Guys, I swear this World Cup 2026 in the USA is giving off so many crazy vibes. Not only because Spain won the cup (which we already celebrated properly), but because Americans are discovering that soccer is cool and on top of that they are appropriating our words as if they were their own.
Turns out now the Fox and ESPN announcers say "golazo" with a lisp that kills you, and English dictionaries have already included it with British phonetics and everything. The best part is that "gol" is a loanword from English goal that Spanish returns to them with an augmentative and everything. I mean, we've linguistically scammed them and they haven't even noticed 😂
What blows my mind the most is that USA-Belgium in the round of 16 drew 50.1 million viewers across Fox and Telemundo, and that's even though the locals lost and on top of that with the red card to Balogun. The Mexico-England match settled at 46.7 million. For a country where soccer has always been a "minority sport", those numbers are absolutely insane.
Spanish is doing more for soccer in the USA than all MLS campaigns combined. Words like "clásico", "rabona", "chilena", and "aficionado" have slipped into English without a translator. And "¡vamos!" is no longer just a Nadal thing.
However, there are soccer historians who say this is like the Olympics: that when the World Cup ends, they forget about it and go back to American football. But then you see Netflix, Disney, and YouTube fighting over the rights to the 2030 and 2034 World Cups for 2 billion dollars and you think: something is changing.
Fans of USA in previous World Cups. Photos: Parke Brewer, Iscar Blanco, Executive Office of the President · Public domain.
And then there's the issue of the Hispanic community, which is already 68 million people. 71% have high English proficiency now, but at home many still watch the games in Spanish on Telemundo. That's the trick: soccer is the last stronghold where Spanish gains ground on English in everyday life.
But careful, they also warn that linguistic assimilation is advancing fast: in 2000 only 59% of Hispanics mastered English, now it's 71%. So perhaps "golazo" ends up being a souvenir of the 2026 World Cup rather than a permanent legacy.
And you, what do you think? Will the yanks really get hooked on soccer or when the World Cup ends will they forget as always? Because I think that with Spain champion and all the hype that has been built, something has changed forever.
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