The Stadium Food at the World Cup is Dogshit

For this FREE Sick Burns Sunday post, I recount some highlights and lowlights from my impromptu trip to Los Angeles with my 78 year old father where we attended the USA-Turkiye game

Short piece today. I got home yesterday afternoon from a whirlwind two day trip across the country with my dad to attend the USA-Turkiye match in Los Angeles and good lord I am tired.

I will have more to say about the experience in the coming days, MS Now has commissioned me to write a little about the experience and some of the larger national themes that emerged in my experience going to the game. But I wanted to give you a few bits and bobs that I am not planning to cover in the piece.

It was the experience of a lifetime, despite the insane financial investment. We did everything we could to mitigate costs on the trip: we flew in same day to save a night's stay in a hotel. We got a hotel in walking distance to the stadium (more on this later), and I used all of the airline miles I had accumulated in my years travelling the country as a reporter to save a few hundred dollars on a flight.

Some highlights of the experience:

-The US team bus motorcade passed us during our walk to the stadium and that was really cool. I hope they appreciated the fat tranny in the '94 replica jersey freaking out on the sidewalk as they drove past.

-I'll have more on this in my MS Now piece, but the people in the seats around us were incredible. We were all practically old friends by the end of the game.

-The crowd was a proper football crowd. I went to a USMNT game years ago, a friendly against Spain at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, MA, and the crowd was 90% Spain fans. The atmosphere there was quite casual, and the crowd barely paid attention to the 0-5 thrashing on the pitch.

But the LA crowd Thursday was the complete antithesis to that experience. Everyone was locked in and every moment of stress and excitement surged through the crowd at every moment as the heavily US favored crowd cajoled our boys forward in key moments.

The crowd knew the game, knew what to cheer for, there were no lame "I believe that we will win" chants. It was a US crowd. It was a football crowd. My ears are still ringing.

Some lowlights:

-I nearly missed the kickoff despite going to get food a full half hour before the game started. The food service was slow, disorganized, and terrible. And the food was garbage.

I got chicken strips for my dad and a hot dog and a bottle water for myself for over $38 dollars and it was just straight up nasty. Surely, I thought, SoFi Stadium food couldn't be this bad, so I looked it up. Apparently FIFA has taken over all concessions and the food options are the same at every stadium at this tournament.

No doubt there was some fat contract behind all of this.

The line was maybe the slowest I've ever encountered at a sporting event and I missed the national anthems. The only reason I made it back to my seat in time to see the US score in the 3rd minute was because I walked all the way up the steep 20 rows into the nosebleed seats we had.

Chat, I thought I was having a heart attack.

-There was no game clock displayed anywhere in the stadium. SoFi famously has the largest jumbotron in the world, a huge ribbon of screens hanging over the pitch, and not a single square inch of the display was devoted to the game clock.

The only time we got to see the clock was when the Fox broadcast feed was showed on screen. If one of the dozens of celebrities were on screen, or one of the hundreds of crowd shots were on the big screen, you couldn't see the damn clock.

There are also ribbon screens running between the various levels of seats in the stadium and those only ever displayed banners for the FIFA World Cup and its various sponsors. No damn game clock.

-This is not an issue with the stadium itself, but in my plan-making ability. The walk to the stadium was great. It was about 1.8 miles. But coming back was excruciating. We should have found an alternative mode of transportation in hindsight.

-Lastly, I forgot my CPAP machine and I didn't get any sleep Wednesday night, and we almost missed our flight out of Boston on the way there but other than that the trip was amazing and my dad and I will never forget it.

There's a lot more to say about the tournament and the politics of it all but that was not the purpose of this post. Depending on how much I get into that later this week for MS Now, I might revisit that part of it.

Anyways, this has been your Sick Burns Friday post. This week I am planning on a couple pieces. There will be the usual politics/news post coming early in the week and then Wednesday I will be reprinting an old piece I wrote years ago about the history of the American Soccer League, which thrived in1920s America before soccer politics and the Great Depression served to wreck the league and the reputation of the game for decades.

Thank you all for continuing to read me. Without you all, experiences like this week with my dad wouldn't be possible. I am continually blown away that you all love my work enough for me to make a living. Thank you.