CHICKENPIE.The match had ended in the way that matches like this — matches that the home crowd has been told, for the better part of three years, are supposed to go a different way — tend to end. Belgium 4, USA 1. Lumen Field, Seattle, sixty-six thousand nine hundred and twenty-five people in the stands, most of them in red white and blue, most of them, by the eighty-eighth minute, watching the scoreboard rather than the match. Charles De Ketelaere had scored twice, once in the ninth minute and once in the thirty-third, on the kind of runs that, against this USA defence, were never going to be the last runs. Malik Tillman had replied for the USA in the thirty-first minute — a sharp, slightly unlucky consolation that, at the time, briefly looked like the kind of goal that could change a match and that, in retrospect, changed nothing. Hans Vanaken had made it three in the fifty-seventh. Romelu Lukaku, in stoppage time, had made it four, with the kind of late goal that managers put on to a highlights reel and strikers put on a contract negotiation. The match had been over, in the way that matches are over when the home side has spent an hour chasing shadows and the away side has spent the same hour passing the ball around them, for a long time before the score said so.
The United States had entered this tournament, in the way that host nations always enter their own tournament, with the wind at its back and a brief that was more emotional than tactical. The team was, on paper, the youngest the country had ever sent to a World Cup. The team was, in practice, a side that had spent the previous eighteen months learning, in public, what it means to lose to teams that, on paper, you were not supposed to lose to. The group stage had gone fine, the way group stages go fine — three matches, two wins, a draw, the team through in second place behind a Dutch side that had spent the same three matches quietly making it clear that it was the best team in the group. The round of thirty-two, which the expanded format had produced for the first time, had gone less fine. The USA had, by the end of it, scored exactly enough and conceded exactly enough to make it through to the round of sixteen, which is the minimum a host nation is supposed to do at its own World Cup and which is also, by the standards of a country that had spent eleven years preparing for this exact tournament, a fairly thin outcome. The round of sixteen, against Belgium, in Seattle, on a Monday night in July, was the place where the brief was going to be tested. The USA lost. The brief was not met. The team walked off the pitch in the way teams walk off pitches when they have lost, and not the way teams walk off pitches when they have been told, for three years, that they were not supposed to lose.
Belgium end USA's World Cup dream with a dominant 4-1 win in the Round of 16. The host nation is out. — CNN, on the result in Seattle
The match had also, for seventy-two hours before it kicked off, not been about football at all. The Folarin Balogun red card, which had been issued in the closing minutes of the round-of-thirty-two match against Bosnia and Herzegovina and which had, under FIFA's standard disciplinary framework, ruled Balogun out of the round of sixteen, had been reversed. The reversal was not, in any reading of the relevant statutes, a routine piece of football administration. The reversal followed a public intervention by the President of the United States, who had stated, on a social-media platform that he owns, that the red card was wrong, and who had, in a phone call to the FIFA president that the relevant parties have not denied, asked for it to be reviewed. FIFA, which is the body that runs the World Cup and which is also, by the structure of its statutes, supposed to be insulated from political interference from the host governments of the tournaments it runs, had, by Friday afternoon, reversed the suspension. UEFA, the body that runs European football, issued a statement calling the reversal a piece of political manipulation that undermined the integrity of the disciplinary process. The Royal Belgian Football Association, whose quarter-final the ruling had just made harder, filed an appeal. The appeal was denied. Balogun, who had been scheduled to miss the round of sixteen, played the round of sixteen. He played it the way a striker plays when the tournament he has spent a month preparing for is being decided, in the stands and in the press box, by arguments he is not part of. He did not score. He was substituted in the ninety-second minute, with the score at four-one, with nothing to chase, with the match already over.
The USA is the last of the three host nations to be eliminated from this tournament. Canada had gone out in the round of sixteen, beaten by Morocco in a match that was tighter than the scoreline and that was, in the way that host-nation losses are always something, also a referendum on what Canadian football had spent the previous four years trying to become. Mexico had gone out next, beaten by England in a match that was less tight than the scoreline and that was, in the way that host-nation losses are always something, also a referendum on what Mexican football had spent the previous four years trying to stop becoming. The USA, on Monday night, completed the set. The three co-hosts are out. The tournament continues without any of the three countries whose flags were, on the front of every ticket, on the side of every stadium, on the back of every volunteer jacket for the last month. The football, for the next ten days, belongs to the other thirty teams that came here to win it and to the broadcast partners and to the host-city organising committees that are going to be running the next ten days of matches in their stadiums without their national teams in the tournament for the first time in their modern history. Mr. Chicken was there for all of it. Mr. Chicken was there for Canada and Mexico, in earlier illustrations, in earlier pieces, in the parts of the tournament that the three hosts all got to play. Mr. Chicken is here, on a Monday night in Seattle, in the lower-right corner of the lower bowl, in a tiny USA scarf, with his wings folded, watching the last host walk off the pitch in the same direction that the other two hosts walked off theirs — head down, hands at their sides, the tournament over before any of the three of them had wanted it to be over.
Belgium play the winner of the round-of-sixteen match between Spain and Bosnia and Herzegovina in the quarterfinals on Friday. The match, on paper, is the kind of match that Belgium — a side that has spent the last decade being told, by every major tournament, that this is its year — has been waiting for. The match, in practice, is also the second match of the next round for a Belgian squad that has spent the last ninety minutes not celebrating a four-one win over the host nation but, in the polite way that professional footballers are polite, acknowledging that it has just won a four-one win over the host nation. The USA squad flies home. The USA squad had spent, before Monday night, eleven years preparing for this exact tournament. The USA squad is going home having scored four goals in four matches, having conceded seven, having made it through to the round of sixteen, having lost in the round of sixteen, having had one of its players reinstated by FIFA at the request of the President of the United States, having had that reinstatement appealed by the team it was about to play, having had the appeal denied, having played the match anyway, having lost the match by three goals, having walked off the pitch in Seattle in the same way the Canadian team walked off the pitch in Vancouver and the Mexican team walked off the pitch in Mexico City — head down, hands at their sides, the tournament over. There are worse ways to leave a World Cup. There are also better ones. Mr. Chicken was there for the whole thing, in the lower-right corner of the stadium, in a tiny USA scarf, with his wings folded, watching the last host walk off, the way a chicken watches anything — quietly, from a corner, with the kind of attention that does not need to be in the centre of the frame to be in the centre of the moment.
