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There is a photograph doing the rounds on Mexican social media this week. A family gathered around a television in what looks like a modest living room in Sinaloa, the curtains drawn in the middle of the afternoon, a green-white-red flag draped over the sofa. They are celebrating. You can see it in their faces. But the curtains are drawn.
That detail keeps pulling me back. Because for all the euphoria that has accompanied Mexico’s performances at this World Cup 2026, for all the noise being made in New York and Los Angeles and Mexico City itself, there are enormous swathes of the country where the party is happening behind closed doors, if it is happening at all.
The Independent reported this week on villages and towns across Mexico where shootings are a near-daily occurrence, and where the cheers are mostly confined indoors. Residents interviewed for that piece described the surreal experience of wanting to celebrate their national team while simultaneously terrified of drawing attention to themselves in communities effectively controlled by organised crime. One woman from a town in Michoacán put it simply: “I like football, but we’re nervous.”
Five words. They contain more complexity about this tournament than most of the official promotional material FIFA has produced combined.
The World Cup New York Is Having
Contrast that image with what The Guardian described from Hudson River Park on Wednesday evening: Brazilians in canary yellow and “100% Jesus” headbands celebrating a 3-0 win over Scotland, Germans chanting in Times Square, Ecuadorians waving flags, the whole city apparently colonised by football in a way that felt, as the piece put it, genuinely intrinsic to life there. The Guardian’s correspondent called it his eighth World Cup and ranked the New York experience alongside Marseille, Seoul, Cape Town and Rio de Janeiro.
I believe him. New York at a World Cup is extraordinary precisely because it is New York: a city where every nationality already coexists, where the tournament does not so much arrive as simply surface. The Knicks’ victory parade apparently segued seamlessly into World Cup fever, which tells you something about the city’s current mood. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has leaned into it enthusiastically, using the tournament as a kind of soft-power moment for his administration, and the city has responded.
But New York is not Mexico. And the gap between those two experiences of the same tournament is something the official narrative around this 48-team World Cup has been conspicuously reluctant to address.
Co-Hosting a Country You Cannot Fully Celebrate In
Mexico is a co-host of this tournament. The Estadio Azteca hosted the opening match, a fact that generated enormous national pride and enormous international coverage. President Claudia Sheinbaum has spoken repeatedly about what the World Cup means for Mexico’s image, for its economy, for its sense of itself.
All of that is real. But it coexists with a security situation that, according to The Independent’s reporting, leaves entire communities unable to participate in the most basic act of football fandom: watching a game in public with other people. The cartels do not take a break for the World Cup. The checkpoints do not disappear. The fear does not lift because the Selección scored.
I grew up between Madrid and Mexico City. My mother’s family is from Jalisco. I know the particular texture of Mexican football passion, the way it runs through generations, the way El Tri can unite people who agree on almost nothing else. I also know that the Mexico being shown to the world in FIFA’s promotional films and the Mexico described by The Independent’s sources are both real, and that pretending otherwise does a disservice to the millions of Mexicans for whom this tournament is genuinely complicated.
According to figures cited in The Independent’s report, homicide rates in several Mexican states remain among the highest recorded in the country’s recent history, with some municipalities seeing near-daily incidents of cartel-related violence. Hosting a World Cup does not change that statistic. It just makes the contrast more visible.
Scotland, Brazil and the Cruelty of Goal Difference
Meanwhile, on the pitch, the tournament has been delivering its usual mixture of joy and heartbreak. Scotland’s exit, confirmed by Brazil’s comfortable 3-0 win, was described by The Guardian’s Football Daily with characteristic dark humour: a nation that arrived with European champions and Premier League winners in its squad, drank several American cities dry, and still found a way to go out on goal difference while technically remaining unbeaten in spirit if not in mathematics.
One reader’s letter in that same column captured it perfectly: Scotland have found new ways to extend the torture of their wonderful fans. In previous tournaments they went out unbeaten or in glorious defeat. Now, in the expanded 48-team format, they get an extra three-day wait in the Miami heat while watching other teams better them on goal difference. The cruelty is almost artistic.
There is something both funny and genuinely poignant about the Scottish World Cup experience, and it speaks to a broader truth about this tournament: the 48-team format means more teams arrive with genuine hope, and more teams leave having experienced something that felt almost like success before it wasn’t. Whether that is a feature or a flaw probably depends on whether you are Scottish.
Football as Universal Language, With Caveats
The podcast discussed in The Independent’s ACFC episode featuring Daniyal Khan makes the case, cheerfully and convincingly, that football and food are the universal languages, that the World Cup is the ultimate celebration of global culture, that New York is the centre of the universe for this kind of thing right now.
Khan is not wrong. The tournament does do something remarkable to cities and to people. The outdoor screenings, the shared strangers, the flags you cannot identify, the goals that make everyone in a bar turn to whoever is next to them regardless of whether they have ever spoken: all of that is real, and it matters, and it is worth celebrating.
But universal languages have dialects. And the dialect spoken in Michoacán right now, behind drawn curtains, is not the same as the one being spoken on the Hudson River waterfront. Both are authentic. Both deserve to be heard. The World Cup’s genius has always been its ability to hold contradictions: the beautiful and the brutal, the collective and the individual, the global spectacle and the intensely local experience.
What makes this edition unusual is that one of the co-host nations is living that contradiction more acutely than almost any World Cup host in recent memory. Mexico is simultaneously showcasing itself to the world and unable to guarantee that its own citizens can safely watch the games in public. That is not a criticism of the tournament, or of Mexico, or of Sheinbaum’s government specifically. It is simply the reality, and it deserves more than a footnote.
What Comes Next
The group stage continues, and Mexico’s campaign will draw enormous attention both inside and outside the country. The Selección have the quality to go deep, and if they do, the pressure on communities to celebrate publicly, to be seen to be part of the national moment, will only increase. For families in secure urban areas, that is uncomplicated joy. For families in towns where the wrong kind of visibility carries real risk, it is something more fraught.
FIFA will not address this. The broadcast partners will not address this. The official World Cup narrative is one of unity and celebration, and there is genuine unity and celebration to report. But journalism exists precisely to hold the full picture, including the parts that complicate the official story.
The woman from Michoacán who told The Independent “I like football, but we’re nervous” is as much a part of this World Cup as the Brazilians dancing on the Hudson. Her experience of the tournament is as valid as any other. The drawn curtains in her living room are as real as the giant screens in Times Square.
For more on the tournament’s broader context and what to expect in the knockout rounds, see our full World Cup 2026 guide and our breakdown of how the 48-team format works. For coverage of the European clubs whose players are featuring across the tournament, our La Liga section has been tracking the Spanish contingent throughout.
FAQ
Why are some Mexicans unable to celebrate the World Cup publicly?
In numerous towns and villages across Mexico, particularly in states with high cartel activity such as Sinaloa, Michoacán and Guerrero, residents face daily security risks that make public gatherings dangerous. Cartel presence in these communities means that drawing attention, even through celebration, can carry real personal risk.
How has Mexico’s co-hosting role affected the country’s security situation?
The World Cup has not materially altered the security situation in affected regions. While major cities hosting matches have seen increased federal security presence, rural and semi-urban areas with entrenched cartel activity remain largely unchanged. The contrast between the tournament’s public-facing celebrations and the reality in these communities has been stark.
Why did Scotland go out of the 2026 World Cup?
Scotland were eliminated from the group stage despite not losing all their matches, going out on goal difference after Brazil’s 3-0 win confirmed their exit. The expanded 48-team format extended their campaign but ultimately could not save them from the mathematics of the group standings.
What makes New York’s World Cup experience distinctive?
New York’s extraordinary demographic diversity means the World Cup feels like a natural extension of everyday city life rather than an imported event. With large communities from virtually every participating nation, the city becomes a kind of microcosm of the tournament itself, with public celebrations happening organically across neighbourhoods.
How does the 48-team World Cup format change the experience for smaller nations?
The expanded format gives more nations a genuine chance of progression and extends the tournament experience for fans. However, it also creates situations where teams can exit on goal difference despite competitive performances, and the longer group stage can prolong both hope and eventual disappointment in equal measure.
