How the united bid for 2026 overcame the Trump effect,
While Trump’s Twitter feed screamed division, they preached unity. Again and again and again. More tellingly though, they attempted to cast minds forward to that most blissful, barely imaginable of places — a Trump-free future.
By calling on Davies and two other teenagers — Mexican youth international Diego Lainez and U.S. under-20 women’s international Brianna Pinto — to address the assembled delegates in their final address before the vote, the United team rammed home that 2026 could be a different time.
Davies, the youngest player ever to pull on a Canadian men’s national team shirt, spoke about his parents fleeing civil war in Liberia, being born in a refugee camp but “a country called Canada welcomed us in and the boys on the football team made me feel at home.”
“The people of North America have always welcomed me,” he said. “Given the opportunity, I know they’ll welcome you.”
Moments after the result was announced and Cordeiro stepped forward to offer words of thanks to the hall and consolation to Morocco, it was Reed and De Maria who were wrapped in a teary and emotional embrace behind him. It was hard to escape the sense that untangling the United States president from the United bid had weighed heaviest on these neighbours from the north and south.
Reed was asked afterwards about how they countered the Trump effect, especially when the frenetic final days of the campaign had coincided with the U.S. president and his hangers-on speaking of “special places in hell” for Canada’s “weak” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“I don’t think that Prime Minister Trudeau is weak,” he smiled. “The support we got from all three governments was overwhelming, very strong guarantees across the board. As it relates to name-calling I’m not going to comment. Those things come and go, the politics of today is not the same as two, three, five years down the road.”
When asked in the next question about Trump’s obsession with building a border wall to divide the U.S. and Mexico, De Maria responded simply that “the ball travels forward. There is no barrier that can stop a football.”
Not totally true. Davies can stop a football. He can trap one that hurtles out of the sky toward him, turn on a loonie, outmuscle someone twice his age and glide away into space to do more mesmerizing things.
At 17 years and 223 days he can nearly do it all.
Hell, if he can take to a stage in the a half-lit Moscow convention centre in some of the darkest times that a lot of us have known and still make us imagine a bright future of borderless unity and joy, maybe he can do it all.