AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTYou have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.They used to call the World Cup, unequivocally, the planet’s biggest sporting event. But it is about to start, right here in North America, and no one much seems to care. Thousands of tickets remain unsold, and just weeks ago, others were being resold well below their official price. In cities around the United States, air traffic isn’t materializing, and hotels that had counted on millions of dollars in additional revenue are watching it trickle instead. FIFA has had to cancel block reservations of rooms, and there’s talk of a global boycott as a kind of protest against President Trump — his wars, his border policies, his imperial vulgarity. When the games actually begin, interest will surely surge. But at the moment it seems as if there is less anticipation than there was for this past weekend’s club soccer Champions League final between Arsenal and Paris Saint-Germain. And I actually do think this might be telling us something, beyond the world of sports, about the global landscape of politics and culture.In the States, the indifference might not be surprising, even though the event is being played mostly on U.S. soil. The U.S. team is more talented than in the past but hasn’t looked impressive for years. Soccer is still a growth sport rather than a dominant one in this country, and many Americans aren’t exactly feeling the flush of simplistic patriotism these days. On top of which, the tickets have been priced punishingly high.What is more striking to me is the muted interest of the rest of the world, which every four years for decades seemed almost to pause for a month to engage in a truly global but appealingly low-stakes performance of tribal nationalism. These days the World Cup no longer seems to tower over the rest of the sporting universe quite so much, with club soccer building a new global ubiquity over the past dozen years or so — if not quite displacing the World Cup at the top of the soccer pecking order, then at least taking a place right beside it.What makes this shift so striking is that it has happened alongside a rising tide of political nationalism around the world, which you might think would produce a great surge in soccer nationalism, too. Instead, the age of global populism has coincided with intense interest in the biggest club teams — for-hire rosters assembled largely from international talent by megacorporations boasting jersey sponsorships from foreign conglomerates. Those teams made up of local prodigies wearing their national colors and playing their hearts out for love of country? They still matter to fans, of course. But no one could even pretend to illustrate the age of global populism by talking about the intensity of popular feeling about national teams.Perhaps this is because, if international soccer once channeled nationalistic passions toward athletic competition, in an age of actual nationalism we may need less of an outlet for those feelings. Or it could be because, as Franklin Foer suggested might be the case a couple of decades ago in “How Soccer Explains the World,” the tribalism of club soccer was a natural check on feelings of nationalism — and itself a form of resistance to globalism. Or maybe it’s simply because club soccer runs for most of the year, instead of for one month every four, with games played weekly and sometimes more often. How much soccer can fans absorb? How many opportunities for cathexis do they need?”But this pattern nevertheless feels like a puzzle to me. This is perhaps in part because one of the descriptions of the new age of populism during its early days noted that it was powered by people who felt abandoned by their nations’ elites, who had through wealth and cosmopolitanism graduated into a kind of global business sphere — almost the way local soccer stars would graduate to bigger clubs and leave behind their roots.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT