Last night Jeff and I attended the US-Turkiye World Cup match. After my attempts to get normal tickets normally failed miserably, I was left with three options:

1. Not see any live soccer this World Cup
2. Buy resale tickets at a huge premium
3. Purchase a hospitality package

Still salty about my fortunes in each of the FIFA draws and at the prospect of paying scalpers, I settled for #3. The first US match (Paraguay) was super overpriced, Match 2 would have required visiting Jon, so I went with the third group stage match against our strongest opponent. An elimination round match would have been pretty awesome but it was impossible to know if the US would end up in Santa Clara, Dallas, or Kansas.


FIFA sent a lot of emails, including one saying there'd be great food and that we'd find out later about parking. Eventually they followed up and informed me that a VIP hospitality ticket did not include parking. I wasn't especially looking forward to the drive so I used it as an opportunity to take the fam back to Great Wolf Lodge.

Turns out Lyft is better than Uber.

GWL isn't especially close (45-60 minutes) to Inglewood but it's rideshare-able. Jeff reserved an Uber and, about a week later, was notified that his reservation was cancelled due to "changes in traffic conditions". Since the email had a heart picture this clearly wasn't a situation where Uber was trying to milk surge pricing. I tried the other rideshare service hoping for a different result, Jeff was skeptical. Sure enough, Lyft kept the reservation and proved again that it's Uber's less evil sibling.

Jersey review from some big box store's website.

The striped US home jerseys are heinous, looking like some sort of clown costume or a crumpled and discarded Where's Waldo (himself a bizarre creepster). The away tops, in contrast, are excellent. Alas, for whatever reason, all the replica jerseys seem to have sold out from the major outlets and haven't been restocked.

My fallback option wasn't bad, for my birthday Jes and Dani got me a bunch of US Soccer swag, including a classy US Soccer collared shirt.


The script said this would be an important match. Turkiye was our highest-ranked opponent and had some making dark horse claims. Meanwhile, who knows how we'd perform in the group stage. Well, the US won our first two matches, Turkiye lost its first two matches, and the other two drew in their head to head, so our six points won the group and Turkiye's 0 points meant elimination.

On paper, the match was meaningless. Perhaps not insignificant though it might provide some hint about:

1. Squad depth, since at least the players on yellows would be sitting
2. The ability of the Pochettino-era USMNT to compete in the elimination rounds

Regarding the second one, Paraguay and Australia played defensive ball, allowing the US (and Turkiye) to dominate possession while trying to score on breakaways or corners. Turkiye is, by all accounts, very good technically and showed it in their possession stats. So, for me, whether or not the United States could win the possession battle against Turkiye would be a good indicator of how we'd do against squads with enough quality to control the game.


The rideshare dropoff was opposite the stadium's hospitality entrance so we had a bit of walking, punctuated by a detour to the bag check because apparently an SL2 is a "professional camera".


The LA stadium is pretty awesome - open air under a giant fiberglass canopy and a big, eliptical jumbotron. I kind of wanted to walk around the concourses in search of a US away jersey but the hospitality entrance took us down to field level via a separate set of escalators. The field level concourse was barren, save for a few eateries so we retired to the hospitality suite.


The lounge had a DJ, a couple of bars, some food stations with lamb and chicken curry and s'mores.





The seats were great, we had a twelfth-row view of The McKennie Show. My only complaint is that the sightlines seem to have been based on an NFL-width field because we had to look at the jumbotron to see any action at the near-side corner flags.


Goals were scored at the beginning, middle, and end of the match. It was exciting, at least.

Soccer ambassador Will Ferrell had the cameras on him a couple of times and took the oppotunity to endorse the stadium dog. Sadly, the celebrity cam drew more crowd roars than any game action, save for the goals.

A win would have been great, a draw would have been fine, the final-minute loss was a bit disappointing. Since we already locked up the group win, I think I'm happy to have seen five great goals even if we only had two of them. I hope the defensive lapses are anomalies because the US possession and ability to play out of the press was unimpressive.

From Kilroy

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