France Opens Its Arms
The worst thing that could happen before a World Cup final happened to my friends and me: every bar was full.
It was July 15, 2018. France was about to play Croatia in the World Cup final, and my friends and I had left home early, convinced we’d have no trouble finding somewhere to watch the biggest match in football. We couldn’t have been more wrong.
Every terrace was overflowing. Every screen was surrounded by crowds dressed in blue, white and red. With kickoff fast approaching, we moved from one bar to the next, hoping to find a free table or even just enough room to stand.
Then, all at once, the city erupted. Cheers echoed through every street, people threw their arms into the air, and complete strangers embraced one another. We hadn’t seen a single second of the match, but we knew France had scored.
We started running. Not to celebrate, since we hadn’t even seen the goal, but to find a screen. Somewhere. Anywhere. We wanted to know what everyone else had just witnessed.
We ran with no destination in mind, desperately hoping to find somewhere to watch the match. As the minutes passed, our optimism slowly faded. Eventually, we slowed to a walk, still scanning every street for a television.
That’s when we saw it: an open ground-floor window, with a television broadcasting the match inside. We stopped for a few moments, grateful just to catch a glimpse of the game, careful not to intrude. Then someone inside noticed us, smiled, and waved us over. Moments later, we found ourselves stepping into the home of people we’d never met, as if we’d known each other for years.
My friends and I looked at each other for a second. I hesitated. It felt strange to walk into the home of someone I’d never met, but their smile made it feel like the most natural thing in the world. We didn’t need to be asked twice. We gathered around the television and settled in for the rest of the match. Within minutes, the awkwardness had disappeared, replaced by the easy camaraderie that football seemed capable of creating.
The second half flew by. Goals from Paul Pogba and Kylian Mbappé put France firmly in control, and although Croatia pulled one back, nobody in the room seemed to believe the trophy would slip away.
When the final whistle blew, we all jumped to our feet. We hugged each other without thinking: my friends, our hosts, people whose names I never even learned. For those few seconds, we weren’t strangers anymore.
We rushed back outside. The streets we had been racing through in search of a television only a couple of hours earlier had become a sea of celebration. People were singing, waving flags, honking their car horns, and embracing anyone who crossed their path. We joined in without hesitation, singing Ramenez la coupe à la maison at the top of our lungs as we ran through the streets, carried away by the joy of a victory that somehow felt shared by everyone around us.
Growing up, I never really cared about football. To me, it was just 22 people chasing a ball around a pitch. I never understood why people became so emotionally invested in the game.
Looking back, the memory that stayed with me from the 2018 World Cup final has very little to do with football itself. Eight years later, I don’t remember every pass, every save, or even every goal. What I remember is an unexpected invitation, a home that welcomed strangers, and the feeling that, for one afternoon, football had turned strangers into friends.
I still wouldn’t call myself a football fan. But ever since that afternoon, I’ve understood that football isn’t always about what happens on the pitch. Sometimes, it has the power to make an entire country feel like one community.
