The World Cup Is Better Than the Olympics

Especially now that the US doesn't suck

Malik Tillman, Gio Reyna, Antonee Robinson, and Sebastian Berhalter celebrate Tillman’s goal against Bosnia and Herzegovina. Photo by Icon Sportswire via Getty.

I love the Olympics. There’s always some weird Calvinball nonsense sport that I get into for a week — I’ll become a handball junkie and get really invested in the Slovenian team. The Olympics lets you sample from the smorgasbord of not-widely-played global sports, and that’s true even as the Olympic Committee obtusely refuses to add that Kazakh sport where guys on horses try to throw a goat carcass down a well.

But I like the World Cup even more than the Olympics. And that’s for one simple reason: Soccer is the global game.¹ The modern Olympics was created to be a global event that would bring people together, but the Olympics has only kind of done that — the shared experience is limited by the fact that most sports have only regional interest. The World Cup is the true global sporting event because every part of the world can field a competitive soccer team.

Few Olympics events are truly global. Most events consist of: 1) Top competitors from a handful of predictable countries, 2) Some almost-top competitors who were born in the predictable countries but had a great aunt twice removed from Vanuatu, so they compete under that flag, and 3) One guy from Bhutan who is less of an “athlete” and more of a “guy who scammed a free vacation”. The only-some-of-the-world-cares dynamic is even more extreme at the winter Olympics, where the non-frozen portion of the world — which is most of it — watches a dozen hardy bear-people play a sport that’s essentially Masochism On Skis. Except that many people don’t watch, because learning the rules of Nordic Combined might be the only thing more grueling than the sport itself.

In contrast, most of the world is mainlining soccer at all times. That includes China, where the Premiere League is huge even though the national team somehow can’t slay regional giants like Oman and The Maldives. South Asia, I’ll grant you, isn’t super into soccer, but they’re also not super into the Olympics — South Asia’s sports culture is dominated by cricket, which is surely the most heinous legacy of British colonialism. But in most of the world, soccer is the sport — it’s ten months of club soccer plus two months of international soccer, which adds up to a full year of probably-not-healthy mania. Even in the US, where resistance to soccer was once the linchpin of our cultural identity, soccer-phobia is mostly gone and the sport is now one of the ones.

The whole world really is watching the World Cup. 1.5 billion people watched the 2022 final, and this year’s tournament is drawing even bigger numbers. During the Olympics, people watch different events at different times — you’ll show up to work wanting to talk about something that happened in rhythmic gymnastics, but the conversation around the water cooler is about fencing. The only shared experience is the opening ceremony, which isn’t even a sport, but rather what a choreographer sees when he drops acid and goes on the “It’s a Small World” ride at Disneyland.

The World Cup does a better job of delivering the uniting event that the Olympics aspires to be. Oh sure: It does it via one of the most corrupt organizations known to man, and there’s always controversy, and if you dig in the wrong corners of social media, you’ll encounter enough racism to shock your pubes straight. But that’s because the whole world cares. There’s only one global game, and the best global sporting event is the one that has it.

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1. I know that the Olympics has soccer, but on the men’s side, it’s a U-23 tournament. The World Cup is by far the more prestigious soccer title.