Social media got flooded with clips of small towns rolling out the red carpet for teams they'd never met before, and Lawrence, Kansas became something of a mascot for the whole thing after adopting Algeria's squad as their own. People started calling it the Great American Sleepover, comparing the whole tournament to getting reacquainted with cousins you never see because your parents don't get along. Visitors also gushed online over small stuff, like free ice in their soda or their first taste of Waffle House. And that warmth spread fast online, catching plenty of Americans off guard by how good it felt. But not every visitor got the same welcome. Iraqi striker Aymen Hussein spent seven hours held up at a Chicago airport before anyone let him through. Fans from Iran, Haiti, Cote d'Ivoire and Senegal ran into travel bans and visa freezes that kept plenty of them from ever setting foot in a stadium, out of a broader ban that touched 39 countries in total. Weird thing is, the players usually got exemptions. The regular fans didn't.
Ticket prices climbed high enough to price out plenty of loyal supporters, and steep transport costs on game days added another sting for visitors already stretching their budgets,and questions kept surfacing about political interference, with critics pointing to how eagerly FIFA seemed to bend toward the Trump administration's wishes at points during the tournament.FIFA president Gianni Infantino faced his own share of criticism over that.Whether the goodwill from all those small towns outweighs the headlines about visas and politics is still anyone's guess.
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