World Cup fan Freddy from Germany has been on the road across the U.S. for one week.
In that one week, his following on X went from 11,000 people to nearly 400,000. Because he cannot stop telling the world how different America is from everything he was taught to expect.
Waffle House at 1am. Buc-ee’s. A Bass Pro Shop with an indoor shooting range. Auburn’s stadium. The Tennessee River. Strangers who stopped to help and ended up recommending their favorite places like they had known him for years. J.J. Watt personally reaching out to welcome him to Houston and sending him care packages just because that is what Americans do when company comes.
Freddy posted his route and asked for recommendations. The entire internet showed up.
Here is what is different for World Cup fans this time.
The last time America hosted the World Cup was 1994. What the world saw then was what the gatekeepers decided they would see.
Editors framing coverage. America as a dangerous and hostile place with lots of crime.
That is still the way many Europeans have encountered America. I know this from experience. On a missions trip to Ukraine, I ended up playing basketball against a street gang. It is still the highlight of my amateur basketball career and a peak for me with rebounds as we beat them. Afterward, working through broken Ukrainian on my end and broken English on theirs, I realized they believed Pulp Fiction was an accurate picture of daily American life. That was their documentary. That was their lens on us.
That was always the deal. Western journalists controlled the lens on the Soviet Union and presented a Potemkin village as fact for decades. Even now, when Candace Owens visits Russia or Tucker Carlson is escorted around Qatar, what people hear about is a carefully packaged product that contradicts the “reality” presented by mainstream media.
What is happening on X and Instagram and Tik Tok is entirely different than what Europe has “seen”. It is real tourists who are seeing first hand that what they were taught, what they grew up thinking about America does not match up with what they are seeing for themselves. It is so much better.
No US official escorted Freddy on his road trip. No famous person met him at the rental car counter. Nobody handed him a script or pointed him toward the approved version of America.
He just showed up. And he told the truth about what he found. That is the World Cup nobody planned for. Fans from Germany, England, Algeria, and a dozen other countries landing in America with smartphones and the freedom to show the world what they actually see, in real time, without a producer deciding what the story is allowed to be.
And the story they keep telling is this: America is a great place to live and a great place to visit.
Our crime is real, but it is concentrated and easily avoided. Visitors are moving through our cities and towns and countryside and finding what most of us already knew. That the overwhelming majority of this country is safe and welcoming and alive with people who are genuinely glad you came.
The South especially welcoming and unique. Travelers who arrived braced for something dark are leaving having been fed, helped, and charmed by strangers who had no reason to be generous except that it is who they are.
These visitors came following our laws, bringing their money, carrying their love of sport and food and culture across an ocean. The supposed American xenophobia toward foreigners? Not if you come legally and as a friend.
What they found is a country that matched every bit of the love they brought. And in a land of staggering natural beauty, the thing that keeps stopping them cold is not the mountains or the stadiums or even the Buc-ee’s or Walmarts. It is the people.
Their wide-eyed wonder is helping us see ourselves clearly for the first time in a while.
Thank you Freddy! Thank you to every visitor at this World Cup for helping us see all there is to celebrate about who we are and how we live.
Ya’ll, come back soon!
Clayton Wood is a Knoxville pastor, lawyer and regular contributor to TriStar Daily.
The Czech National Soccer team enjoying a rodeo.
