A month before Senegal’s first 2026 World Cup match, Oumar updated his WhatsApp status. In the photo, he stands in the middle of a bright white stairwell, lit by overhead LEDs bouncing off mirrors on the walls. His back to the camera, Oumar looks down at the bottom of the stairs. Glossy tiles glow beneath his feet. He places one hand lightly on the railing like a debutante, while his other hand points back to the vinyl numbers printed on the back of his green jersey: 221, Senegal’s area code. Above him hovers the word HOME and a giant red arrow, pointing down. At first, I thought it was a caption that Oumar had superimposed on the image. But then I recognized it as a sign hanging from the ceiling in the Home Goods section of the LotLess where Oumar works as a security guard. Over the year and a half that he’s worked there, all manner of occasions—Eid, July 4, his birthday—have been commemorated on those steps.
He had ordered the jersey from his friend in Dakar who runs a flock printing business. Three years ago, they were living and working in the same neighborhood, where Oumar operated a small shop selling phone accessories and made silver bracelets on the side. Then Oumar flew to Nicaragua, before walking, busing, and riding on horseback to the southern border of the US, which he crossed in 2023, along with thousands of other Senegalese émigrés and nationals of dozens of other countries. This would be their first World Cup in the United States.
Throughout the month of May, Oumar periodically reposted the HOME image to his WhatsApp. On June 16, the day of Senegal’s first game, he added a caption to the bottom of the image: Allez les lions, Let’s go lions, with three fire emojis and two flexing Black biceps. He sent me a text to confirm the address of the place where we would watch the match together. Senegal would be playing their colonizer, France. A couple weeks earlier, Oumar had sent me a photo of a painting he’d made of a lion with one of its front paws on a football and the other on the head of a cock, forcing it to bow. The lion’s body was painted in the tricolor of the Senegalese flag, with a small green star on its torso, while the cock was a patriotic ombré of the French blue, red, and white. To their delight, I’d shared it before the match with a Mauritanian cab driver, a Senegalese friend selling fake Gucci on Canal Street, and a Malian trash collector living in the Parisian banlieues. Senegal is the de facto team for many sub-Saharan African fans whose own countries didn’t qualify, particularly those in West Africa. Guineans, Burkinabés, Malians, Mauritanians, Gambians, and even Chadians I knew all had their hopes riding on the Lions of Teranga.
Oumar had scheduled a dentist appointment on the morning of the match. He’d been suffering from a chronic toothache in one of his back molars and, when he spoke, he would delicately rest his long, thin hand flat against his cheek to ease the pain of talking. In the evenings, he’d suck on a few cloves or steep them in water to make a healing tea. He called me from the dentist’s office less than an hour before kickoff, still waiting in the lobby while the receptionist sorted out an issue with his insurance.
We were planning to meet at the same Mauritanian café where I had watched Senegal play Morocco in the AFCON finals in Rabat less than a year earlier. The match nearly fell apart in extra time when the referee disallowed a Senegalese goal after calling a foul, awarding Morocco a penalty in the process. In protest, Senegal’s coach, Pape Thiaw, strode onto the field in a long puffer jacket and waved his team off the pitch and into the dressing room, where they remained for nearly ten minutes. It was Senegal’s most decorated player, Sadio Mané, who brought the team back out to win the game. The incident was both celebrated and condemned by the Senegalese diaspora, who either felt that the walk-off was a righteous objection to poor treatment by their Moroccan hosts or an embarrassing confirmation of old European stereotypes about Black African teams: that they are disorganized and less tactical as a team, even if the individual players are superskilled. Senegal’s victory was overturned and given to Morocco two months later by the Confederation of African Football, the organization that runs AFCON, and Thiaw was slapped with a $100,000 fine and a five-game coaching ban.
Thiaw was on the roster, as a player, for Senegal’s 2002 World Cup debut, where they also faced France in their first match. In an underdog miracle, Papa Bouba Diop scored the only goal of the game, ran to the corner of the field and laid down his jersey, before dancing around it in a small circle with his teammates. Eleven-year-old Oumar watched the game while working at his uncle’s corner store in Dakar. “C’était chaud,” he said. “It was lit.” People flocked to the store to buy liter bottles of Coca-Cola and Fanta, and then passed out cups of the cool, sweet sodas for free as the entire city came out into the streets to celebrate. “We sprayed it over ourselves like the players did. It’s when we started to dream that Senegal could really become something.”
As a kid, Oumar played football in secret, “at the edges of the city before the police came to chase us away.” He was born and raised in Touba, a holy city in central Senegal that had banned the sport. To watch football matches, he walked three hours south to the neighboring town of Mbacké. “You leave at 1 to get to the stadium at 4. Then you wait for the police to pass and hop over the stadium wall.” Oumar’s older brother Modou had been a local star. “He could shoot with both feet. He could dribble through people like Messi.” For a time, Oumar and Modou both lived in their grandmother’s village of Diout ngeul, south of Touba. “When Modou was much younger, maybe eleven, players ten years older drove two hours from Mbacké to the village to get Modou to play for their navétane teams,” Oumar told me.
Navétanes are grassroots football leagues in Senegal, named after the Wolof word for the rainy season during which games are played. After the sport was imported by French colonists, navétanes grew out of its most popular and improvised form—street pick-up games played among teams representing cities, neighborhoods, or villages. The leagues mobilize entire communities and their local economies: Women cook food and collect donations for the team, tailors sew clothing and banners in the team’s colors, and collectives form to manage the team and its resources. Those social collectives often develop into de facto political bodies, advocating for their communities and endorsing candidates for local elections. Oumar used to assist his printshop friend during the navétanes season when demand for jerseys was overwhelming. Now, he watches his neighborhood games on YouTube during his lunch break at LotLess. Livestreams of navétanes have recently boomed in popularity, catering to a growing diaspora audience, some of whom send money back home to support the teams. From the sidelines, local journalists—or sometimes even just kids with phones—broadcast matches so friends and fans abroad can tune in.
Modou’s navétane glory days came to an end when the brothers moved to Dakar to work in their uncle’s corner store and apprentice as silversmiths. They finally lived near the stadiums of their favorite teams but had no time to watch the games. Oumar, who had never watched television before, was forced to become a screen fan as he worked from dawn to dusk. His uncle had a television in the shop to watch games played in European leagues: “I would see him scream and jump when somebody scored, so I copied him.”
If navétane leagues are the popular, grassroots expression of local football talent, elite Senegalese youth academies, imported and financed primarily by French clubs, represent that talent’s transformation into a commodity for international markets. Up until 2025, France’s Olympique Lyonnais, for instance, had a longstanding partnership with Senegal’s AS Dakar Sacré-Coeur. The French academy would export coaching and training expertise to Sacré-Coeur, who would then ship out their best players to Lyon, collecting transfer fees and sell-on clauses in return. Over their twenty-three-year partnership, France’s FC Metz has invested more than 10 million euros into the Dakar-based youth training academy Génération Foot. Like a purchase option on a mineral reserve, Metz has first right of refusal on the talent produced by the academy they finance. While Metz acquired Sadio Mané and Isamïla Sarr (a winger for Crystal Palace) for free from Génération Foot, they earned 4 million euros from Mané in 2012 and 17 million from Sarr in 2017 on transfer fees alone.
Meanwhile, the scouting and mining of local players for export leaves domestic football leagues bereft of their finest players. Despite the country’s high international ranking, teams in Senegal’s domestic leagues don’t even rank among the top fifteen of African clubs, beaten out by clubs in lower GDP-per-capita states like Rwanda, Guinea, and Tanzania who pay their players more. Among up-and-coming players, the desire to leave Senegal and play abroad is so intense that players are often tricked into scams. Fake scouts lure the young men into trafficking schemes, take their money and leave them stranded abroad with fake papers. But Senegal’s footballers are like the rest of the country’s émigrés, who know they could get more for their labor power abroad than at home. Oumar had made more or less the same calculation.
Oumar and I watched Senegal’s first game, which was being played just across the river in New Jersey, on a television screen in a Brooklyn café, surrounded by spectators who weren’t quite sure what it meant to be fans from this place. The room was sparsely peopled with the Gen Z children of African immigrants and Americans with a passing interest in the sport. Oumar, who arrived late, tooth still aching after his insurance was denied by the dentist, sat next to a young Senegalese–American woman. She greeted him in French, but didn’t know more than “Ça va.” “You speak Wolof?” Oumar asked her in English. She shook her head.
The hotly anticipated Senegal–France rematch was a long, slow deflation. The room was quiet as France easily pulled ahead, first with a goal by Kylian Mbappé and then another by Bradley Barcola. It wasn’t until stoppage time began that Ibrahim Mbaye dribbled past the French left back, who fell to the ground, leaving just the keeper between Mbaye and the goal. His shot glanced off Mike Maignan’s fingertips and ricocheted into the net, making the 18-year-old Mbaye the youngest African player to ever score in a World Cup. Tall, thin Oumar, usually unhurried and measured in all things, sprung up out of his seat in celebration. The rest of the café barely reacted, its spectators unsure, and already too resigned to defeat. Oumar took a few paces and then, with nowhere to go in the cramped room, promptly turned and sat back down in silence. Even the possibility of redemption was shortlived; one minute later, Mbappé scored a beautiful, soaring goal from far out, and the game was over.
A few days after the match, Oumar called me five times in a row. When I saw the missed calls, I rang him immediately. He was in a disciplinary meeting with his manager because he had allegedly incurred three “Tardiness and Absence” violations over the last thirty days. “This my friend. She explain me,” I heard him say to his manager in English. Oumar turned on his video feed to show me the document he was looking at. It listed three dates on which Oumar had shown up late to work or called out at the last minute. He often came down with colds. When our friends played pick-up games, he attended them faithfully only to sit on the sidelines, afraid his asthma would flare up. (Oumar’s favorite player, the Senegalese right back Krépin Diatta, had fallen ill during the AFCON finals, with inexplicable fainting spells that left him hospitalized. “He cares about his team until the very end,” Oumar said.) “Oumar has actually had four violations,” his manager said, “but I decided not to count one of them.” She repeated this statement and double-checked to make sure that I had translated it accurately, maybe hoping that Oumar would be appreciative that she had delayed the disciplinary action she was currently taking. I explained it a second time to Oumar. “Okay,” he said. But she retracted her generosity when Oumar pointed out that one of the violations was a result of a miscommunication on her part. “You have three violations anyways, so it doesn’t change anything.”
The final violation had occurred on the day of the Senegal–France game. “I had a dentist appointment that day,” I translated for Oumar. “That’s why we scheduled you to start later in the day,” his manager insisted. “But you didn’t show up.” Oumar listened to my translation into French and laughed. “Yes. I scheduled the appointment that day to see the game,” he admitted. “But don’t translate that.”
“There was a long wait at the dentist’s office,” I said.
An advertisement for DoorDash and Casamigos tequila played over and over on the TV in the corner of Le Baobab restaurant in Harlem. In shaky first-person perspective, it showed a bike delivery guy catching fragments of an ongoing football match as he makes various game day deliveries—in apartments, board rooms, and restaurants. For his last pickup, he collects a bottle of tequila from a corner store and delivers it to a World Cup watch party in a spacious apartment. As the apartment door swings open, a goal is scored, the guests erupt into cheers, and the delivery guy is whisked into the room for communal celebration with Casamigos margaritas. Your delivery guy doesn’t hate you, the ad promises, he wants to party with you.
Outside the restaurant in the afternoon sun, 116th Street moved in slow motion. The block had been cordoned off by dozens of police officers stationed there to control a World Cup crowd that never materialized. Delivery bikers were stopped at the barricades by the police and rerouted. Those who managed to get past had to walk their bikes in the middle of the road. The ascending, rapid chime of UberEats notification pings from the drivers’ phones echoed down the quiet street and into the restaurant as deliveries stalled. The corners of the small dining room were cluttered with the helmets and cubical cooler packs of the drivers who flowed in and out of the restaurant as the ad played overhead. The manic, drunken celebrations portrayed on the screen soured in a room filled with despondent, gig-working, Muslim fans.
The week before, Senegal had lost to Norway in their second game. On that day, June 26, they would need to beat Iraq by at least four goals to have any hope of advancing. Everyone in Le Baobab—by far the most well-known Senegalese restaurant in the city—blamed coach Thiaw for Senegal’s World Cup defeats. He’d favored older, more experienced players who could no longer keep pace with the likes of Mbappé and Haaland. Everyone I spoke to agreed: “Football is for young men.” A star like Mbaye shouldn’t be left warming the bench for an entire first half just because he’s young, they complained. In the match against Norway, Kalidou Koulibaly, a 35-year-old veteran player, hadn’t been replaced until the seventy-second minute, despite looking visibly fatigued.
“Thiaw is complexé,” my friend Daouda explained. He usually sold luxury lookalike purses on Canal Street, but during the World Cup he was hawking knockoff jerseys for anywhere between $10 to $200. “He plays only the ones who are recognized on the world stage. Even if the others are better.” Complexé is the term used by Senegalese to appraise those who still suffer from a colonial mentality, such as women who apply skin-whitening cream. “Senegal is rich,” Daouda continued, “but we’re exploited.” He spoke about the players like an international scout, as a natural resource, akin to fish stocks or offshore oil deposits.
The critique of Thiaw by young diasporic Senegalese was often followed by a broader gripe about their elders. Those I know in the cohort of Senegalese asylum seekers who arrived in the US post-Covid via Nicaragua have often described financial precarity in their new country as owing to the incompetence of their stateside uncles, who had arrived twenty years earlier but failed to establish viable lives. “How can you come here and spend your whole life working like a dog for nothing?” one young man averred after his uncle refused to house him in his apartment when he arrived in New York City. He was working as a delivery biker. “This isn’t a real job. It’s just what you do when you aren’t stable,” he said. His uncles were also driving for Uber; they were just doing it in cars.
Senegal’s diasporic football fans were eager to usher out old heroes and replace them with new ones. This generation’s rising stars, figures like Ibrahim Mbaye and Mamadou Sarr, were born and raised in France and trained in elite French leagues, but had nonetheless committed to playing for Senegal. These were the rare second-generation children realizing the dream of the emigrant parent: the ability to choose when and where to move, the ability to return. Even sweeter if that return meant spurning France. Thiaw was wasting them.
My friend Abdoulaye arrived at Le Baobab after an UberEats shift in an American jersey. I texted a photo of him to his older sister in Dakar. “I’m here supporting Senegal, but your brother’s become American,” I teased. “Lol this time that’s bad news for us,” she responded. Normally, Fatou and the rest of Abdoulaye’s family experienced his assimilation as presents and cash—used iPhones, authentic Beats headphones, and other remittances—that he diligently sent back home. Hidden from them were the grueling hours of e-bike delivery for less-than-minimum wage that made up the majority of his life in the US. Abdoulaye confessed that his American jersey had nothing to do with his loyalties, which remained firmly with Senegal. He was wearing it to “do a little diplomacy.” “I have a Mexican jersey too” he said. “I put it on if my client has a Latino name. Or Colombia. This one,” he said, gesturing to his USMNT jersey, “I wear this one for Americans. It helps with tips.”
We ordered plates of dibi, a tough, grilled meat eaten as a street food in Dakar and bouy, baobab fruit powder mixed with sweetened condensed milk. Friends and strangers came over to share our meal. Many were on short breaks between shifts and some couldn’t afford plates of food on their own. We put on blue rubber gloves to handle the rice and meat as the game kicked off above us.
The anti-Thiaw faction was almost immediately vindicated when 22-year-old center midfielder Habib Diarra, who hadn’t made an appearance until the final moments of the previous two games, scored the first goal of the match in just four minutes. Then, a red card for Iraqi center back Rebin Sulaka after fourteen minutes gave Senegal a one-man advantage for nearly the entire match.
As the DoorDash ad came on again, Abdoulaye laughed. He’d watched Senegal’s first game just like the worker in the beginning of the ad, stitching it together in ten-minute intervals stolen between each delivery. “You just have to wait in the restaurant without validating the order,” he said. “You can watch ten, sometimes fifteen minutes before the client calls and then you have to go.”
“Sometimes clients ask for ‘No Contact’ deliveries. I hate that. They see my photo in the app and decide they don’t want to look at me. Once I was leaving a delivery outside an apartment and the client accidentally came out. He was African.”
“One time the clients invited me into their house for dinner. A Bangladeshi family. It’s because they were Muslims. And delivery drivers.”
When Senegal notched their second goal, the restaurant came alive. Delivery drivers who had been watching distractedly began canceling their shifts to stay till the end. Waitresses, looking to accommodate a growing crowd, tried to kick out idling spectators, but other patrons came to their aid. “He’s with us!” one man said about a stranger, sitting two tables away from him, who then rushed over to the man’s table where they watched the rest of the match together.
Suddenly, four goals seemed within reach. Whenever the Senegalese offense touched the ball, tables around me pleaded, “Duggal, duggal!” to manifest another. “They need four, but five is safer,” said a guy sitting next to me. He had been running convoluted mental math as the France-Norway game unfolded simultaneously in Boston, calculating and recalculating the victory margin Senegal needed to advance. Two clean back-to-back goals by Papa Gueye miraculously brought the game to 4–0. The man sitting next to us had taken off his Bayern Munich jersey and pulled out a Senegal jersey that he had been hiding in his backpack. He promised that he wouldn’t wear it before the end, watching the game in a white undershirt for fear of jinxing the result. He’d been waiting nearly three years to argue his immigration case before a judge who seemed unlikely to approve it. “Maybe we’d be better off in Canada,” he wondered.
Unlike the first two games at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, this game was being played in Toronto. Senegalese journalists with approved US visas for the tournament were told that they wouldn’t be let back into the country if they went to Canada to cover the game; it was the latest in a series of scandals concerning Senegalese border-crossing. Six months earlier, DHS had placed sweeping travel restrictions upon any and all Senegalese nationals seeking to enter the United States, threatening tourists with up to $15,000 in temporary visa bonds and forced reviews of the last five years of their private communications, which amounted to an almost complete travel ban. Rumors and videos had been circulating online alleging that the Senegalese team had been excessively searched by US customs upon their arrival, though some of them turned out to be AI-generated.
As Iliman Ndiaye scored a fifth goal—all but confirming Senegal’s place in the Round of 32—an older man in the corner of the restaurant wearing a cabbie hat smiled and began to softly sing the refrain to one of Senegal’s national hymns: “Gal gaa ngi rëbbi. Gal gaa ngi rëbbi. Ëllëk ci suba teel dinañu dem Sénégal.” Those around him sang along: “The boats are out fishing. Early tomorrow morning we’ll return to Senegal.”
Popularized during the independence era, the song was transformed into a football anthem by the famous singer Khar Mbaye Madiaga, who recorded a version of it with the national team’s players for the 2002 World Cup. A Senegalese friend explaining the lyrics pointed out that it’s unclear whether the returning fishermen had had any maritime success. “They earn something, they come back. They earn nothing, they come back,” he said. “Either way, they always come back.” The dream of departure, he pointed out, is always a dream of return. “It’s like us. We came here and one day we’ll go back.” In 2002, all but one player on Senegal’s starting squad was born in Senegal. In 2026, nearly half of them were born elsewhere.
Senegal’s final match ended in disaster, but little grief. This was a spectatorship accustomed to the shifting allegiances and political contradictions of belonging to a football fandom outside of Europe. Raised on the glamour and theatrics of the Champions League, the question even for West Africans, ultimately, is whether you prefer Messi or Ronaldo. As a Mauritanian friend put it, via a poll on his WhatsApp status, after Belgium beat Senegal 3–2: “Chameleons, which team shall we jump to next?”
While I watched the Spain–France semifinal at a bar in Crown Heights, a friend called me from inside an ICE detention center in New Jersey, where he was also watching, and where he had been for nearly a year.
In his home country, he’d been a farmer, but he had also played football as a center midfielder in minor leagues. The first time I ever spoke with him about football, he’d laid out his loyalties clearly: Barça, Marseilles, Chelsea, Dortmund. “Those are my teams.” His favorite player was Messi. “My son has known how to play since he was born.” His son, who is now 8 years old, was 5 the last time they’d seen one another.
In his early thirties he’d fled to Brazil, before trekking north past corpses in Darién to become a manager at a Domino’s in a small American city. This is where ICE had arrested him. The detention center he is being held in is about fifteen minutes south of MetLife Stadium, where the final was due to be played. “When we have outdoor time, we try to listen in case we can hear the fans,” he said. But surrounded by Port Newark—the largest shipping port in the northeast—an asphalt mixing factory, half a dozen chemical plants, two sewage treatment centers, an IKEA, and a landfill, and further boxed in by highways stretching across every direction, the only audible sounds were those of clanging supply chains and whirring machines, accompanied by the taste of burnt plastic in the air.
When he called, Spain was up by one goal. He was watching the game in the dayroom used by detainees in his cellblock. “From what I’ve seen, the only people in the world who don’t like football are Americans. They locked up all the people who wanted to watch the games.”
“We have two television screens in here. One in English and one in Spanish. I always watch the Spanish screen because that’s where everyone is. When you get up to go piss, you come back and somebody else is in your spot.” His cellmates were Cubans, Dominicans, Guatemalans, Ecuadorians, Mexicans, Venezuelans, Hondurans. With nothing else to do and few to talk to in his own languages, he’d started to learn Spanish. He’d previously been with other West Africans but had been shuffled around after participating in a hunger strike to protest the overcrowding, lack of medical care, and rotten food at the facility. He’d been sprayed with tear gas and kept in solitary confinement for days before eventually being transferred. In his new block, he prayed alone.
When I visited him a couple weeks earlier, a Telemundo broadcast of a match played on a small old-school TV set fixed to the upper corner of the room. Visiting sisters, wives, and daughters were too preoccupied to watch; a guard had just come out to inform five of the families that their relatives were not at this site. Other visitors in the waiting room stepped in to translate for the families who didn’t speak English. The families responded by pulling up their detained loved ones’ information in the ICE detainee locator system, which indicated they were being held at this facility. “Sometimes it takes a little while for the system to update,” the guard said. “I have no more information.” One man said he had been trying to find his friend for a week. As my friend and I chatted in the visiting room, he told me that not much had changed since the last time we’d seen one another. Calls to his wife were still exorbitantly expensive, and his brother hardly picked up the phone. Every day felt the same. Mostly we stuck to football—his encyclopedic knowledge of players’ histories, match outcomes, and his love of Lionel Messi.
Watching the semifinal, my friend’s voice drifted in and out of legibility over the phone. In the background, shouting in Spanish echoed off the concrete walls and metal tables of the dayroom. Through the tinny, muffled speaker of the tablet inmates use to make calls, his voice seemed at times like a nearby whisper and at other moments as if he were shouting from very far away. I stepped onto the sidewalk in front of the bar to find better reception, then pressed my hands and face up to the window to watch the match inside through the glare. But the street traffic was too loud and I kept asking him to repeat himself. “This machine hates my voice,” he said, laughing. “Even when I write to you, every time I type something it changes my words to English ones.” I’d wondered why he always sent me texts in curt and semiformal English, even though we spoke to each other in French. He couldn’t turn off the English autocorrect. “If they want me to speak this language so badly, why are they sending me back to Africa?”
Coming up on a year in detention, he still didn’t have any way of knowing when he would be deported. “I won’t tell my son that I’m in prison. He’s always asking me why I don’t do video calls with him anymore. I just tell him I’m working in a place where I don’t have service. I’ll explain it to him one day when he’s older.” I hadn’t spoken to him since Senegal’s exit from the World Cup. It had depressed him. “But Alhamdullilah. Africa is shining,” he said. “The goal for Congo. And Cabral—this guy—he is so strong! Wow.”
“France is lucky they don’t have to face Ivory Coast again,” he said, referring to a pre-tournament friendly that most fans wouldn’t have bothered to watch. Ivory Coast had won 2–1, beating France for the first time in its twenty-year history of playing at the World Cup. The match wouldn’t count on any official record, but my friend nonetheless recited a nearly minute-by-minute recollection of it. French–Ivorian defender Guéla Doué had scored the initial goal for Ivory Coast, and assisted their second. Guéla’s younger brother, Désiré, the PSG star whose name means “Desired Gifted”, had chosen to play for France but warmed the bench the entire game. “He should have gone back to Ivory Coast to play for his people, like Guéla.”
In the semifinal, my friend was supporting Spain. Seven Barcelona FC players had been selected for the squad. And anybody was better than France. “The French came and stole our uncles. Then they took our brothers for their teams. And now Trump kidnapped me.” I squinted my eyes to focus on his nearly unintelligible voice and compulsively turned up the volume but it wouldn’t get any louder. Sounds of metal and electricity emerged, as if the line were picking up the shipyards and factories around the prison. I heard a distant roaring, coming closer, and then a burst of cheers refracting in my phone speaker. “Shit!”
I looked up to see Pedro Porro beaming, then getting swarmed by the bench, disappearing under a horde of pink pennies. When my friend’s voice reappeared, he was cackling. “Trump is pissed! Beautiful!” Whooping and jeering in Spanish drowned out his laughter. “If God wills it, maybe they’ll let me out and I can go see the final. Inshallah. I still don’t think I did anything wrong to America. It would be my one chance in this life to see Messi play.” I told him that if we found a way to get him out in time, I would take him to the final. In the back, another swell of cheers as Lamine Yamal scored.
The sound suddenly cut again to a low static hum. For about ten seconds, I heard only white noise. Beneath the hollow, windy sounds, I could just make out my friend’s quiet voice. “I think he was off.” Then the line dropped.
