Scorpions, Shirts And the Socceroos: A 2026 World Cup Diary

We spent 23 days on the road through Chile, Mexico, Canada and the United States. We came for the football. We came home talking about the people.

Let's get the first thing out of the way. Going to a World Cup is an enormous privilege.

Flights across the Pacific. Tickets bought at 3.30 in the morning. A month away from work and family. Savings disappearing into hotels, stadium tickets, Ubers and beers priced with the confidence of small investment properties. Most football supporters on this planet will never get the opportunity, and plenty who deserve it more than we do never will. We knew that before we left. We felt it throughout the trip.

And yet, for all the years spent imagining the matches, almost immediately something else began to take over. That's the thing nobody really tells you about a World Cup.

You go for the games. You come home talking about the people.

Ask somebody about a World Cup they attended twenty years ago and they'll remember the goals, obviously. But give me another five minutes and I'll be telling you about my Uber driver in Sochi, the FA-sponsored party train in South Africa, the couple in Moscow who took us under their wing, or the Danish couple we drank with until sunrise in Samara. The football gives everyone an excuse to be there. The rest happens around it.

A World Cup is less a tournament than a temporary country. For a few weeks, people arrive from every corner of the planet carrying scarves, songs, flags, grudges, hangovers and wildly optimistic expectations. Rivalries that seem genuinely important at home suddenly coexist with curiosity. Complete strangers buy each other drinks. People with no shared language can still communicate perfectly well when discussing a referee's competence.

Everyone has travelled ridiculous distances because twenty-two people are kicking a ball around a rectangle of grass. There is something wonderfully absurd about the entire enterprise.

Spectators into speculators

Getting there had required nearly a year of ballots, pre-dawn ticket portals, resale markets and dynamic pricing. We bought tickets to games we might never attend, sold tickets to matches we couldn't physically reach and tracked the whole thing in a spreadsheet nobody completely trusted. At some point five football tragics had stopped being supporters and accidentally become commodities traders.

We came to watch the World Cup and ended up running a trading desk.

There were conversations about supply, demand, resale values and whether holding onto Scotland v Brazil represented emotional commitment or irresponsible portfolio management.

Night one, football royalty

Eventually, after all the spreadsheets and speculation, we actually got on a plane. And landed in Mexico City.

The airport doors opened and suddenly everything we'd spent a year talking about was real. Music spilled out of bars. Street vendors leaned over smoking grills. Condesa buzzed beneath trees and traffic and neon. We'd crossed the Pacific, barely slept and had no idea what time our bodies thought it was.

I came through customs wearing my Mexico ’70 shirt. The customs officer took one look at it, smiled and gave me the thumbs up. Cleared for entry, in every sense.

Naturally, our first priority was tacos, beer and mescalitos. Jet lag could wait. A proper al pastor taco could not.

We wandered around looking for somewhere busy enough to trust when the bloke at the next table noticed my T-shirt.

“Great shirt.” It was one of our Maradona designs.

We started chatting. Argentina. Football. Diego. Then he casually told me who he was.

Daniel Arcucci. Journalist. Three-time Maradona biographer. Friend of the great man himself.

Football royalty, sitting at the next table in a Mexico City taqueria on our first night because of a T-shirt. The whole exchange lasted maybe five minutes — a chat, a hug, a photo — but for those five minutes we talked about Maradona as though we'd known each other for years.

I'd always said that was the point of Strip Tees. Football brings people together. The shirt simply starts the conversation. But sitting there with somebody who had actually known Diego, I realised how literal that idea could become.

A shirt is a passport

A World Cup is, in effect, the world's biggest dress-up party. And a football shirt is more than something you wear to a stadium. At a World Cup, it's a passport. It tells strangers where you've come from, who you love and, perhaps most importantly, that you're prepared to spend the next twenty minutes talking about football with someone whose name you don't yet know.

Once I noticed it, I began seeing it everywhere.

In Vancouver, a local apologised profusely — as only Canadians can — for mistaking my Matildas kangaroo shirt for South African.

In Seattle, an Uber driver asked where we were from. “Australia.” His whole face changed. “You know Irankunda?”

Know him? I unzipped my jacket and revealed the Irankunda Strip Tees shirt underneath. The car almost left the road.

He was Burundian, and what followed was one of the loveliest conversations of the trip. He told us about Burundian football, refugee journeys and the pride his community felt watching Nestory Irankunda represent Australia. His entire community, he explained, had adopted the Socceroos because one of their own had become one of ours. A twenty-minute Uber ride became a conversation about identity, migration and football's strange ability to connect places that look impossibly far apart on a map.

Later, in California, a small boy proudly showed me a sheet of stickers his dad had made for him. They were Strip Tees designs. Copied. Reprinted. Let's say distributed without an invoice. He absolutely treasured them.

I didn't have the heart to explain intellectual property law to a child at a World Cup, so I quietly replaced a few of the bootlegs with genuine stickers and wondered whether his father noticed the upgrade the next morning.

By then it was becoming obvious. The shirts were doing exactly what we'd always hoped they would. Starting conversations. And Mexico City provided plenty of them.

Mexico in full colour

There was the lone South African who walked into a packed bar carrying his flag the night before Mexico played South Africa in the opening game. In plenty of places that might have been interpreted as provocation. In Mexico he was instantly elevated to hero status. People cheered. They danced around him. Drinks appeared. For one night, rivalry became theatre.

Twenty-four hours later Mexico had beaten South Africa and the entire city appeared to decide sleep was unnecessary. We ended up on a rooftop above a family restaurant that somehow transformed into a nightclub. Three locals adopted us. Tequila appeared with alarming frequency. Everybody danced on tables.

In my experience Mexicans don't particularly need an excuse for a party. Giving them an opening World Cup victory was probably excessive.

There were Mexican jerseys everywhere, strangers embracing and music pouring across rooftops. And we were in the middle of it. Not because anybody knew us. Because nobody needed to. We were there for football. That was enough.

Mexico kept delivering those moments. A sticker on a wall made it reasonably clear that not everybody in the city was enthusiastic about the current US administration.

Markets sold football trinkets alongside Day of the Dead skulls, because almost everything in Mexico seems improved by the addition of a skeleton.

Then came the food. Travel has a habit of compressing memory. A few months later you struggle to remember exactly what happened on Tuesday, but you remember the scorpion taco.

Yes, we ate scorpion tacos. Would I do it again? No. Did we wake at approximately 3am convinced we were experiencing some kind of collective scorpion fever dream? Yes.

The crickets were slightly better. Crunchier than expected and marginally less haunted.

It was around this point that I realised holiday eating has its own form of peer pressure. Nobody looks at a scorpion and thinks, That would go beautifully with salsa. You eat it because your mates are watching and because somewhere deep inside every middle-aged man remains a thirteen-year-old boy who refuses to be the one who says no.

Then there was lucha libre. Kitsch. Absurd. Very funny. Men in masks launching themselves through the air while an audience that fully understood the theatre screamed themselves hoarse. Whether any of it was technically real seemed completely beside the point. It was one of the best comedy shows I'd seen in years.

Mexico City felt endlessly alive. But eventually the tournament pulled us north.

Vancouver, and a win for the ages

Vancouver was almost the opposite. After Mexico's noise and colour, Canada felt like somebody had lowered the volume. Beautiful harbour. Mountains. Clean streets. People apologising when you accidentally bumped into them. It was the perfect place to catch our breath.

Unfortunately there was football to worry about.

Australia's first match was against Türkiye and almost nobody outside the green-and-gold bubble gave us much of a chance. Their captain had promised to dominate Australia, then doubled down in the press conference. Which was useful. Australian football people are most comfortable when somebody has underestimated us.

We were two rows from the front behind the goal amongst the active support, and from there watched the Socceroos tear the expected script to pieces. The first goal arrived through a burst of transition football, fast and direct and completely committed. The second was even better from where we were standing — possession nicked from the Turkish captain before the finish was arrowed into the corner almost directly in front of us.

Then Australia defended. And defended. And got saves when they needed them. 2–0.

Watching football from behind the goal compresses everything. You don't see tactical structures. You see bodies, angles, panic and space appearing for half a second before disappearing again.

Then the whistle went. The release was extraordinary. For a moment I was transported twenty-one years backwards to Sydney against Uruguay in 2005 — that same feeling of tension leaving thousands of bodies simultaneously.

The players walked over and posed in front of our end. Then outside the stadium somebody put on Yothu Yindi's Treaty. Thousands of Australian supporters danced. In Canada. After beating Türkiye. At a World Cup. It felt right on so many levels.

There are moments when following the Socceroos makes absolutely no rational sense. And then there are moments like that.

Write Australia off at your peril.

Vancouver itself never quite had Mexico City's intensity, but perhaps that was the point. It became a pause in the trip. A place to walk, reset and notice a maple tree displaying what looked suspiciously like the national colours.

Seattle, brass bands and Down Under

Then came Seattle. Seattle announced itself with a 9am burrito and a beer at Pike Place that proved unexpectedly difficult to consume. The breakfast of champions. Both medicinal.

Before Australia played the United States, an American brass band started performing Nirvana's Come As You Are outside the stadium. It was so perfectly Seattle that you almost wanted the moment preserved in a museum.

Then the match began. The first half wasn't good. Australia looked overawed and went into the break two goals down. There was improvement afterwards, but the game had gone. 2–0. The hosts deserved the night. The green and gold had turned up. The first half hadn't.

Still, the travelling support kept singing.

That's one of the things you discover following Australia overseas. The relationship with the team is different from following most clubs. There isn't the same assumption of entitlement.

You know what it means for Australians to get here. You know the individual journeys. You know many of them have crossed continents, changed countries, been overlooked, fought for contracts and built careers far away from the places they grew up.

Their journeys feel like versions of Australia's journey. That's why people travel thousands of kilometres to watch them. It isn't simply eleven footballers. It is an idea of who Australia is now. And perhaps who we want to be.

The chants deserve their own mention. Chef's kiss to whoever came up with "Aussie boys are on a bender, Donald Trump is a sex offender", belted out while nervous police watched on. Even they always broke into a wry smile when we followed it with "We're all getting deported".

We eventually left the stadium and spent roughly an hour trapped in the exit logjam, which gave us ample time to contemplate American infrastructure. This would become another recurring theme. America can build self-driving cars. America can land people on the moon. America can apparently deliver a burrito to your front door using a robot. But ask 60,000 football supporters to leave a stadium simultaneously and everybody appears genuinely surprised.

The most memorable Seattle night, though, didn't happen at the football.

Our Airbnb was near the airport in a part of town chosen largely because it was near the airport. There was a bar nearby. It looked slightly sketchy. Perfect.

We walked in and discovered an R&B open mic night in full flight. Singer after singer got up. The standard was frighteningly good. Proper voices. Serious performers. A packed room.

Then one of our group decided this was his moment. He put his name down. Song? Down Under. Of course.

The band looked uncertain. A few bars went by. Then somebody found the flute line. And suddenly a room full of magnificently confused African American patrons was watching an Australian sing Men at Work with the conviction of a man performing his national service.

The first verse was shaky. There were pitch issues. Possibly significant ones. But something happened. People started smiling. Then singing. Then cheering. By the final chorus the whole room was with him. Complete strangers became instant friends.

That's the memory I'll still be telling people about in twenty years. Not because the singing was good. It wasn't. Because for four minutes it didn't matter.

After the USA game we also attached ourselves to three impossibly good-looking Cuban-American brothers from Miami who were on a boys' trip of their own. Hats were swapped. Instagram handles exchanged. For a few hours two separate boys' trips became one.

Somewhere around the same part of the journey we met a group of young Scottish lads, barely eighteen, travelling around America on their gap year with the confidence that only teenage boys several thousand kilometres from their parents can possess. They had fake IDs. Reasonably convincing ones. They also explained just how difficult getting into American clubs had become, which was presented to us as a major civil rights issue — though judging by their level of intoxication, it was clearly evident they had succeeded.

The road south to Miami

From Seattle we headed south, travelling through landscapes that seemed determined to keep changing character. At one point we ate dinner in a fake Bavarian village in the Washington mountains. Leavenworth had once been a struggling timber town before reinventing itself in the 1960s as an alpine German tourist destination. And somehow it worked.

There we were, Australians travelling through America for a football tournament, speaking German and eating Bavarian food in a manufactured Bavarian village. Travel is good for perspective.

There was also a hipster stopover in Portland, where I'd lived back in the 90s — a chance to revisit old haunts, recharge the batteries and, in the proud local tradition, be weird.

Then came Miami. Miami does not believe in understatement. Heat. Music. Cars. Colour. South Beach. Little Havana. Everything looks like it has been turned up slightly too high.

The future and the past appear to occupy the same block. We watched delivery robots trundle through Little Havana carrying food past old men playing dominoes. Self-driving technology delivering Cuban sandwiches through one of America's most nostalgic neighbourhoods. It felt like a visual metaphor somebody had over-written.

America is full of contradictions like that. On one hand, autonomous vehicles and food-delivery robots. On the other, mountains of Styrofoam plates, plastic cutlery and single-use packaging that made parts of the country feel like environmental policy had stopped developing around 1978.

Miami also introduced us properly to Hard Rock Stadium. Or more accurately, to the challenge of reaching it.

Getting there from downtown was an exercise in illogical logistics. Uber to a bus station. School bus to a car park. Then roughly two kilometres on foot. Total travel time around two and a half hours. To attend a stadium in one of the richest countries on earth.

Every person walking alongside us appeared to be asking the same question. Surely there was another way. Apparently not.

The first game there was Uruguay against Cabo Verde. Naturally, we wore Socceroos shirts. It was Uruguay. Australians have memories.

Who could forget the karate chop that ended Ray Baartz's career, or the welcome our boys received at Montevideo airport in 2001?

Some football grudges aren't worth maintaining. Others become part of the family furniture. You barely notice they're there until someone mentions Uruguay.

Earlier that morning we'd had breakfast with a Cabo Verde supporter who radiated optimism about his team's chances. We smiled politely. Then watched his confidence turn out to be entirely justified.

Cabo Verde got the draw. Uruguay went out. Around us were stunned faces and sky-blue tears. We permitted ourselves a small karmic smile. Nothing excessive. We're not monsters.

Three nights later came one of the golden tickets of the trip. Scotland v Brazil. We'd received resale offers of around $3,000 from desperate Scots, which could have funded a fair chunk of the trip. But when would we ever get a chance to watch Brazil at the World Cup again? Football won. Obviously.

Outside the stadium, the FIFA live sites had become miniature nightclubs. Brazilian dancers. Scottish bagpipes. Music everywhere. Supporters from countries that had nothing to do with either team. That is another strange joy of a World Cup. A neutral game rarely feels neutral. Everybody picks somebody.

Inside, the actual contest was rather less balanced. Brazil tore Scotland apart. At one point a statistic circulated suggesting Scotland had spent a total of forty-seven seconds in Brazil's half. It somehow felt generous.

For Scotland supporters, the result probably hurt. For everyone else, watching Brazil at a World Cup still has a particular magic. The shirts. The songs. The expectation. That sense that somewhere in every Brazilian team exists the possibility of something ridiculous happening. Even when they are dismantling somebody else's dream.

Which brings me to the Scottish father and son in front of us. At full time they were both in tears, and the dad turned around and asked if I'd talk to his eight-year-old boy. So I told him about Australia's 32 years in the wilderness. The heartbreak and the tears. Iran in '97. And then the glorious return in 2005, when it all finally meant something. It will happen to Scotland too, I told him. Hold on.

Between matches we kept collecting oddities.

At bars we handed out stickers showing a kangaroo kicking down the Space Needle. Americans genuinely begged for them. A group of new friends decided the correct placement was on their backsides. It wasn't exactly the intended brand application. But it remains possibly the most effective unpaid marketing campaign in Strip Tees history.

The march to Santa Clara

Then the trip reached Santa Clara. And suddenly all the jokes, food, shirts, strangers and transport nightmares narrowed back down to the reason we'd crossed the Pacific. Australia. Paraguay. A place in the knockout stage.

We joined the Socceroos march through streets that looked as though they'd been designed by a committee charged with producing “pleasant suburban California”. Spanish Revival houses. Wide roads. Bemused locals standing in driveways as thousands of Australians in yellow streamed past singing.

There is something wonderful about a football march. Thousands of people who have travelled separately suddenly become one moving thing. Everyone heading towards the same stadium. Everyone carrying their own history of why the match matters.

From our seats high at the back of Levi's Stadium we watched something that still feels slightly strange to write. A South American team appeared scared of Australia. Not respectful. Scared.

Paraguay sat deep. They protected space. They played for safety. Australia dominated.

There was a time when taking a point from almost any South American opponent would have been presented as evidence that a golden generation had arrived. Now one was parking the bus against us. Football changes slowly until suddenly it doesn't.

For ninety minutes the Socceroos controlled the game and booked only the third trip to the knockout stages in Australian history. The final whistle went. Twenty-three days of travelling suddenly had a footballing justification. Not that it needed one. But it was nice to have.

We celebrated. We sang. We stayed in the stadium longer than necessary.

Then came the walk. Several kilometres in search of an Uber. At which point I'd like to formally apologise to Homebush for every negative thing I've ever said about getting home from Stadium Australia. You don't know what you've got until you're standing beside a freeway in Santa Clara desperately refreshing a rideshare app.

The long way home

The trip signed off with a road trip to West Hollywood, where along the way we spotted sea lions and sea otters. Actual sea lions and sea otters. Lolling about metres from our lunch table. You don't expect a nature documentary with your lunch, which is presumably part of the appeal.

Once there, we somehow crashed a glamorous hip hop industry party, made new friends at an exclusive rooftop venue and caught bands at The Viper Room. Yet the most surprising thing of all was watching Germany lose a penalty shootout in a dive bar in East LA.

The tournament continued without us physically there. The knockout match against Egypt was watched jet-lagged from home. It still stings. That's football's arrangement. It gives you everything and then reminds you it owes you nothing.

But even in defeat, something about this Socceroos group felt different. Young. Talented. Growing. 2030 suddenly didn't feel like an abstract future tournament. It felt like the next trip.

Which is ridiculous. We've only just recovered from this one. The spreadsheet has barely stopped smoking.

But that's what following football does. You complain about the flights. You complain about FIFA. You complain about ticket prices, exit queues, transport, plastic cutlery and beer that costs more than lunch. Then somebody announces the next tournament and within five minutes you're checking accommodation.

Because ultimately none of those things are what you remember.

I remember Daniel Arcucci pointing at a Maradona shirt in Mexico City. I remember the Burundian Uber driver lighting up at the name Irankunda. I remember a small boy carrying bootleg Strip Tees stickers. I remember a lone South African becoming a hero in a Mexican bar. I remember tequila on a rooftop.

Scorpion tacos. Crickets. Lucha libre. A fake Bavarian village. A brass band playing Nirvana. A room full of strangers singing Down Under. Young Scots trying to conquer American licensing laws. Cuban-American brothers who became mates for an evening. A Cabo Verde supporter who knew something we didn't. Delivery robots. Sea lions and sea otters. Stickers on backsides. Yothu Yindi outside a stadium in Vancouver. A yellow river of Australians flowing through Santa Clara. And a South American team sitting deep because they were worried about the Socceroos.

The matches give a World Cup its structure. They tell you where to be and when. Everything else fills the spaces between.

And perhaps that's why football travel becomes addictive. You think you're going somewhere to see something. Instead you meet people you would never otherwise meet, enter places you would never otherwise visit and collect stories you couldn't possibly have planned.

For twenty-three days, the world gets smaller. A bloke from Burundi in Seattle supports Australia. An Argentinian journalist in Mexico admires an Australian Maradona shirt. Mexicans dance with South Africans the night before trying to beat them. Australians sing a song from 1981 to a room full of Americans who have absolutely no idea what is happening and eventually decide to join in anyway.

Football creates the excuse. People do the rest.

Going to a World Cup remains an enormous privilege. But perhaps the privilege isn't simply getting to watch the world's best footballers. It's getting to temporarily inhabit this strange travelling community built around them. A place where a shirt can start a conversation. Where a stranger can become a friend before you've finished your drink. Where you can travel halfway around the world and somehow keep finding pieces of home.

We went for the football. Of course we did. But when we talk about 2026 in twenty years' time, I suspect the goals will only be the beginning. The stories will be everything around them.

And yes, 2030 is coming. We'll be there. Privilege acknowledged. Spreadsheet already open.