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Verde is right now.”

He added, half stunned, that even Tom Brady had fewer followers, despite a career widely considered one of the most dominant in sports history. For Hand, that gap revealed something larger than a single match: football’s global gravity.

Across the United States, the same realization was spreading in different forms. The World Cup wasn’t acting like a foreign import trying to earn attention; it was exposing how little of its scale Americans had fully absorbed. Stadiums filled near capacity, and broadcasts drew millions. The sport was not arriving--it was already everywhere.

Sports marketing analyst Bob Dorfman said the shift was emotional as much as statistical. Fans were discovering not just elite athletes, but entire cultures of support, where traveling crowds treated matches like national rituals. Anthems echoed through stadiums with a weight that surprised many first-time viewers.

In Los Angeles, outside a match between the United States and Turkey, the atmosphere felt closer to a festival than a game. Drums echoed, smoke filled the air, and fans arrived dressed in costumes--from superheroes to fictional coaches like Ted Lasso--blending humour with devotion.

Inside the stadium, supporters like Alicia Rutz said Americans were learning to watch differently, celebrating not only goals but movement, timing, and craft. The sport was becoming legible in new ways.

Yet questions lingered about permanence. The United States had seen surges before, from the 1994 World Cup to the rise of MLS and the dominance of the women’s national team. Each time, growth followed--but never quite overtook the country’s established hierarchy of sports.

Even now, stars like Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Christian Pulisic coexist in the American consciousness with Patrick Mahomes, Arch Manning, Alex Ovechkin, and Caitlin Clark.

For Hand, that overlap defined the present moment: intense, global, and temporary.

Still, something had shifted. For a few weeks, the scale of football was no longer abstract. It was visible, viral, and impossible to ignore. And even if attention would drift again, the memory of that scale would not.