{"id":690050,"date":"2026-06-07T16:11:11","date_gmt":"2026-06-07T16:11:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/690050\/"},"modified":"2026-06-07T16:11:11","modified_gmt":"2026-06-07T16:11:11","slug":"an-australian-in-the-us-national-identity-is-one-thing-but-its-hard-to-cheer-for-either-world-cup-team-world-cup-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/690050\/","title":{"rendered":"An Australian in the US: national identity is one thing, but it\u2019s hard to cheer for either World Cup team | World Cup 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

Is \u201cUSA! USA! USA!\u201d a more fundamentally obnoxious chant than \u201cAussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!\u201d? As an Australian who has spent most of the last 15 years living in the United States and is now a permanent resident, the Socceroos\u2019 World Cup<\/a> group match against the USA raises some questions. Has my adopted nation dethroned my homeland as the world\u2019s foremost exponent of being unconscionably terrible to immigrants? And on a more personal level \u2026 who do I support here?<\/p>\n

Well, look, OK, there\u2019s really only one answer to that second question. I\u2019m not an especially patriotic type, but if anything does bring out my Australian-ness, it\u2019s the World Cup \u2013 perhaps because it\u2019s one of the few events at which we can still claim to be underdogs. And now, two decades after I rose at dawn to watch Australia\u2019s dreams dashed by the intersection of Lucas Neill\u2019s leg and Fabio Grosso\u2019s general vicinity, I find myself living in a country hosting the tournament.<\/p>\n

Not so long ago, the idea of seeing the Socceroos play on the biggest stage of all would have had me racing to book tickets. But not this year. For a start there\u2019s the cost \u2013 the astonishingly high ticket prices, accompanied by transport costs that feel actively predatory<\/a>. But more generally, there\u2019s a strange and somewhat fraught atmosphere around this tournament, one that reflects the mood of the country as a whole. With every passing day the US feels less like the land of the free and more like the home of the brave, and the World Cup is on a collision course with one of the primary reasons for this: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).<\/p>\n

While the war in Iran has pushed it from the front pages internationally, ICE continues to wage its own domestic war<\/a> against undocumented immigrants, documented immigrants and anyone else its officers decide they don\u2019t like the look of. Football in the US remains popular in immigrant communities, which means that the World Cup is shaping up as a potential flashpoint. There is uncertainty around ICE\u2019s involvement with the World Cup<\/a>, and whether or not ICE does target games, the fact that it is a possibility is bad enough. Living in the US today as a non-citizen is characterised by a constant low-level wariness, a sense of walking on thin ice.<\/p>\n

A friendly between Australia and USA in 2025 heats up. The tension has been rising again ahead of their Group D clash. Photograph: Andrew Wevers\/USSF\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Similarly, the last two years have made it clear that the US is not particularly friendly to visitors: no one wants to get off a long flight to find themselves arguing the finer points of immigration law with a man who has just called you \u201cretarded\u201d<\/a> and explained that, \u201cTrump is back in town \u2026 we\u2019re doing things the way we should have always been doing them.\u201d It\u2019s no surprise, then, that tourist numbers have declined dramatically<\/a> since Donald Trump\u2019s return to power \u2013 and despite the confident proclamations from the US president and Fifa boss Gianni Infantino, there\u2019s no reason to believe that the World Cup should be immune to this effect. It\u2019s not like anyone is going out of their way<\/a> to make fans feel welcome.<\/p>\n

So if there was ever a time to find one of those silly hats with corks on it and brush up on the words to Boonie\u2019s victory song, surely this is it? Right? Well, perhaps. But nationalism admits little in the way of nuance at the best of times, and these are certainly not the best of times. National identity is one thing \u2013 a shared origin implies a shared context, a shared understanding, a shared body of cultural experience. Try explaining TISM to an American and it\u2019ll become very clear how different two ostensibly similar countries can be. It\u2019s why I could slide seamlessly back into Melbourne after a decade away, and why I could live in the US for the rest of my life and never consider myself truly American.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s a fine line between celebration of similarity and fear of difference, and it has always seemed to me that national pride sits uneasily on both sides of that line. It\u2019s the place where the warmth of kinship starts to metastasise into derision for the other, where \u201cus\u201d starts to be defined in opposition to \u201cthem\u201d.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also hard to take the moral high ground about the Trump administration\u2019s blatant and cynical scapegoating of immigrants when Australia served as a primary source of inspiration<\/a>. It\u2019s hard to look at the US\u2019s blithe disregard for the climate crisis without thinking about how Australia remains the world\u2019s biggest exporter of gas. It\u2019s hard to condemn the US\u2019s regional meddling when Australia has its own ignominious history of dealing with its neighbours in a manner that Gareth Liddiard described<\/a> as \u201cconducting policy with the one free hand while the other\u2019s around their throat.\u201d And so on.<\/p>\n

I feel lucky to have an Australian passport, sure. It confers privileges denied to the vast majority of the world\u2019s population, and the fact that they\u2019re afforded to me is simply a matter of luck. And I\u2019m grateful. But proud? To the extent I\u2019m proud of either of my countries, it\u2019s because of what they do, not what they claim to be \u2013 and at this point, it\u2019s hard to feel like cheering for either of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Is \u201cUSA! USA! USA!\u201d a more fundamentally obnoxious chant than \u201cAussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!\u201d? As an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":690051,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-690050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=690050"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690050\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/690051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=690050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=690050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=690050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}