Can America have its own World Cup fairy tale like Germany in 2006?

In the summer of 2006, Germany did something that still sounds slightly improbable to Germans who remember the country before it. It became pleasant.

For four weeks, a nation more often associated with efficiency than ease found itself smiling in public. Flags appeared in windows and on cars without the old unease. Foreign fans filled railway stations, city squares, and beer gardens. Police officers posed for photographs. Volunteers gave directions. Strangers talked to strangers. The weather helped. So did the sport. But the memory that survived was not a match, a goal, or a final result. It was the mood.

Germany had given the tournament a motto that many foreigners first understood only after arriving: “Die Welt zu Gast bei Freunden.” The world as guests among friends. It was a simple sentence, and for Germany a rather bold one. Friendliness had never been the first word that came to mind when the world thought of the Federal Republic. Reliability, perhaps. Discipline, certainly. Prosperity, too. But friendliness was a different claim.

The country did not argue for it. It demonstrated it. That is why the 2006 World Cup still matters beyond football. Visitors moved through a Germany that felt different from the one they had expected. The old image was still there, but it now had competition from memory.

The United States is now hosting the World Cup in a moment very different from Germany’s summer of 2006. For a long time, America carried a natural advantage in Europe. It was familiar, admired, argued with, copied, and criticized, but rarely felt distant. That has changed.

In recent years, the European image of America has hardened. Trump, migration fights, campus protests, tariffs, Iran the language of political confrontation have come to dominate the picture. Much of it now reaches Europeans through a media filter that leaves little room for ordinary American life. One German newspaper recently twisted Germany’s old 2006 motto into a dark joke about the United States: “Die Welt zu Gast bei Feinden” — the world as guests among enemies.

That line matters because it captures the change. America is no longer merely criticized in Europe. It is increasingly imagined as unfriendly. The World Cup can test that image against reality.

Spend a few days in the United States and the picture becomes harder to keep intact. Visitors meet a country that is less hostile than the commentary around it. They meet Americans who ask where they are from and stay for the answer. They find a level of casual helpfulness that Europeans often forget to expect. They move through cities, airports, restaurants, and stadiums, and the country begins to detach itself from the argument about it.

That is why the German comparison matters. In 2006, the world did not discover that Germany had become another country. It discovered that the old picture had missed something. The same could happen now in America. The point is difficult to transmit through politics because it belongs to experience. It is felt in a conversation, in a moment of help, in the gradual realization that the country is not moving according to the script one brought from home.

Millions of visitors are arriving with opinions, anxieties, and borrowed judgments. They are arriving tired from flights, confused by distances, impressed by scale, irritated by prices, curious despite themselves. They need directions. They wait in lines. They sit next to Americans in stadiums and at bars. They travel between cities that do not resemble one another. They discover, often in passing, that the United States is much harder to reduce once one has actually moved through it.

Some encounters will be bad. That is unavoidable. America is not built for the convenience of European tourists. Its distances are enormous. Its airports can be punishing. Its public transport is uneven. Its politics will not pause for the tournament. The country will still be loud, impatient, and difficult to summarize.

A tournament puts people inside the country they have spent years judging from outside. That changes the scale of the judgment.

Europe’s view of the United States has hardened at a dangerous moment. In Berlin, Paris, Brussels, and Vienna, America is discussed with a strange mixture of dependence and irritation. The continent still relies on American power, while many of its officials and commentators increasingly speak of America as a danger to be managed. This attitude has grown stronger since Donald Trump returned to the center of American politics. It will not disappear because a Dutch fan has a good conversation with a waitress in Dallas or a German family is helped by a stranger outside the stadium in Miami.

Yet politics often changes first in smaller places than politicians admit. A country becomes more difficult to despise after one has been treated well there. A caricature loses force when it collides with memory. The American argument in Europe has become stale because so much of it is conducted by people who experience the United States chiefly as a media event. The World Cup can interrupt that routine.

Marco Rubio‘s speech at the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 14 belongs in this background because it named a tension that many Europeans prefer to avoid: the habit of judging America while depending on it. Rubio, speaking in Munich as U.S. Secretary of State, said the United States and Europe “belong together,” but he also made clear that Washington expects Europe to rethink some of its own assumptions. During the World Cup, that argument leaves the conference hall and meets daily life.

Germany’s achievement in 2006 was modest only on the surface. It allowed visitors to add something to the old picture. America should not try to copy that summer. The countries are too different. Germany offered compactness, order, and an unexpected lightness. America offers distance, noise, and surprise. Its best moments will not look organized. They will happen in ordinary contact: at a hotel desk, outside a stadium, in a parking lot, at a roadside restaurant, during a delayed flight, in the small American habit of turning a practical question into a conversation.

The tournament matters most where no one is making a speech. A visitor asks for help, gets more than directions and suddenly the country feels less like a warning. The politics remain. The problems remain. But the visitor has now met the place before returning to the argument.

Germany’s motto in 2006 worked because it was tested in daily life. The world came as guests, and many left feeling that they had indeed been among friends. America has no need for such a neat sentence. Its promise is less orderly, more improvised, and harder to translate.

For a few weeks in 2026, Europeans have the chance to see the United States without a European commentator standing in front of it. That may be America’s real World Cup test.