I Am Not a Soccer Person and This Was the Best Month LA Has Had in Years

Let me get my credentials out of the way, since I don't have any.

My dad is from Albania, so soccer was always on in our house the way weather is always happening. He put me in AYSO and I was terrible, historically bad, running toward the ball in a hopeful cluster with eleven other children and contributing nothing. I grew up around the game without ever taking to it, the way you can grow up in a house with a piano and never learn to play.

Then this month happened.

I was driving down La Brea when an entire bar erupted. Not the people in it, the building. I heard it through a closed car window at forty miles an hour. I don't know what happened in that game, I don't know who was playing, I only know that a structure on La Brea Avenue made a sound and I thought about it for the rest of the day.

So we pulled up the Venice Beach webcam, the live one, just to look, and the boardwalk was packed with tourists, except not the usual ones. These were in kits from everywhere, standing on our slightly grimy beautiful boardwalk looking like they'd found something. So we got in the car. And then we did it again the next weekend, and the one after that. Three weekends running we drove to Venice for no reason except to be near it, walking the boardwalk and stopping at every bar, not to go in, just to catch a score through a doorway and keep moving. That was the outing. Two grown adults collecting the scores of games we had no stake in, like we were birdwatching.

One night we got to talking with a man selling vintage clothes on the boardwalk, who mentioned he used to run a store on La Brea. He needed to go get his car and couldn't leave the booth unattended, so my husband and I said we'd watch it. For twenty minutes we stood behind a stranger's table on Venice Beach guarding vintage jackets and sunglasses while he disappeared into the parking situation. And we sold a pair. That was the whole month, right there. Everybody a little more open, a little more trusting, a little more willing to join whatever was happening in front of them. We came to Venice to watch soccer fans and ended up running a vintage booth. The spirit of the game, apparently, includes retail.

One evening we left Venice with two minutes on the clock, drove all the way home to Hollywood, and still walked in before it ended, because two minutes in soccer is somehow twenty minutes. I have questions about this sport and I don't want a single one of them answered.

A friend from high school texted out of nowhere and asked us to come watch a game, and we went. We went! Who am I? And then I'd come home and scroll TikTok, on purpose, hunting for clips of Europeans discovering America. A Spaniard having a genuine spiritual moment in a Waffle House. A Japanese guy who looked like he was about to eat a piece of BBQ bigger than him. An English woman tasting ranch dressing for the first time and going quiet, like something inside her had been rearranged. Thank you, ranch. You did diplomatic work this summer the State Department could not.

Here's where I've landed. The US is not in the final. We went out almost two weeks ago along with almost everybody else, and I watched us win anyway. I watched a Colombian family ask a stranger for directions and end up invited to his cookout. I watched the boardwalk fill with people who came for a tournament and stayed to marvel at the size of everything, the portions, the friendliness, the free refills that made them lose their minds. My dad had to escape a work camp and cross two countries to find out that America is loud and enormous and will overfeed you and mean it. This month a couple million people just flew in and found it out for free. That's the trophy. Nobody's handing it to us on a stage, but that's the one that counts.

And it ends Sunday.

That's the part I don't think has hit people yet, so let me be the one to say it. This does not come back next summer, or the summer after that. The bars go back to being bars, the boardwalk goes back to regular tourists, the city stops sorting itself out by flag for no reason anybody needs to explain. We get one more afternoon of the whole planet holding its breath at the same time, and then it closes for years.

So make it count. Whatever version of Sunday you land in, be all the way in it.

If you stumble into it

This is the best one, and it's the one I'd pick. Don't plan a thing. Walk outside before noon on Sunday and follow the noise, which will not be hard to find. Pick a neighborhood that isn't yours, walk until you hear a building breathing, and stand at the edge of the crowd like you belong there. You do. Nobody's checking credentials, and the person next to you does not care that you can't name a single player, they care that you showed up and you're facing the same way they are.

Learn one thing before you go, which is that this sport is four hours of almost. That's the whole secret. The room will detonate over a ball that did not go in, and if you flinch you'll feel like a tourist, and if you go with it you'll feel like you've been coming there your whole life. Somebody is going to scream over a miss and then hug you about it. Let them.

If you're a guest

Bring something and stop talking about it. Not a dish that needs the oven, not a thing you assemble on arrival. Your host has exactly one job on Sunday, which is to disappear into the game, and you walking in with a casserole that needs forty minutes at 350 makes you a problem in a jersey.

Bring ice. I mean it. Nobody in recorded history has purchased enough ice, and you will be the most beloved person in the room for eleven dollars. Or bring a tray of empanadas, good bread and olives, the beer, something that arrives already finished. And come before kickoff, not at kickoff, because at kickoff your host is finally sitting down. Don't be the doorbell.

If you're throwing it

Your goal is not to serve the most impressive meal anybody's ever seen. Your goal is to be sitting down when something happens.

Make one thing that's genuinely good and buy the rest. Make the empanadas, the carne asada, or the baked pasta, the thing people will remember, and buy the tortillas, the salad, the cookies, and once again more ice than you think any household could possibly require. Then put the food out in waves, easy things first and hot food when there's a lull, and hold one tray back, because somebody's cousin will appear halfway through with a person you've never met and you will look like a genius.

Make a real drink for the people who aren't drinking, too. Not one lonely can rolling around the bottom of the cooler, but a batch of agua fresca or lemonade in an actual dispenser. Nobody at your party should feel like an afterthought.

And do everything you can before kickoff. You do not want to spend the final multiplying portions, hunting for a missing ingredient, or standing over a stove while everybody in the next room suddenly loses their mind.

The point

Sunday at noon pacific, it's Lionel Messi at 39 against Lamine Yamal at 19, Argentina against Spain for the whole thing. People across the planet are going to make the same sound at the same second. That does not happen anymore. Almost nothing does.

So get the food out early, hold a tray back, buy more ice than you think you need, and go stand somewhere with people who care about something. You don't want to be in the kitchen for this one. Trust me. I drove to Venice three weekends in a row just to stand near strangers holding their breath, and I wasn't even rooting for anybody.

One last thing. I wanted to know what people hosting their own watch parties were actually worried about, so I ran a small focus group through SmartFocus.ai, and the answer wasn't inspiration. Nobody said "I don't know what to make." They had math problems, timing problems, headcount problems, worried about running short, making too much, or getting stuck in the kitchen during the final. That's what shaped the advice up above, and it's a decent example of what SmartFocus.ai is for: when you've got an idea or a message or a decision you want to pressure-test, you can run your own AI focus group and hear how different audiences react before you put it out into the world.

And if you got invited somewhere and still have no clue what to bring (or you're hosting and need last minute help), ask BakeBot.ai. Tell it how many people, what kind of party, what you've already got at home, and whether you actually plan to cook, and it'll suggest something that fits, scale the quantities, handle substitutions, and turn the whole thing into a shopping list. Both are free. Then put your phone down, get out of the kitchen, and go be part of it.