World Cup Fans Get a Crash Course in America They Never Expected

The 2026 FIFA World Cup was supposed to be about football. For a lot of visiting fans, it’s turned into something else: their first real look at the United States.

Posts from European visitors have been flooding X since the tournament opened.

Three hours of driving through Texas and the map barely moves. A single Costco registers, for some Europeans, as roughly the size of a village. A Walmart — groceries, tires, firearms, all under one roof — has left more than a few visitors quietly reconsidering what a “store” is supposed to be.

Buc-ee’s, a Texas convenience chain, runs some locations with 120 fuel pumps and retail floors large enough to get lost in.

One French visitor wrote that he was greeted by more strangers on his first day in the U.S. than he could remember in a lifetime back home. Others have noted the flags — American flags, state flags, company flags — outside homes and businesses in numbers that would raise eyebrows almost anywhere else.

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Enormous portions. Free refills. Cuisines from every corner of the world within a few blocks of each other. Texas barbecue has stopped more than a few visitors mid-sentence.

The stadiums tell a different story. A Chinese social media user following the tournament pushed back on the idea that American infrastructure is in decline. Americans, the post argued, are pure pragmatists: if something generates money, they build it fast and build it well. If it doesn’t, they leave it alone.

Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium holds 75,000 people and has air conditioning. That’s not even one of the largest venues in the country — America has multiple stadiums that seat over 100,000, most of them college football grounds, and they sell out regularly.

Hosting the tournament also required almost no new construction. Brazil and South Africa nearly bankrupted themselves on World Cup infrastructure. Russia and Qatar built subway lines, hotels, and stadiums from scratch. The U.S. basically re-turfed the fields and started collecting tickets.

Public infrastructure is another matter. Subway cars that sway and creak, neighborhood roads that go unrepaired for years, an airport renovation in New York that cost five times what it should have and delivered something roughly comparable to a mid-sized regional terminal. When there’s no obvious return on investment, the urgency disappears.