Cincinnati vs LA Galaxy: How a Rust-Belt Suburb Took on Hollywood’s Soccer Monopoly—and Won the Internet’s 15-Minute Attention Span

CINCINNATI, Ohio — Somewhere between the Ohio River and the smog-soaked hills of Los Angeles, two professional football clubs met on a humid Midwestern night to remind the rest of the planet that the United States still insists on calling the game “soccer.” The occasion—FC Cincinnati versus the LA Galaxy—was billed locally as a “crucial Western Conference showdown.” Globally, it registered somewhere between a minor ripple and the sound of one hand clapping in an empty Wembley.

Still, the match carried the faint aroma of geopolitical symbolism, like a half-eaten burrito left too long in the sun. On one touchline, you had Cincinnati: a rust-belt resurrection project bankrolled by billionaire Carl Lindner III, whose family fortune was built on bananas, insurance, and the tacit understanding that late-stage capitalism is just Monopoly with better lawyers. On the other, the Galaxy: Hollywood’s house team, a franchise whose payroll once rivaled the GDP of Tonga and whose roster has featured more galacticos than the Milky Way gift shop. David Beckham played here; so did Zlatan Ibrahimović; so did—briefly, bewilderingly—Steven Gerrard, who looked like a man who’d taken a wrong turn out of Anfield and ended up in a theme park where the rides were tax write-offs.

The final score, 3-2 to Cincinnati, hardly matters. What matters is that the game was streamed in 104 countries, which sounds impressive until you realize that 87 of them were probably using it as background noise while doom-scrolling TikTok. In Jakarta, a student watched on a cracked phone screen between bites of indomie, wondering why Americans scream “DEFENSE!” like they’re ordering a sandwich. In Lagos, an Uber driver caught the last ten minutes on the radio, mistaking the commentator’s breathless “Luciano Acosta curls it top bins!” for a weather report. And in Kyiv, a bar full of displaced Ukrainians raised ironic toasts to the concept of “extra time,” a luxury their own country can no longer afford.

MLS, for all its earnest hashtags and Target-sponsored halftime shows, remains the global game’s eccentric cousin who moved to the suburbs, bought a Peloton, and now insists he’s “just as European as you.” The league’s salary cap is set so low that most European scouts treat it like an urban legend, yet the Galaxy still manage to pay a Designated Player more than the entire Cincinnati back line earns in a year. The resulting spectacle is less a contest of equals and more an allegory for the widening gulf between America’s coastal elites and its fly-over interior—a tension the rest of the world has outsourced to Netflix documentaries.

And yet, there is something perversely noble in the pretense. While FIFA’s greasy palms auction off World Cups to the highest despot, MLS soldiers on with its peculiar mix of meritocracy and mild delusion. Cincinnati’s fans—many of whom once drove three hours to watch the USL version of this same club—now pack a $250 million stadium that looks like a UFO designed by someone who once saw a picture of Bayern Munich’s Allianz Arena and thought, “Yes, but make it beige.” Their joy is unironic, which in 2024 feels almost subversive.

Meanwhile, the Galaxy trudged back to LAX contemplating existential questions: Is it possible to be both glamorous and irrelevant? Does Gio dos Santos still cash appearance bonuses from 2018? And why does every postgame press conference sound like a hostage video scripted by a wellness app?

As the jet lag settled and the highlights filtered onto Arab-language Twitter, one truth emerged: in a world fracturing along every imaginable fault line, the ability of 22 strangers to chase a ball for 90 minutes and still argue about it afterward remains a small, ridiculous miracle. It won’t stop climate collapse, or inflation, or the inexorable rise of AI-generated pop stars, but it will, for a fleeting second, make a few million people forget all of the above. And really, what more can you ask of a Tuesday night in Ohio?