The World Cup just made my hometown the center of the world and I’m still floating

It’s raining in metro Atlanta this morning, and down my way it’s been the gentle kind that falls peacefully, basically enough to provide a LoFi soundtrack while I sit out on the porch making a cup of coffee last probably far longer than I should. I feel like the ordinary parts of the day can wait a bit longer. And what I’m about to type might not mean much to those who’ve been to and/or covered World Cup matches, but there’s like… a heaviness in the air that has absolutely nothing to do with the precipitation. Instead, it’s just a strange quiet of the morning after something you waited years for, and I keep looking out at a city that has temporarily gone back to looking similar to how it did two days ago. For as much thought and as many resources have gone into the coverage of this World Cup, we’ve all been racking our collective brains trying to determine how does a small, independent outlet stand with the giants? It’s not easy, and the common thought is simply “keep it local,” which we’re trying to do, but as I sit here with the rain falling, the juxtaposition between what happened yesterday in my hometown vs the quiet of the next day is wild.

Yesterday, I emerged from riding MARTA into the city, got off at the SEC District Station, and made my way up the Red Deck to my first view of the stadium with Spain fans everywhere. I was standing at the top of the Georgia International Plaza next to Atlanta Stadium, a.k.a. Mercedes-Benz Stadium, with my phone out, doing all the typical work I do on a matchday, which is throwing video clips into our socials one at a time and getting ready to go into the stadium to cover a game. I was already feeling like I’d entered a dream state, though, from a conversation I’d just had with a Cape Verdean family who were trying to explain to me what this day meant to them, and finally coming to the realization that I was standing smack in the middle of the biggest sporting event in the history of the world.

I was locked in to my phone as I was trying to share these various clips with the world when these drums started up somewhere behind me, back towards the Georgia World Congress Center. They were low at first, just like when we hear the Atlanta United march coming up the street, and then suddenly everywhere, and by the time I turned around the entire country of Cabo Verde had apparently decided to hold its first ever World Cup party in the exact patch of concrete where I happened to be standing.

Here’s the thing about being at the stadium, I’ve never once taken this building for granted. I’ve been coming to the Benz for years, and covering this club as a labor of love means I know the place about as well as a person can know it, and not a single time have I walked up to it without feeling blessed. I’ve spent a real portion of my relatively recent adult life trying to explain to people who have never set foot inside that there is genuinely nowhere else like it, that the place gets into your chest and does something to you unlike many other professional sports stadiums. So I’ve always known what this building means and what it’s capable of, and I’ve celebrated and been frustrated with everyone when the soccer either goes the way I want, or it doesn’t.

What I was not the least bit ready for was the feeling of watching the rest of the world come walking in to find it out all at once.

The march arrived as an island of blue surrounded by a sea of Spanish red. That’s the only way I can really explain it, just blue in every direction, flags I’ve legit only ever seen in pictures snapping over people’s heads, drums I could feel through the grass before I could pick them out with my ears, and a wall of singing and dancing and pure joyful noise rolling toward me from a crowd of people who had either crossed a country or an entire ocean to be in my city on this one particular day. An island nation of barely six hundred thousand who’d never qualified for a World Cup had somehow carried a crowd bigger than some of its own towns directly to Atlanta, and they were absolutely hyped. They had come to throw a party and they were throwing it right on top of me and other journalists and all the Spanish fans and neutrals who were also in the area. I grabbed just a morsel of video and then just stopped, remembering the same thing I always tell myself – and that my wife always reminds me when I go to the stadium – “just take it all in.” I put the phone away for a bit and just stood inside of the whole experience and let the whole scene just play out.

A man came past close enough that I caught his face, head to toe in Cape Verde blue, eyes visibly wet and wide open. He wasn’t talking to me or to anyone in particular, best I could tell, but he was just saying it out loud into all the noise because it was clearly far too big a thing to keep inside: “I knew we’d show up, but I can’t BELIEVE my country showed up like this.” I thought about that sentence all day, and again as I sit out here on the quiet porch rewatching some of the videos. There was a whole life and a whole story folded up inside of that sentence, and the emotions all of these people were carrying, that I never would’ve experienced had it not been for this tournament coming to my city.

By the time I made it inside and up to my seat I genuinely thought I’d braced myself for whatever was coming, since the expectation was Spain was going to blow Cape Verde out of the water. I know the sound this building makes, I know the way a real Atlanta United night climbs up out of the lower bowl from the Supporter’s Section and fills the roof under the Oculus until you can feel it in your teeth. I’ve stood in some loud moments there: Messi during Copa America, Josef Martinez scoring on the Red Bulls in 2019, Miguel Almiron’s first return to the building when he was still with Newcastle and scoring during the Premier League Summer Series, Thiago Almada hitting a game winner to cap off an opening day comeback win vs San Jose.

The thing about yesterday is that what poured down onto the pitch was something I’d simply never heard inside the building in all my years of attending. It wasn’t louder so much as deeper and stranger, almost like a buzz that was stitched together out of a handful of languages and cultures at the very same time. The anthems came, and an entire corner of the stadium stood and sang for a country whose capital city holds double the number of people than what the stadium held. I’ve watched an enormous amount of soccer in that building, and this feeling was entirely new.

The football itself gave the day exactly the story it deserved, despite being a goalless draw. For the better part of ninety minutes Spain, one of the great powers of the entire sport, attacked in wave after wave at a team that honestly had no business holding them. Cape Verde and their hero Vozinha refused to be moved as they threw bodies in front of everything, clinging to a scoreline that grew harder to believe with every minute it managed to survive. Spain, for their part, brought on one of the current best attackers in the world in Lamine Yamal and even his unpredictability wasn’t enough to fully unlock the Blue Sharks.

When the final whistle finally went and the line still held, the Cabo Verde end of the stadium became unhinged in the way you only do when you’ve won something that made history. There were grown men holding onto each other and weeping, flags being slung overhead, and that same blue I’d been swallowed up by hours earlier now pouring down the steps in straight up disbelief at the fact their country had walked into a World Cup and taken a point from Spain in the very first match it had ever played.

In the post-match press conference, Cape Verde’s head coach, affectionately called Bubista, was all smiles as he discussed how smaller teams in tournaments like this absolutely must play organized. He mentioned he would’ve loved more transition moments and attacking chances but was more than happy at how stubborn his defense had been against the titan that is Spain.

After walking out of the stadium and back into the fan zones, I stood there for a moment watching strangers from a place I’ll most likely never see live through the best afternoon of their entire lives, and I was ecstatic for every one of them.

So again, I find myself out here on the porch the day after, watching the rain fall on a city and state that looks almost like it did a couple of days ago, and the feeling is more than just one of gratitude. It’s a high that’s taking a while to come down from. I know how things go from here. We’ll have more matches here in Atlanta and we all can only hope we have more history made (though admittedly with more goals involved), and in a few weeks the tournament packs itself up and moves on. The blue scatters back out across the world, the Spanish likely move beyond this minor speed bump and have a solid showing, and Atlanta settles quietly back into being just my home town, albeit one that should be a little more proud than it was a week ago. And if I am being honest I dread that normal returning quite more than I expected.

But I keep thinking about how lucky we got. Out of the entire draw, most folks had reached the same opinion about how lopsided some of Atlanta’s matches would be. But a man in Cape Verde blue whose name I’ll never learn got to have the best day of his life inside of the building I spend so much time in, making sure I never take it for granted. I’ve spent years telling anyone who would sit still long enough that there’s nowhere on earth quite like this place, and yesterday I got to stand in the middle of the entire world arriving at that very same conclusion on its own. I don’t think I’ve ever been prouder of where I’m from. The world showed up, and Atlanta showed up right back. I’ll take the quiet rain for a little longer, but I’m already counting down to the next moment the world gets to step into my city once more.