The FIFA World Cup 2018 is dominating the world of sports and the international stage these days, but it will all come to an end on Sunday, July 15.
The World Cup Final is scheduled for Sunday, July 15 at 4 p.m. local time at Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow, Russia, according to a report by the London Evening Standard. This means that the game will begin at 11 a.m. Eastern Time in the United States. The schedule is packed from now until then, with innumerable high stakes matches determining which teams will meet for that final showdown in just under three weeks.
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Three matches are scheduled for Monday alone. Uruguay and Russia will face off in Samara, Saudia Arabia and Egypt will play in Volgograd, and a match between Spain and Morocco will take place in Kaliningrad. The global event has crept into every aspect of life, even in the U.S. where the sport of soccer — or football — is not generally followed. Around the country, sports bars and cooking up specials and extending their hours to host viewings of the games, and sporting networks are hoping to clue their audiences in on the unfamiliar game.
Right now, no less than three games a day are scheduled out as far as Thursday, June 28. Beyond that, the match-ups will have to be determined by who wins and moves forward in the brackets.
Over the weekend, England took a massive leap forward with their biggest win ever in a World Cup match. The national team’s Harry Kane pulled off a remarkable hat-trick with the help of team mates Jesse Lingard and John Stones. The team will get just three days to rest and recover before they’re up against Belgium on Thursday in Kaliningrad. The match will begin at 2 p.m. ET, and will decide the fate of the entire Group G.
While the grandeur of the international competition is hard to avoid, enthusiasm is even lower than usual in the U.S. because the men’s national team has chosen not to compete for the first time in over 30 years. The team very simply failed to qualify, according to a report by Time, despite their unlikely victories in the 2014 World Cup.
Americans can still tune in to support the women’s national team, which already has three World Cup titles under its belt, but history shows that they likely won’t get the same fanfare as their male compatriots.
The U.S.’s general disinterest in a sport that is ubiquitous in the rest of the world continues to puzzle analysts, particularly those who have sought to tap the market for FIFA and other organizations.
Author Laurent Dubois told TIME that it has a lot to do with class. While in other countries, football is a cheap and easy to learn sport that is accessible to everyone, in the U.S. that’s not the case. Soccer clubs are expensive to join, and huge tracks are empty land for playing fields aren’t always as easy to come by, especially for lower-income populations, who are generally drawn to the smaller basketball courts.
“Could this be a salutary moment to reconfigure the structural aspects of U.S. soccer?” Dubois asked. “If that’s the case, if it forces the change, then it might all be for the best in the long term.”
