Watching World Cup Alone

It’s 2:47am on a Wednesday and I’m standing in my kitchen in boxers, holding a bowl of cereal I poured during halftime, watching a corner kick on a laptop propped on two cookbooks because the screen won’t stay up on its own.

Nobody is in the room. Nobody has been in the room for the entire tournament.

The goal goes in. My arms go up. And then they come back down, and the only sound in the apartment is the fridge humming and my own voice going “oh my god” to a wall painted landlord beige.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

The group chat that died

I did try. I want that on the record.

I made a group chat in June. Named it something stupid — “kickball boys” — added six people. Two from work, three from college, one guy I play pickup basketball with on Sundays.

Week one: 340 messages. Memes. Someone posting “WE BALL” in all caps at 6am.

Week two: 41 messages.

Week three: my message, “anyone watching the 3pm?”, sat there with three read receipts and zero replies for nine hours. Then Marcus typed “cant, kid has swim.” Then nothing.

I checked that chat probably forty times during the round of 16. Forty. I know because I caught myself doing it while I was already watching the game, thumb sliding down, refresh, nothing, close, open, refresh.

Who am I even refreshing for?

”Just go to a bar” — okay, I went

My sister said it like it was obvious. “Just go to a bar, dude.”

So I went. Thursday, 11am kickoff, this Irish-ish place four blocks from me that puts a sandwich board out front with the fixtures written in chalk. $8 pints before noon during matches, which is honestly a fair deal.

I sat at the corner of the bar. There were maybe thirty people in there. Every single one of them was in a cluster. Two guys in matching jerseys. A group of six with a table full of half-eaten wings. A couple sharing one pair of earbuds, which — why? The sound is on the TV. Whatever.

And there I was, watching the game, and every time something happened the whole room would erupt and turn to each other, and I would turn to my left, and there was a wall with a framed photo of a horse.

I stayed for 62 minutes. I paid, tipped $3, walked home.

Being alone in your apartment is one thing. Being alone in a room full of people who aren’t alone — that’s a different animal. That one sat in my chest for like two days.

The part where I set an alarm for 4:50am for nobody

Some of these matches were brutal timing. Middle of the night, 5am, whatever. And I still set the alarms.

I have a note on my phone with all the kickoff times converted, color-coded, because I’m apparently that guy now. 4:50am alarm, coffee going by 4:55, on the couch with a blanket by 5:00.

The weird part isn’t waking up at 4:50. The weird part is that there is zero social consequence if I don’t. No one is waiting. No one texts “you up?” No one is going to give me crap at work for missing it because nobody at work knows I care.

So I’m doing it purely for me. Which sounds healthy when I type it out. It did not feel healthy at 5:14am when I muted a goal celebration because I was worried about my neighbor.

I muted a goal. Think about that.

Things I actually did to cope, ranked by how sad they are

Least sad: I bought a $34.99 lap desk off Amazon (checked the order — May 2026, it was $34.99, went down to $29 in July and no I didn’t return it) so the laptop stopped sliding off the cookbooks. Actually solid. Non-slip pad underneath, doesn’t get hot, cheap. Would recommend it to anyone watching World Cup alone on a couch.

Medium sad: I started narrating. Out loud. Full commentary voice. “He’s got to shoot there.” Nobody heard it. I heard it. It made the room feel less like a tomb.

Sadder: I kept a Twitter reply thread open next to the stream so there’d be text moving on the screen. Strangers reacting in real time. It’s not the same but it’s movement. Parasocial? Sure. It worked though.

Sadder than that: after the quarterfinal I recorded a 40-second voice memo describing what happened. To nobody. I never sent it. It’s still in my Voice Memos, titled “New Recording 17.”

Okay the coping was pathetic, BUT at least I didn’t fake-cheer on a video call with someone who was clearly doing dishes. My roommate from 2021 did that. Worse.

Does it actually ruin the game?

Honest answer: no. And that’s what messes with me.

The football was still good. That free kick in the semi where the keeper didn’t move — I felt that in my stomach, palms actually sweating, leaning so far forward I knocked over a LaCroix. Real, physical, no audience needed.

The game doesn’t need you to have friends.

But the ninety seconds after a goal? That’s where it falls apart. That’s a communal window. You’re supposed to grab someone’s shoulder. Yell something incoherent. Get handed a beer you didn’t ask for.

Instead I have this dead air where the energy has nowhere to go and it just kind of… sours in my chest. Goes tight. Then the replay starts and I’m fine again.

Ninety seconds, forty-some matches. Do the math on that.

The one match that was different

My upstairs neighbor — older guy, mid-sixties maybe, I’ve said maybe eleven words to him in two years — knocked on my door during the semifinal.

I thought he was going to tell me to shut up. I’d yelled at the 71st minute.

He said, “You watching the game?”

I said yeah.

He said, “My TV’s out. Two weeks. Cable guy keeps rescheduling.”

He watched the last twenty minutes on my couch. Drank one of my beers without asking, which I respected. When the winner went in he slapped my knee — actually slapped my knee, hard — and said “MY GOD.” Then he left. Said thanks at the door.

That was the best twenty minutes of the entire tournament and it had nothing to do with the football.

He hasn’t come back. His cable got fixed. I checked — I heard his TV through the ceiling on Sunday.

What I’m not going to tell you

I’m not going to tell you to join a supporters club. I looked one up. There’s one that meets at a place in the arts district, they have a Facebook group with 900 members, they wear scarves indoors in August.

I didn’t go. I don’t know why. I opened the event page four times and closed it four times and I genuinely cannot explain the block. It’s not fear exactly. It’s more like the effort required to become a person who shows up somewhere new feels like it costs more than I have right now.

That’s not a lesson. That’s just where I’m at.

I also want to say — and this is the contradictory part — I liked some of it. Nobody talked during play. Nobody asked me to explain offside for the fourth time. I paused for the bathroom. I ate the entire tournament’s worth of dinners standing up. There’s a version of this that’s a genuinely good time and I lived in that version maybe 60% of the way through.

The other 40% was the thing where you turn to say something and there’s a horse photo.

The final

I ordered wings. $28.40 including delivery fee and tip, from the place that’s always slightly cold by the time it arrives.

Set them on the lap desk. Turned the volume up to 14, which for me is reckless.

Watched the whole thing. Extra time. Penalties. The camera doing that slow pan across faces in the crowd where everyone is hugging someone.

When it ended I sat there for a while with the confetti still falling on screen and the wing bones in the container and my phone face-down on the cushion.

I picked it up eventually. Opened the group chat. Typed “what a final.”

Deleted it. Put the phone back down.

The stream went to postgame analysis and I let it play for another hour with the sound on because turning it off meant the apartment would be quiet.

That’s the whole thing. That’s watching World Cup alone.

Tags: [“Lap Desk”, “Amazon Basics”, “Solo World Cup Streaming”, “$30-35”, “Small Apartment Setup”]