Watching World Cup Alone

3:47 AM. The apartment is so quiet I can hear the fridge humming from across the room. My phone screen lights up — Brazil just scored, and I’m lying here alone in my boxers, watching on a $4 cracked streaming site that keeps freezing every thirty seconds.

That’s how I watched the World Cup alone. Not by choice. Not really.

My group chat — the one that’s been blowing up every four years since 2014 — went weirdly silent this time around. Half of them moved abroad. Two got married and “don’t really do football nights anymore.” One just stopped replying for no reason I could figure out. So there I was, a 28-year-old with a six-pack of Heineken that had been sitting in my fridge for two weeks, watching Messi run down the wing on a MacBook balanced on my knees because my TV remote died in 2022 and I never replaced the batteries.

Stop. Let me back up.

It started in June, way before the actual tournament kicked off. I was hyped. I bought a new jersey — black Argentina one, the one with the three stripes, $85 shipped from some random overseas site because I missed the official drop. I told myself this year would be different. This year I’d actually invite people over, make chili, hang a flag from the window, do the whole thing. I even bought those little Argentine flag napkins off Amazon. $7.49 for forty. Who even sells those?

Then nobody RSVP’d.

I mean, technically, two people said “yeah sounds fun, let me check my calendar.” Then never followed up. My coworker Marcus said he had a “thing” that weekend. My old college roommate David — the one who used to sleep over for every single match and yell at the ref until his throat went hoarse — moved to Berlin last March and now texts me like once every two months, mostly when he needs US Netflix login info.

So it was just me.

The first match was Argentina vs. Saudi Arabia. I don’t even remember the score now. I sat on my couch at noon on a Saturday with the curtains open, sun coming in sideways, and I watched the whole thing. Messi scored that early goal. I pumped my fist. Nobody was there to high-five. My cat looked up from the windowsill, mildly annoyed at the sudden movement, then went back to licking her paw.

That’s the part that gets you.

Not that you’re alone. You can be alone on a Tuesday and feel totally fine. It’s the noise — the absence of it. You keep expecting someone to yell, to throw a chip at the screen, to say “BRO DID YOU SEE THAT” right into your ear. And when it doesn’t come, the silence fills in the gap like water filling a glass. Slowly. Then all at once.

I tried filling it myself. I literally talked to the TV. I said “COME ON MESSI” out loud at 2 PM on a Wednesday while doing dishes. My neighbor probably thinks I’m unhinged. I don’t care. The thing is, when you watch alone, every emotion gets amplified. A good goal becomes euphoric and then immediately deflates because there’s no one to share it with. A bad call from the ref makes you angrier than it should, because you have no outlet. The anger just sits in your chest like a brick.

The night Argentina lost to — wait. Let me think. They didn’t really lose until later. The night Mbappé scored a hat trick in the final, I was pacing around my apartment like a caged animal. I spilled beer on my rug — the rug I got from my mom for Christmas, the one she spent $200 on at West Elm. I yelled so loud the cat hid under the bed for two hours. And when the final whistle blew and Argentina won and Messi lifted that trophy, I just stood there in my kitchen holding an empty bottle, staring at the wall behind my fridge.

Nobody to text about it. Nobody who would get it.

I did text someone. My friend Priya in Mumbai. She texted back “omg same here, alone too 😭😭” with like four crying emojis. Cool. Cool cool cool. So now we’re both alone, separately, on different continents, texting each other about how alone we are. That’s not the camaraderie the World Cup is supposed to give you. That’s two people in different timezones being lonely at each other.

Stop again.

What I’m trying to say is — I don’t think people warn you about this part. The ads show packed pubs in London, screaming fans in Buenos Aires, jerseys everywhere. They don’t show the guy at home with a single six-pack and a cracked stream at 480p. They don’t show the empty couch cushion next to him. They don’t show the part where you mute the TV when the neighbors come home because you don’t want them to know you’re sitting there alone at 11 PM on a Tuesday, screaming at a referee in Lisbon.

My sister called me the morning of the final. She goes “are you watching with anyone?” and I said “yeah, you know, the usual crew.” Lie. Total lie. The usual crew doesn’t exist anymore. The usual crew is scattered across four countries and three relationships. I watched the final alone, in my bedroom, on my phone because the laptop charger broke three days earlier and I kept putting off buying a new one. $29 on Amazon. I’ll do it tomorrow. (I haven’t.)

Argentina won. I literally cried. Real tears. In my bedroom at 9:17 PM on a Sunday like a total weirdo. The tears fell on my pillow. I wiped them with the back of my hand. My cat came in eventually, meowed once, and left.

Was it the emotion of the win? Partly. Was it also the three weeks of building up alone, the small deaths every matchday, the slow realization that nobody was going to show up? Yeah. Probably that too. It was the whole mess of it.

Honestly, I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. I have friends. I go to things. I RSVP to weddings, baby showers, housewarmings. I send cards. But every four years, when the World Cup rolls around, that specific loneliness hits different. It’s not the regular “oh I’m single on a Friday night” thing. It’s the “oh, the entire planet is celebrating together and I’m buffering at 480p while they chant in the stadium” thing.

I kept thinking — is this what getting older is? Slowly realizing that the rituals you built your twenties around don’t survive your thirties? That the people you partied with at 2 AM in 2018 are now in Lisbon with a baby and a mortgage and a 401k they check every morning at 6 AM before coffee? Is that what happened?

Maybe. I don’t know.

The worst match to watch alone was Croatia vs. Brazil. The one that went to penalties after extra time. I had been watching alone for three weeks by then. I knew every player on both teams. I knew their kids’ names from Instagram stalking. I had no one to text. The stream froze at 119 minutes, right before the penalty shootout. I restarted it three times. By the time it loaded, Croatia had already won and I had missed the most dramatic moment of the entire tournament.

I sat there for like ten minutes just staring at the ceiling. The popcorn I’d made was getting cold. The beer was flat. My phone buzzed — Twitter was losing its mind — and I just lay there thinking “I should have been there for this. I should have been anywhere for this.”

Then I poured another beer and started watching highlights. Highlights alone. That hits different too, by the way. Watching highlights alone when you already know the outcome is like reading the last page of a book first. You feel nothing. You’re just confirming what happened, like a coroner filling out paperwork.

Counterpoint though — and I gotta be honest about this — there were a few moments where watching alone was kinda better. Like, when Japan beat Germany in the group stage, I was lying in bed at like midnight, watching on mute because my roommate was asleep, and I literally had to bite my pillow to not scream. That was pure. That was mine. Nobody else’s. Nobody’s bad take in my ear. Nobody’s conspiracy theory about why the ref was biased. Just me and the pillow and Doan scoring in the 83rd minute.

But I wouldn’t wish a whole tournament alone on anyone. Even me, who now claims to “prefer” it on my dating profile. I don’t. I just don’t have a choice right now. Saying you prefer it is way easier than admitting you’re lonely on a global stage.

What do I do with all this? I don’t know. I’ve been telling people I had “a great World Cup, watched with the guys.” That’s my line now. The guys who don’t exist. The guys I’m going to text in 2030 to plan a watch party that’s never going to happen because by then I’ll have moved twice and they’ll have had another kid and the group chat will be totally dead.

The thing is — the World Cup comes back in four years. And in four years, who knows. Maybe I’ll have a partner who likes football. Maybe I’ll have moved somewhere with a sports bar down the street where you can just show up and people cheer with you. Maybe I’ll still be alone, in the same apartment, with the same cracked stream, pretending I’m not.

I don’t think there’s a lesson here. I’m not going to wrap it up in a bow. Sometimes the loneliest place on earth is your couch during the biggest party on earth. Sometimes you’re 28 and your friends have scattered and you’re watching a goalkeeper save a penalty and nobody in your immediate vicinity gives a single damn about it. Sometimes the buffering icon is the closest thing you have to a companion.

It’s fine. I’m fine.

I’m buffering again. The stream died right as I was typing this paragraph. Now I’m just sitting here in the dark with my phone, scrolling highlights I already watched at 1x speed, waiting for the next international tournament so I can do this all over again. The cat’s asleep. The fridge is humming. The beer is warm.

Send.

[“World Cup”, “Solo Watching”, “Sports Loneliness”, “Late Night”, “Football Fan”