The World Cup takes over as the backdrop to summer in New York

The England and Croatia fans came streaming across the Brooklyn Bridge around teatime on Wednesday. It was that time in the city; the forbidding high rises spitting out its office workers, the traffic lanes clogged and pulsing; the serious runners out in force and, on the wooden pedestrian walkway on the bridge, the thousands of pleasure walkers snap-happy and blissed out at the insanely beautiful intersection of engineering, myth and pink summer skyline.

Two Croatians stood for a long time staring at a snazzy apartment building on the Brooklyn side of the crossing. They’d just watched England beat their country 4-2 but they didn’t seem too downbeat: there would be other games, and Manhattan was just a short few steps away. They’d spent the afternoon in the fan zone magicked up directly beneath the enormous stone pillar the base of the bridge on the Brooklyn side, where fans could sit on the parched lawn and watch games with the East river and lower Manhattan as a backdrop. It took a moment, though, to see what the Croats were studying: a low-lit luminous lettering spread across several apartment balconies that read: Knicks In Five.

For New Yorkers, June has been a peculiar month where the historic championship run by their long-suffering Knicks NBA team brought them tumbling headlong into its role as one of the host cities for the World Cup. The timing has been good for both the city and visiting football fans. For decades, the Knicks fans struggled with how to synchronise a beloved club with a brand name that was a vital part of city iconography with decades of baffling and confounding underachievement.

The San Antonio Spurs, who faced the Knicks in the finals led by Victor Wembayamba, their physically extraordinary 7’4” French phenomenon- complete with 8ft wingspan, had not even joined the NBA when the Knicks won their second of two fabled early-decade titles, in 1973. Since then, the Spurs have won five championships, and New Yorkers watched as other newly created teams in minor cities got it together and learned the title-winning knack that eluded New York, for all its glittering omnipotence as the premier American city.

Then came the past few weeks when a teak-tough, humble and conspicuously star-less crowd of ballers started winning and didn’t stop. In the age of social media, the entire world got to see it: the giddy fervour that swept through the boroughs and the masses of humanity revelling – literally hanging from street lights and rafters – in the excuse to celebrate the myriad toils and wonders of living in their city. And Lord knows they pay enough for the privilege.

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Some of it was, of course, performative and larking. Nobody but diehard Knicks fans were bothered about the “wait” before this summer. But the sport and moment was so compelling that the big screens were imported to all the bars and restaurants, and wheeled out on to the streets. A decade into the streaming revolution which has smashed the tradition of television as a community phenomenon, it was back. New York watched its team win together, all eight million of them,

And as, first, Kylian Mbappé and, later Tuesday night, Lionel Messi took their respective bows in Meadowlands and Kansas City, it became obvious that New Yorkers are happy to extend their sports crazy summer for another few weeks. The World Cup has taken over from Knicks as the backdrop to this summer in the city.

At the check-in for the fan zone, a security guard, apologising the thorough bag-check, explained that some visitors were less than thrilled by the intrusion. One had questioned the need for the presence of armed guards near the entrance. “The threat of terror, you know. It’s the Brooklyn Bridge.”

On Thursday morning, nearly two million people made their way to the parade route for the Knicks team parading the Larry O’Brien trophy on an open-top bus from Battery Park and up Broadway as far as City Hall. The morning was muggy, low-cast and most of the access points were closed by 7am. The parade screening would be exacting: among the “prohibited items”: bikes, chairs, cookers, pets, drones, strollers and weapons. A quarter of a century after 9/11, the dispensation remains as sharp as ever.

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Next week, the Germany and England teams and their fans arrive here. The World Cup is taking place in a perfect lull between the close of the NBA season and the late-summer months when baseball becomes the chief fixation. Football will never be the first, or even the second, sport for the majority of sports fans here, although it is the obsession of the new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who is an avowed Arsenal fan.

But New York is a proper sports city and even for the casually curious, the daily run of games, from noon until deep into the evening, and featuring exotic, unlikely pairings, has a hypnotic effect.

Times Square has become an obvious gathering points for visiting fans but it’s on the side-streets where you can best see the gathering appreciation of the world game, where clusters of by-passers find themselves stopped in their tracks by TVs showing Messi in his late-era pomp or the injury time drama of Ghana and Panama.

Over the next few weeks, the games will thin out and the foreign visitors will exit the other host cities. But New York will feature as a prominent backdrop and theatre setting as the tournament gradually sorts out the pretenders from the real deal, all the way until the last two standing meet for the right to lift the World Cup trophy in the MetLife stadium, just beyond the roaring city still floating with the giddy novelty of winning it all.

Where else would a World Cup final be?

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