A Son’s Gift
June 13, 2026
“Love’s a beautiful game…” — Ed Sheeran
Riding up the escalators of stunning SoFi Stadium last night with Ty, my first son, two tickets in the nosebleeds of Section 500-something, the kind of seats where the players look like tiny chess pieces and birds (literally) can and did poo in the seat front of you, you’d think you will not be able to see much on the field. But this field with panoramic screens that show up close action and bird’s eye height was quite ideal to see this historic moment.
Ty greeted a fellow fan sitting next to us from Las Vegas and introduced me - “this is my dad who took me to a World Cup game in Orlando in 1994.” What he did not say was that this time Ty was the one who went through the near impossible process of getting these seats and invited me, 32 years later.
70,492 people roared together in a building that is somehow both a cathedral and a spaceship — that vast, undulating roof catching the last California light, the whole structure feeling less like architecture and more like a vessel built to hold a single, swelling note. And we screamed and shouted for 90 some minutes jumping up and down like kids again with improbable (to us long time fans) four goals against a very good team.
The U.S. had never played like this. Not in my lifetime of watching. A sold-out crowd of 70,492 watched the Americans open with a 4-1 victory over Paraguay, a team that has beaten Brazil and Argentina in qualifiers, and the manner of it mattered as much as the score. It was the most goals the U.S. men’s national team has ever scored in a World Cup match, three of them arriving before halftime in a flurry that left the stadium genuinely disoriented — the good kind of disoriented, the kind where you become part of something unexpected and deliriously new.
The Coach’s Quiet Architecture
What struck me, watching from on high, was how “accordion” the team’s shape was — especially from five tiers up, you could see the choreography. Mauricio Pochettino had Chris Richards back in the lineup, giving him his first-choice XI, and the system breathed in a way I hadn’t seen from a U.S. side before: patient circulation that suddenly detonated into verticality. Pulisic split two defenders in the seventh minute and found Weston McKennie, whose touch led to an own goal — and just like that, the dam was open.
A coach’s tactics are a kind of authorship — an invisible hand shaping what becomes visible. There is something almost theological in that: the maker who recedes so the made thing can shine. Pochettino “got it right,” as one writer put it — his team came out with energy and delivered one of the most memorable opening performances in recent U.S. soccer memory. But the architecture was never the point. The architecture was in service of the players — of who those players are.
The Diverse Voice of America, On the Pitch
If you traced the biographies of last night’s goal-scorers, you’d basically get a spread out diaphanous flows overlapping like a Frankenthaler painting . Folarin Balogun, born in Brooklyn to Nigerian parents because his pregnant mother were not allowed to board a plane, then moved to England as an infant, grew up in London, joined Arsenal’s academy at eight, and represented England at the youth level before choosing to play for the United States (he could have played for England or Nigeria) — and last night he became the first U.S. player to score multiple goals in a World Cup game since 1930, when Bert Patenaude’s hat trick against Paraguay was the first in World Cup history. Ninety-six years later, against the same opponent, in the same number — a strange and lovely echo.
And then there’s Giovanni Reyna — whose late goal restored the U.S. lead to three — son of a former USMNT captain, a player whose path back into this team has been anything but smooth, a story of injury, doubt, and second chances. There’s McKennie, raised between Texas and Germany. There’s a roster stitched together from Monaco, Milan, Marseille, Juventus, Mexico City’s Club América — a squad with players drawn from Ligue 1, Serie A, the Bundesliga, the Premier League, Eredivisie, and MLS alike. This isn’t a metaphor I’m imposing on the team. This IS the team. Each one of them carries a story of displacement, return, inheritance, and choice — which is to say, each one of them carries an American story, whether or not they were born here.
And for one night, under one roof, 70,000 of us were chanting the same three syllables — USA, USA, USA — not as a chant of exclusion but of gathering. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that particular chant feel so much like an embrace. It felt less like a boundary being drawn and more like a net being cast wide enough to hold every story on that field. After a long season of division in this country, there was something genuinely healing about it — not a resolution of our fractures, but a glimpse, for ninety minutes, of what we sound like when we’re for something together rather than against each other.
Sunil, and the Bus
And then — because these nights always have their small, human-scale miracles tucked inside the big ones — Ty and I ran into Sunil Gulati on our way as we stood in line to get very expensive T shirts. Sunil and I serve together on Bucknell’s board; he’s a friend, and one of the people most responsible, behind the scenes, for American soccer’s slow climb toward nights like this.
Ty, who hosted the “We the Peeps” podcast that traced US soccers frustrating past, lit up immediately — he knew the story before I could even begin telling it: the time the team bus driver didn’t show in Panama, and Sunil — federation president, Columbia economics professor, the most credentialed man in the building — simply got behind the wheel and drove the team himself.
I keep thinking about that image. The architect of the whole system, reduced — or rather, revealed — as the real driver. Someone has to get the team where it needs to go, and sometimes that someone does it without anyone noticing, without credit, simply because the job needs doing and he was the one standing there. There’s a whole theology in that bus.
A Son’s Gift
Which brings me to the title I keep circling back to. “A son’s gift.” Balogun’s two goals — a son of Nigerian immigrants, raised in London, choosing America. Reyna’s goal — a son following, and now exceeding, his father’s path into this same shirt. McKennie, Pulisic, all of them — sons of United States, formed in some other country or culture, offering what they have to a place that is not quite the place they came from but has become, somehow, the place they belong to.
Isn’t that the oldest story we have? A son, sent out, formed elsewhere, returning home not to take but to give — to offer back to the father’s house something the house didn’t know it was missing. The prodigal in reverse: not the son who squanders and returns empty-handed, but the son who was always going to come home, and comes home carrying gifts.
I think of kenosis here — the self-emptying that doesn’t diminish but adds. Pochettino’s tactics emptied themselves of ego so the players could fill the space. The players emptied themselves of the comfort of their club identities to wear one jersey, together, for one country. No player stood above the other. And somewhere above all of it, I want to believe, is a Father who watches sons come home — from Brooklyn, from London, from Düsseldorf, from Dallas — and delights not in the score, but in the return.
The Father’s Homecoming
SoFi Stadium, for all its glass and steel and 75,000 seats, felt last night like a place where transcendence and loss share the same address. We’ve lost so much, as a country, as a world — trust, belonging, the simple shared joy of cheering for the same thing without irony. And yet there it was, returning to us, unbidden, in the seventh minute, and the thirtieth, and the thirty-fourth, and at the last touch as an exquisite goal: joy, undefended, 70,000 voices wide.
Maybe that’s what a homecoming actually is — not the restoration of what was lost, but the discovery that the Father was already there, waiting in the place of loss itself, ready to run out to meet us before we’d even finished the run home. Last night, under that vast curved roof, in a stadium built on a a place that used to be a racetrack, in a city full of people who came from everywhere to become from here — for ninety minutes, the loss and the transcendence were the same field, the same game, the same gift.
A son’s gift, given back. A Father, giving a high five back
USA 4, Paraguay 1. Love’s a beautiful game indeed.
