Barreling along Route 3 in New Jersey at 70 miles per hour on the opening Saturday of the World Cup, a smudge of red whisked by the corner of my left eye. It took a moment for my brain to process what I’d just seen: a pair of pedestrians wearing Moroccan soccer jerseys, walking where no human should ever be, on the narrow unprotected strip that runs along the highway’s concrete median wall. The pair was headed east, toward the Meadowlands and the stadium where their team was about to play.

I don’t know how these two brave and possibly foolhardy people ended up in the middle of eight lanes of New Jersey traffic, but they must have somehow made it to the match alive, since I didn’t read about them in the New York Post. It would later occur to me that you could see them as a metaphor for this World Cup itself. Dangers whiz all around the tournament, threatening to ruin the fun, and yet it keeps happily marching forward.

During the anxious run-up to the tournament’s kickoff, it was popular to question whether FIFA and its president, Gianni Infantino, might accomplish the unthinkable: putting on a World Cup that sucks. Infantino has been roundly maligned, particularly in the sport’s European heartland, for fawning over the event’s primary host, President Donald Trump, while pumping up its prices and profits and allegedly debasing all that is holy about the sport. The co-hosts of the Soccernomics podcast summed up the case against FIFA in a column earlier this month in the Economist, which was provocatively headlined, “This May Just Be The Last World Cup.”

Here are just some of the unprecedented aspects of “Trump’s World Cup”: it is the first time that a host nation is engaged in an illegal war with a participating nation; the first time that citizens of four participating countries are subject to a travel ban issued by a host nation; and the first time a host nation’s leader has openly threatened to annex one co-host and torn up trade agreements with the other. And although the World Cup stands out as a festival of international travel, American policies on entry to the country, as well as the targeting of immigrants within — not to mention nauseatingly high ticket prices — have given many supporters pause.

Here are just some of the unprecedented aspects of “Trump’s World Cup”: it is the first time that a host nation is engaged in an illegal war with a participating nation; the first time that citizens of four participating countries are subject to a travel ban issued by a host nation; and the first time a host nation’s leader has openly threatened to annex one co-host and torn up trade agreements with the other. And although the World Cup stands out as a festival of international travel, American policies on entry to the country, as well as the targeting of immigrants within — not to mention nauseatingly high ticket prices — have given many supporters pause.

Outside of the realm of geopolitics, there was a parallel set of predictions of doom involving the complexities of staging the largest World Cup ever in terms of participating teams (48) and matches (104) across 16 cities in three different countries. Would FIFA’s transportation plan, which required many host-city governments to spend huge sums on mass transit, actually be able to get fans to the stadiums? Would its “dynamic” ticket-pricing strategy and its embrace of online resale markets work, or would fans rebel against the extortionate cost, resulting in matches played in empty stadiums? Would we Americans live up to the low expectations of the rest of the world, both in the competition — the national team’s recent performance had been uneven at best — and as a national audience, displaying our stereotypical indifference to the game everyone else calls football? Would the group stage be any good, considering the size of the field, which included many teams that looked weak on paper?

Before the games began, I wrote a feature for this magazine about Infantino and the decade-long process of bringing this World Cup here and examined everything that was threatening to go wrong for this edition of the tournament. Now that we are over a quarter of the way through the 39 days of play, it’s time to take a hydration break (boooo!) and look at the doomsayers’ record. Here’s one man’s scorecard.

Prediction: FIFA will ruin it

It seems silly in retrospect, but when the tournament began, there was reason to wonder if fans would even show up to watch. Prices were running well over $1,000 a seat for many matches. On the opening night, swaths of the stadium in Guadalajara appeared to be vacant for the late match between South Korea and the Czech Republic. An economist went mildly viral with a social-media post in which he claimed to have discovered a “ticketing shell game,” suggesting FIFA was holding “large, contiguous blocks of seats” that it was about to dump on the resale market. FIFA’s ticketing procedures were so convoluted that the attorneys general for New York and New Jersey issued it a subpoena before the tournament as they investigated whether it was using false scarcity to drive up prices. Who knows if anyone will ever get to the bottom of what was really going on. (FIFA has declined to comment on the ticketing investigation.) But when I attended the first match at the venue that FIFA insists on calling “New York New Jersey Stadium,” between Morocco and the perennial contenders........

© Daily Intelligencer