Just keep watching the ball. On a lovely soft powder blue night in Los Angeles the World Cup produced an opening act on its US front that might have been conjured by the whirling hands of Gianni Infantino himself, a Fifa president who increasingly has the air and the mannerisms of an elite celebrity stage magician. Or at the very least, of a man who appreciates the power of the show.
It turns out California really does know how to put on one of those. There was even a moment before kick-off that seemed to capture the cosmically strange nature of the entire Fifa multiverse. A little later the headline act Katy Perry would appear in a silver bustle and perform on a podium alongside a 10-year-old TikToker.
Before that we got the Korean pop sensation Lisa, who has 105 million Instagram followers, or 102.5 million more than the USMNT, backed by a troupe of men performing surprisingly sexualised hip thrusts and groin grabs that no doubt express, on some deeper level, the value of international team sport.
Adjacent to this a man in a tracksuit appeared holding aloft a golden ball, like some ancient deity hoisting God’s gonad on his shoulders. At which point an enormous golden Fifa sign appeared, all four letters at least 50ft high, winched down out of the ether like a vision of divine grace – if not the most ludicrous sporting spectacle of all time, then surely the most ludicrous yet.