cool global scale. The World Cup gives people something profound to step into country, heritage, family history, city, neighborhood, immigrant background, childhood memories, or simply the taint that everyone around me is cheering for. This brings me to a very core concept that sports fandom can be directly tied to, and that is social identity. Social identity is the idea that people can partly understand themselves through the group that they belong to. Basically, we don't form our identities in isolation. We are constantly attaching meaning to the groups that we're a part of, like our families or our cultures or our hometowns. And sports are one of the clearest examples of this because the group identity is so visible. Think about it, colors and jerseys and rituals like chants. There is a clear us and them, but in a way that is usually much less violent than, you know, war. It is the psychology of we, not my team won, it's we won. We did it. Even though they personally did not touch the ball, run on the field, or contribute anything besides emotional support and maybe nachos. And they're not just being dramatic either. Psychologically, the team has become part of the identity. The win reflects the group, and because they feel connected to the group, it also reflects on them. It becomes the thing that I as an individual have attached a part of myself to that was seen and validated and shared with others who want to feel the same thing I'm feeling right now. That is why a victory can feel euphoric. And this also explains why losses can feel weirdly personal too. Because if the team represents a part of you, then the loss can feel like a threat to your identity. Again, if even you were safe at home on the couch. For those uninterested in sports, this might seem a little unhinged, but this irrational behavior doesn't come from nowhere. It stems from our very core need to belong to a group that gets us to something that's bigger than ourselves. Human beings are wired for group connection. Now, for most of human history, belonging to a group wasn't just emotionally comforting. It was survival. You needed cooperation and shared identity and ways to protect each other. And sports fandom gives us a modern, much lower risk version of that kind of tribe. You get all of the belonging and the emotion and the symbols and that collective joy and heartbreak without having to go hunt a mammoth or defend your village from a saber-toothed tiger, which I personally appreciate because I don't think I have the hand-to-hand combat skills to take down a saber-toothed tiger despite my cat-leg reflexes. But this is where I think the World Cup becomes especially interesting because it's not just giving us a team to root for, it's giving us a socially acceptable reason to feel connected to other people. Ho, game changer. And this matters now more than ever because, well, I want to address a very obvious elephant in the room, and I confess it has nothing to do with soccer. The world is feeling a bit dicey and unsettling at the moment. America doesn't have it a fraction as bad as other countries going through way worse things. So I'm gonna try to articulate this as respectfully as possible, because experiences are relative and I can only compare to what I know. In America, we're feeling a bit divided in a number of ways amongst our own people. Do you like matcha or not? Do you like ice or not? We don't like ice. Certain people in charge of things. We're very worried about ourselves and what's happening in this country, which is honestly on brand, and that doesn't even scratch the surface of what's happening elsewhere. We are yearning for some kind of common ground and connection with one another so badly that we recently celebrated a civil union between a pop star and a football player, like it was the royal wedding. No shade, love is grand. But I do think that is a bit of a cry for help as a nation. Also, also, I'd like to point out that the USA just celebrated its 250th birthday on July 4th, thus making America a cancer. And as a girlie who is both in touch with her spiritual side and a fellow cancer, I can validate that one of cancer's core needs is to feel safe. We are not feeling that right now. We're kind of desperate for things that make us feel collectively happy and give us a reason to gather and cheer and believe that for once everyone in the room is not arguing about the collapse of civilization, but just screaming at the same television, peacefully. And this is where the World Cup does something powerful. It gives us something modern life rarely does anymore, a shared emotional room. Think about it, right? Like a bar erupts and a city square goes silent during these penalties and family group chat is exploding. And it creates a safe emotional outlet where people can experience what's called collective effervescence, which is the feeling of emotional electricity that happens when people experience something together, like celebrations, rituals, concerts. These all become places where people are allowed to feel big things out loud. Yes, you can cry, yes, you can scream, yes, you can hug a stranger, you can experience intense joy and rage and devastation and betrayal, and nobody calls it a breakdown. Because if we need a reason for connection, the World Cup provides one in such an easy, immediate way. You do not need to know someone's life story, you do not need to agree on everything, you don't even have to speak the same language, you just need to be watching the same game. It reminds me of when you go to like a work event where you don't know anyone and you feel awkward or anxious or bored or all three of those things, and then suddenly you meet someone who is from your hometown or went to your university, and now you instantly have this small alliance with this person who was a stranger just a few moments ago. The World Cup does that on a massive scale. Now there's another piece to this sense of belonging in which it does something extremely special by giving countries their own stage to shine. And I mean stage in the symbolic sense, a place where a country gets to be seen, heard, represented, celebrated, and emotionally projected onto by millions of people. For a few weeks, countries aren't just these dots on a map. They become characters in a global story. They arrive with their colors and flags and songs and history. And especially with the World Cup taking place across the US, Mexico, and Canada, there's something fascinating about all of these countries arriving on this shared stage. These stadiums become more than sports venues, they're temporary theaters for national pride, and for a few weeks, a nation becomes a beloved character with its style and history and heartbreaks, and that all gets compressed into 90 minutes. And that is the part of what makes the World Cup feel so emotionally charged. You're seeing these countries being seen and celebrated in real time, and for people living away from where they're born, the World Cup can become a way to reconnect with home, or even just the roots from a distance. Now, you could argue that the Olympics do something similar, and yeah, they do. Sure, the Olympics bring nations together, but the Olympics are different because the attention is spread out across dozens of sports. Some people are following gymnastics, some people are following swimming, some people are somehow deeply invested in pole vaulting without any prior experience to pole vaulting. And what is curling? Still don't know. So uncultured. Anyway, I respect that journey. The Olympics do create a global celebration of excellence through many stories, and that's beautiful. But it also means the emotional attention is distributed. You can get excited, but you can also get lost in your own little silo. The World Cup is different. The World Cup creates a global obsession around one story. That makes it easier to follow casually, even if you know almost nothing about it. You just have to know, are we still alive in this story? And that is a very simple, very powerful emotional structure. And I think we need that right now more than we realize because so much of modern life just does not feel simple. It's kind of fragmented and noisy and like everyone is living inside their own algorithm. We rarely are in one big room together, even metaphorically. So when something like the World Cup happens, it cuts through that noise in a very ancient human way. And I think part of the reason that feels so good is because most of life does not give us that kind of clarity. Most of the time it's complicated and the problems we're dealing with are layered and exhausting and morally confusing and politically charged, very emotionally draining. And yes, I acknowledge that as third world problems. But for 90 minutes, the story is simple. You root for one side in one colored jersey or another side in another colored jersey. And if that experience is tied with pride for your country, then heck yes! It gives people somewhere to put their hope and their need to feel connected to other human beings without having to explain their entire worldview first. And sometimes that's all it takes to feel a little less alone. Now, the other thing the World Cup does incredibly well is make the stakes feel absurdly high. And that is because the World Cup is built for drama. A Shakespearean experience, if you will. Anyway, it combines some very powerful things, scarcity and uncertainty, with an international meaning. So, okay, first, scarcity. The World Cup only happens every four years, which means it does not feel like regular sports programming that happens every week or season. There's not always another chance with the same team, the same generation, or the same player, the same moment. That alone changes the emotional temperature. Because when something is rare, we assign more meaning to it and naturally pay closer attention. We feel like we're witnessing something that might not happen again and in the World Cup, that's often true. And I know that sounds dramatic, but it is because it is dramatic. It takes the emotional intensity of sports and compresses it into this relatively small window of time where every match feels like it could be part of history. Then there is the uncertainty. There's actually a concept in sports psychology and sports economics called uncertainty of outcome, which basically means the part of what keeps people watching is not knowing what is going to happen. Now, if the result is too predictable, the emotional investment goes down. We need the possibility of surprise and the sense that anything could happen. And that turns the World Cup into, yet again, a global story. Now we love stories when we don't know how they end. The World Cup gives us that in its most purest form. Heroes in the players we root for, villains in the players on the other team, pressure, heartbreak, redemption, and a clock that eventually will stop. It doesn't matter if you're a fan of sports. You don't need to understand strategic tactics or formations. But what everyone does understand is belonging, tradition, public expression of emotion, and the fear of missing out on a cultural event. So with the World Cup, the point is not, do you like soccer? It's more about do you want to be part of the same thing everyone is feeling? And finally, one of my favorite things that makes the World Cup so tantalizing is that it is one of the greatest stages in the world for underdog psychology. Because yes, there are the teams that everyone expects to win. And then there are the underdogs, right? So we got the teams that we're not supposed to get this far. The countries that people underestimated. Ooh, and the plot thickens. And people love that. Even people who don't watch sports love that. And that's because an underdog story is one of the easiest emotional stories to understand. Everyone knows what it's like to feel underestimated. That is why underdogs are so powerful. They make the world feel less fixed. They suggest that hierarchy can be interrupted, and that history doesn't always get the final say, and that is intoxicating. See, when an underdog rises on a global stage, it gives people this little hint of emotional rebellion. It lets us believe, even briefly, that the world can still surprise us. They represent every single person who had to work twice as hard to be taken half as seriously. And we as a population want so badly to believe in it because the rise of the underdog can symbolize change on the horizon. And at this point, some people are like, I don't care if it's good or bad change. I just need to feel something different. Gas is currently outside of my tax bracket, you guys. We're all grasping at straws here. And the World Cup is built for that feeling because one match can change everything and maybe give us a glimmer of hope that we've been aching for for a really long time. So I truly don't know what's going on in the World Cup, but I think it's great. I love how excited people get for it. So cheers to the World Cup, whatever team you're rooting for. Till next time. Friends, thanks so much for hanging out. See you soon. That's a wrap on this episode of Jeans with the Blazer. If today's conversation gave you something to think about, a mindset shift, or just the push you needed, do me a favor. Subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode. Leave a review wherever you enjoy your podcast. It helps more people find it and it keeps these conversations going. And I love hearing from you. Follow at Jeans with the Blazer and tag me with your biggest takeaways, your latest wins, or just tell me what topics you want to hear about next. See you next time.

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Melody Beuz

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