Politics
I Moved My Kids Across 8 Countries To Give Them Something AI Can’t Replace
My son, Mahaan, was nine the first time I watched him fail at something in real time.
We had just moved to Sintra, Portugal, and he’d joined the local football league. No one on the team spoke English. No one looked like him. In those first weeks, I’d watch him keep glancing back at us between huddles, a look on his face that said, clear as anything, “I have no idea what these people are saying.”
There was no app or translation he could pull up mid-drill. He just had to stand there, not understanding, and figure out what to do with that.
What he did was sit in it. Over several weeks, he learned to read his coach’s hand gestures. He slowly found ways to connect with his teammates that didn’t require language – a pass, a nod, a joke that worked without words. By the second month, he was best friends with half the team.
I think about that season a lot now, mostly because of how rare it’s becoming.
Every conversation about kids and AI seems to land on the same worries: cheating on essays, shortened attention spans, a generation that can’t write a sentence without a prompt. Those are real concerns. But after two decades spent studying how children actually learn, and a handful of years watching my own two kids grow up in a dozen different countries, the thing that keeps me up isn’t plagiarism.
I’m afraid we’re raising a generation of kids who will never have to sit inside discomfort long enough to learn what they’re made of.
There’s a concept in learning science called assimilation and accommodation.
Assimilation is when new information fits neatly into what a child already understands – easy, comfortable, low friction. Accommodation is what happens when it doesn’t fit, when the old mental model breaks and has to be rebuilt; this is where things get uncomfortable, and also where almost all real growth happens.
AI, used the way most of our kids are currently using it, is an assimilation machine, and that’s what concerns me most.
My daughter, Laaha, is a writer. She carries a typewriter with her, an actual one, and disappears into it for hours. Watching her work without AI is watching someone wrestle with a sentence until it says the thing she actually means, not the thing that was easiest to produce.
The few times she’s used AI to help with a piece of writing, the results came back faster and cleaner, but something in them felt thinner. The sentence had an answer in it, but not a search. She noticed it before I had to point it out, that the writing that meant the most to her was always the writing that had cost her something to get to.
That process, that reward – that’s what I feared my kids would lose. So a few years ago, my husband and I made the decision to leave a conventional life behind and start moving our family through different countries and cultures, building our kids’ education around the world instead of around a single classroom.
Photo Courtesy Of Rekha Magon
People assumed we were running from something or chasing some Instagram version of freedom. We weren’t. We were trying to engineer something specific back into childhood: situations our kids couldn’t Google their way out of.
A new country where they don’t speak the language yet. A friendship that has to be built from absolute scratch, with someone who looks nothing like them and grew up nothing like they did. A problem – logistical, social, emotional, that has no clean answer.
When we first moved to Kotor, Montenegro, the stoic, reserved culture of the Balkans came as a shock to my daughter. Laaha was 11, and by then she was used to running small errands on her own. She’d done it in every other country we’d lived in.
But in Kotor, asking a tall, stone-faced vendor how to weigh and bag vegetables at the market felt like too much. For the first few weeks, she wouldn’t even try.
Then, slowly, walking the streets of that small historic town on her own, she met Maria, a woman in her 30s who sold boat tours outside the old town walls. The two of them became fast friends. Through Maria, Laaha’s whole sense of the place shifted; she started to see the warmth underneath what had first read as coldness.
Two months later, on Laaha’s birthday, Maria knocked on our apartment door with a gift and a card. When we left Kotor and Laaha had to say goodbye to her, the tears on both their faces are something I’ll never forget.
A beautiful relationship was formed, but it didn’t come easy and it didn’t come right away. It took the unglamorous skill of staying in a hard moment without an exit, which is what I fear children losing. The ability to sit with not knowing. To be bored without immediately filling the boredom. To be in a room with someone you don’t understand yet and stay long enough to start understanding them, instead of closing a tab.
That skill doesn’t come from a curriculum. It comes from being intentionally, repeatedly placed in situations slightly beyond what’s comfortable, and not being rescued from them too quickly, by a parent, an app or an answer that arrives before the question has finished forming.
I think about Mahaan again, a year later, in Syros, a small Greek island where we lived for three months. I put him, 10 years old by then, in charge of figuring out our washing machine. There were no instructions in English, just a panel of Greek symbols he didn’t recognise.
He sat in front of that machine for the better part of an afternoon, working through what each symbol meant by trial and error. When he finally got the first load running, the look on his face wasn’t relief. It was pride, the specific kind that only comes from solving something nobody handed you the answer to.
I don’t know exactly what the world will look like by the time my kids are adults. Nobody does, and I think that’s the honest starting point for any conversation about how to raise kids right now, AI or no AI.
What I want for them isn’t a head start on a particular set of facts. It’s the capacity to walk into a totally unfamiliar situation – a new country, a new job, a relationship with someone who sees the world differently – and stay there long enough to figure it out.
That capacity gets built the same way it always has: through repeated, real, occasionally uncomfortable practice. Not through a tool that does it for you.
So, as difficult as it is, what I’m working on is resisting the urge to hand my kids the answer the moment they look stuck. For now, while we still get to choose, that struggle is ours to protect.
Rekha Magon is the co-founder and chief education officer at Boundless Life, a global platform enabling families to live, work and learn around the world. She has spoken at SXSW, and her work has earned multiple recognitions, including Canada’s 9th EdTech Innovation Award, Skift Innovation Awards, Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies of 2026 and a Finalist for Emerging Leader of the Year Education Pioneer Award.
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President Donald Trump couldn’t avoid public wrath while attending Sunday’s World Cup final between Spain and Argentina.
As singer Jennifer Hudson wrapped a stirring rendition of the US national anthem, the Jumbotron at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium jumped to Trump, immediately inciting a blast of boos from the 82,500 other fans in attendance.
Verified by measurements shared with the presidential press pool, ambient crowd noise at the stadium clocked in around 78 decibels while jeers brought it to 84.
The US president was watching from a VIP suite along with his friend, FIFA President Gianni Infantino, first lady Melania Trump, and diplomatic rivals Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada and Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum.
Eva Marie Uzcategui – FIFA via Getty Images
Trump, who was on hand to present the winning team with the World Cup trophy, did not pick a favourite ahead of the game but did remark that it’d be difficult for Spain to reckon with Argentine star Lionel Messi’s talents.
Though the 2026 World Cup has been a historic success, drawing a record-breaking 6.6 million fans across 16 stadiums throughout North America’s three largest nations, the impact of the US president’s politics could not be avoided.
Scandal emerged over decisions to deny a respected referee from Somalia entry, as well as the US sharply curtailing visas for the Iranian delegation and forcing the team to keep their home base in Tijuana, Mexico.
Nevertheless, Trump celebrated the World Cup as an American success during a reception for FIFA at his New York City Trump Tower on Friday.
“It turned out we were a soccer country, and I think it’s going to remain,” he said of the once soccer-sceptical US. “This has really brought the world together.”
There’s a lot for British government ministers not to like about the Ethics and Integrity Commission’s recent report about shaking up the lobbying industry. The laws we have at present on professional sweet-talking are conveniently limited and easy to evade. Even where there is machinery for recording contact between government and lobbyists, it is so confusing that making sense of what is recorded is a nightmare for any journalist.
All this would change if the commission had its way. The report recommends that all lobbying of government ministers, aides and middle-ranking mandarins – from WhatsApp chats to meetings at party conferences – is publicly declared on an easy-to-read database. Even those who don’t lobby the state for money would have to sign up to a register. That also goes for charities and pressure groups seeking to influence policy.
The proposed new rules would hit Labour and progressive parties far more than the Conservatives, who have long been legally obliged to declare their contacts with advocates for the corporate world. Labour ministers and their departments constantly have their ears bent by the kinds of NGOs, pressure groups and the big campaigning charities that aren’t currently caught in the net, but they would be under the commission’s recommendations. If Amnesty International, the New Economics Foundation and the like want to continue setting up discreet workshops with Sir Humphrey’s top officials – or whispering in ministers’ ears about the beauty of open borders, wealth taxes or transgender activism – they would have to be open about it and have their meetings recorded for our benefit.
This would come as a shock to the current progressive establishment, whose members have long acted as if the lobbying threat comes solely from billionaires and shills for multinational conglomerates. But this is both misleading and outdated. Today’s super-rich are more likely to fund a think-tank, or an international institute campaigning for a particular worldview, than to nobble ministers over an expensive lunch. When it comes to lever-pulling, these organisations excel most in covert influence. It is the charity-industrial complex – comprising many NGOs that are now sophisticated multimillion-pound transnational operations – that lobbies hardest.
So this potential shake-up of the lobbying industry might actually help the public, drawing attention to the role played in our political system by charities and NGOs. But the Ethics and Integrity Commission could go further still in its recommendations.
The boundaries between government and private-sector activity are now more fluid than ever. Many charities and non-profits are only nominally independent. In reality, they receive a large proportion of their income from the government itself, officially to help deliver a particular policy, but often to direct and apply it, too. Many such charities have a distinctly activist bias. There is not much difference between such organisations and lobbyists as regards their potential for influence on ministerial policy – they push for the policies they want and get rewarded financially.
So ideally, we need a requirement for all campaigning organisations in receipt of any funds from government departments to register this fact. More importantly, they should have to record all contacts between themselves and ministers or departmental officials.
And what about public-sector bodies set up supposedly at arm’s length to advise ministers? The Ethics and Integrity Commission has airily dismissed any suggestion that they should be caught in the lobbying net. ‘Providing impartial, expert advice to government in the public interest is an integral part of their role and their governance’, the commission states.
If only. The idea that, say, Natural England or English Heritage are just groups of well-meaning boffins offering the government impartial advice is absurd. Both organisations see it as their function to put pressure on the government to promote a particular interest, and have no hesitation in doing so. And that’s before you get to bodies like the Equality and Human Rights Commission or the office of the Children’s Commissioner for England, which have no compunction in putting pressure on government in matters often at odds with voters’ wishes – such as in strengthening the power of the human-rights lobby or banning the smacking of children. These may or may not be good policies, but we have just as much of a right to transparency from such bodies as we have from any other group set up to promote a particular point of view.
We don’t know what the Labour government will say to this report. More likely than not, it will be buried in the upcoming parliamentary recess. But the opposition, from the Tories to Reform UK, should use it to promote genuine democratic scrutiny of an increasingly inscrutable progressive establishment. Daylight, as ever, remains the best disinfectant.
Andrew Tettenborn is a professor of commercial law and a former Cambridge admissions officer.
Los Angeles leaders are spending billions to make the 2028 Olympics a story of climate and environmental policy progress, reports Alex Nieves.
Transit and community groups want to know whether the investment will be part of the region’s Olympic legacy or just a flash in the pan.
The question of just how enduring their efforts will be was a throughline Tuesday and Wednesday at the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator’s Road to 2028 summit — an event focused on leveraging the Olympic Games to accelerate clean energy and transportation development in the state’s most populous region.
The overall vibe of the conference was an optimistic one, as Los Angeles County and dozens of cities are hustling to secure hundreds of buses, plant trees and clean waterways before millions of people descend on the region in two years for the Games. But some attendees were already wondering what comes after the two-week mega event is over.
“When we look to the future, if once the games leave and we have not left communities better than the way we found them, then we have all lost,” said Cynthia Mitchell-Heard, CEO of the Los Angeles Urban League, speaking on a panel of grant recipients who’ve received funding from the LA Olympics organizing committee for environmental projects. (The Urban League received $100,000 to create a workforce development program for people affected by last year’s Altadena fire.)
Catherine Baltazar, associate director of advocacy and organizing at Climate Resolve, argued that throwing dollars at infrastructure projects won’t guarantee long-term progress in communities that have historically lacked resources and disproportionately borne the brunt of climate change.
“Investment should not end when the Games end,” Baltazar said. “We know that these communities will continue long after the Games, and so for me, that’s the legacy that I want.”
The focus on the post-2028 future comes in part because of what was seen as a successful test run during this summer’s World Cup. The region hosted eight matches at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, avoiding any major snafus while seeing a significant spike in public transit use.
While the Olympics will be far larger than the World Cup, the region has structural advantages over many past Olympic host cities, including enough existing venues to house every sporting event. Much of the preparation now is centered on buying and leasing roughly 1,700 buses — including 500 electric school buses — to shuttle fans to and from venues that will be transit-only.
Transit advocates argue that those investments, including recent expansions of Los Angeles’ light-rail system, don’t solve for structural budget deficits that could threaten service cuts — as bus and rail operators have already warned about farther north in the Bay Area.
Los Angeles’ legislative delegation has failed the last two years to secure a boost in the state budget for systems like LA Metro, which faces a $2.3 billion deficit through 2030. Metrolink, a commuter rail line that serves six counties across Southern California, has indefinitely extended a 20 percent reduction in weekday service amid a $30 million deficit.
Matt Petersen, CEO of the Cleantech Incubator, told POLITICO the budget challenge has only intensified under a Trump administration hostile toward clean transportation.
“Local governments are struggling, states are struggling on how to put the resources where they’re needed,” he said. “I think the bottom line is: Without the feds, it’s super hard.”
But he said he still believes that Los Angeles is “well on the way to being ready” for the Games and to leave a lasting benefit for the community.
“That’s really what we’re here to do,” he said. “Ten years after the Games, what will we have seen manifest because of this moment?”
CHICAGO — The United States’ third-largest city felt confident passing on this year’s World Cup in part because the city’s sports loyalty was well-scripted. The Bears owned Sundays. The Cubs and White Sox divided baseball fans. And the Bulls still carry the glow of the Jordan dynasty.
But a whole new generation of sports teams is betting Chicago’s appetite for sports is bigger than its traditional loyalties — and that fans are ready for something different.
The WNBA’s Chicago Sky is preparing to host the league’s All-Star weekend July 23-26. The Chicago Stars are trying to build a women’s soccer franchise in a city with deep youth participation and a growing appetite for the sport. And the Chicago Fire are planning a new privately financed stadium in the South Loop and are investing heavily in youth development and facilities.
The timing is notable.
The city’s newest teams are making their pitch at the same moment two of Chicago’s oldest franchises are asking for help building new homes.
The McCaskey family continues to pursue public assistance for a new Bears stadium, whether in Illinois or Indiana. White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf has sought public support for a proposed South Loop ballpark. Those requests have triggered a familiar debate: whether taxpayers should help finance stadium projects for billion-dollar sports franchises while governments struggle with schools, transit and other basic services.
The newer teams are offering a different message. Chicago Fire owner Joe Mansueto, another Chicago billionaire, privately funded the team’s $750 million stadium, though the Chicago City Council earlier this week approved a $425 million tax subsidy to fund the surrounding infrastructure. Their pitch is not built around nostalgia but around investing in communities.
At a sports and business forum at the Obama Presidential Center this week, Fire Chief Marketing Officer Dan Moriarty described a shift in how soccer is being consumed in Chicago. The sport’s audience is younger, more diverse and increasingly global, he said, with fans who already follow international clubs now looking for a local connection. He pointed to a simple sign of change: at Chicago farmers markets, soccer jerseys are increasingly common — even if many of them still carry the names of European clubs.
The challenge, he said, is turning those fans into supporters of Chicago teams.
“Soccer has this lifestyle aspect,” former U.S. women’s national team goalkeeper Alyssa Naeher said during the discussion. “It brings people together.”
That may be soccer’s biggest advantage in Chicago. The city is already a global crossroads, with neighborhoods shaped by generations of immigrants and communities that have long embraced the sport. The Fire are betting that global stars can accelerate that connection. The club recently signed Polish striker Robert Lewandowski, one of the world’s most accomplished players, as part of a broader effort to raise the team’s profile.
Women’s sports are riding a similar wave.
“Women’s sports generally, and particularly soccer, has seen an evolution in this country,” said Laura Ricketts, who is a bridge to the old and new in sports. She’s a co-owner of the Chicago Cubs, an investor in the WNBA’s Chicago Sky and executive director of the Chicago Stars women’s soccer team.
“What we’re now seeing [is] an explosion, especially in the NWSL,” she said of the National Women’s Soccer League. “We’re growing, and the best way [to see it is] our fan base is growing.”
She compares women’s soccer today to the NBA or Major League Baseball of the early 1980s. “There’s just so much opportunity,” said Ricketts. Women’s soccer, she said, has benefited from decades of investment in youth leagues and college programs. That foundation is now translating into a professional audience.
The growth is not just about attendance. It is about loyalty. Women’s sports fans, Ricketts said, tend to be younger and highly engaged, with a strong connection to the brands and communities supporting the teams.
With World Cup interest, “We’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg for soccer in this country.”
She said there’s been similar investment into basketball and she hopes Chicago sees the benefits of that as it hosts the WNBA All-Star weekend, marking three decades of the league.
“The momentum continues right here in Chicago,” Sky co-owner Nadia Rawlinson said, describing the event as a celebration of how far women’s basketball has come — and how much further it can go.
None of this means the Bears, Cubs, White Sox or Bulls are losing their place in Chicago’s sports hierarchy. But newer teams are making a case for a place alongside them.
Stories of fans left outside stadiums, duped by “ghost tickets” on resale platforms, were everywhere at this year’s World Cup. But advocates are hopeful the near-endless stream of negative headlines and angry supporters will spur long-sought-after laws to outlaw the practice of speculative ticket selling, when resellers put tickets they don’t yet have on the open market.
At the state level, it would seem they’re right.
Illinois, North Carolina and Washington, D.C. have all passed legislation banning speculative ticket sales since the beginning of the World Cup. Connecticut, Oregon and Vermont have also enacted ghost ticket bans this year. And Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey announced her intention to file a bill prohibiting ghost tickets — among other consumer-friendly initiatives — on Thursday.
“It’s definitely raising eyebrows in the state of politicians and legislators to really ban ghost ticketing, speculative ticketing,” said Scott Friedman, podcast host and co-founder of the Ticket Talk Network. “When you have it happen at this scale, that not just affects the United States, it’s a global tournament for heaven’s sake. Absolutely, change is coming.”
“You see dozens of these bills percolating around the country,” said John Breyault, vice president of public policy, telecommunications and fraud at the National Consumers League. “Most of which have some kind of ban on speculative tickets.”
There’s action at the federal level, too. Though advocacy groups aren’t exactly aligned on a path forward in Congress. Breyault and the NCL have been active in promoting the TICKET Act, which passed the House in April and moved through the Senate Commerce Committee in June.
Proponents say the bill would ban speculative ticket sales and safeguard consumers against fraudulent ticket websites.
“In this environment, where Republicans and Democrats can’t agree that the sky is blue on some days, that’s a rare occurrence,” Breyault said.
But Stephen Parker, the executive director of the National Independent Venue Association, said the “you could drive a Mack Truck” through the TICKET Act’s ghost ticketing provisions. Music groups, too, have panned the bill, arguing it would still allow speculative ticket sales by permitting sellers to advertise ticket procurement services for tickets they do not yet possess.
For now, Parker said, the most encouraging action is happening in the states.
“This is happening across the country, and ultimately, what we are seeing is state legislators from both parties saying enough is enough. If Congress isn’t going to do something, we are, and we couldn’t be more grateful for their work.”
New York and New Jersey planned to spend roughly a half billion dollars hosting eight World Cup matches, including today’s final. But once it’s over, lawmakers in both states want to know if they got their money’s worth.
In New York City, Councilmember Virginia Maloney, who leads the chamber’s committee on economic development, is going to lead that examination.
“First I want to make sure we recouped our cost,” she said in an interview on Friday at a coffee shop in her Manhattan district, which includes the Upper East Side. “I’m not confident we can say that.”
She said data seems mixed on how well hotels did because of the World Cup. Bookings initially appeared low, but it seems like hotels recovered closer to the matches. However, it’s not clear if that’s because of the World Cup or the other major events happening this summer in the city, including the July 4th festivities and the Knicks’ championship win — which means an analysis will have to try to untangle what economic activity happened because of the World Cup and what would have happened anyway.
“What is irrefutable is that bars and restaurants were seeing a lot more activity and action in New York, and that translates into real economic benefit for New Yorkers,” Maloney said.
Maloney attributes that to a lot of things, including a law signed by Gov. Kathy Hochul to temporarily extend hours for bars and restaurants.
One report from the Queens Chamber of Commerce found a 30 percent increase in businesses for people going out to drink and eat.
“The economic benefit was not necessarily people who were going to the World Cup, but just people participating in the summer of New York, going to all five boroughs to celebrate or be out together,” she said.
The host committee released a study last summer predicting $3.3 billion in economic impact across New York and New Jersey, including about $432 million in state and local tax revenues.
Maloney worried about rosy projections from FIFA and its boosters compared to the reality on the ground. A preliminary study by the host committee of just the group stage found $1.2 billion in direct economic impact, Bloomberg reported.
Maloney views the experience as a learning opportunity for other big events the city puts on, including future political conventions and the 2042 Olympics, which the state and city are exploring a bid for.
“It should be something that you can make a playbook out of, not where you’re starting from scratch every time there’s a major event,” Maloney said.
Forget Zohran Mamdani. The local elected official who really rules MetLife Stadium today is Jeffrey Lahullier, whose 10,000-person town sees its population swell by more than 800 percent whenever there’s an event at the stadium complex in the middle of his turf, writes POLITICO’s Will McCarthy:
Read Will’s story “The World Cup came to town. The town grew eight times larger” here.
Mikie Sherrill has embraced the World Cup like few other Democratic governors, save perhaps Gov. Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania.
She has been to seven matches, built a tight relationship with the former standout U.S. goalkeeper Tony Meola and will take in today’s final at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. (She missed one match because she was working on her first budget).
“There’s a lot of controversy over whether or not this makes sense. We’ll be doing all the math as these returns come in,” Sherrill said. “When I came into office, I really was focused on how to make this a net benefit for the state, and how to bring everyone into the state. If you’re going to host this game where one in three people in the world will be watching this final, you want the people of New Jersey to feel like they’re part of it, and not just that there are some elite people going to watch the game, but they’re actually able to take part in the excitement, and these fan zones have been really wonderful for that as well.”
Six months into her term, Sherrill spoke exclusively with POLITICO to talk about her battles with FIFA, President Donald Trump and, also, how she ended up in a puddle of beer doing the viral Viking Row celebration with an army of Norway fans outside of MetLife.
The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
How did you end up in that puddle of beer?
I think we’ve seen all over the internet people who are loving our delis and our Wawas and enjoying the shore, and I think it’s just been such a fantastic feeling. And we had Norway come, and as you’ve seen on social media, they were rowing. I rowed at Navy my freshman and sophomore year at Navy, so I had a little bit of a kinship there to all the rowers coming from Norway. So when they were coming back to the stadium, we reached out and said, “Hey, are you guys rowing? We want to come touch base and welcome you to the state. And they said, ‘Yeah, come row with us.’ So I did, and it was really a lot of fun.”
What have your battles been like with FIFA, particularly on cost-of-living issues?
I would say everything we’ve gotten out of the World Cup, we built.
I would really like to leverage it — if the Women’s World Cup is going to be in the U.S. — I would really like to leverage a little bit of what a special place it is to host a World Cup game here. And really try to leverage that for better benefits for the state because FIFA put nothing into this. I mean they’re making $11 billion and now they’re trying to sell grass, and they’re trying not to pay their bills. It’s really a problem.
So you’d be open to being a host site again in 2031?
If it made sense economically, yes.
President Donald Trump — whom you have battled — will be at the final on Sunday. How are you going to handle that?
What I think has been interesting is I think a lot of people went into Trump’s second administration thinking they had learned how to handle him in his first administration, and the word on the street seemed to be you just do an insane amount of flattery, and then get what you want, and just you know kind of work that way. You know, keep your head down, don’t say too much, just flatter the hell out of him, and then I’ll give you what you want. And I don’t think that has been the case in the second administration.
And so we in New Jersey had a year of watching him operate, and every promise he made, he walked back. And so the art of the deal to Trump seems to be. Figure out what you want, leverage the heck out of you, and never give it to you. But try to have you sell your soul in the process.
I just largely have focused on delivering for the people of New Jersey. And when he tries to punish people here in New Jersey, like when he tried to stop the Gateway Tunnel funding, when he gave out pink slips to the 1,000 workers that were already on the job, good union jobs. I didn’t try to cut some deal with him. I didn’t say I was going to name Penn Station after him or something because it wasn’t his money to leverage. I just took him to court almost immediately, and we won. And then he appealed it, and we won again. And now he’s, you know, said he’s going to build some mass detention facility in Roxbury in a warehouse that only has two bathrooms, and he thinks he’s going to put 2000 people in it. And there’s no sewersystem, so we took him to court, and we won.
So it’s not that we’re throwing gratuitous punches here. I’m just constantly fighting for the people of New Jersey, and when he attacks them, I’m going to stand up.
What are your predictions for the final on Sunday? Is Argentina going to prevail? How many goals is Messi going to score? What are some things that you’d make Kalshi bets on?
I don’t do Kalshi bets. But there are a lot of people from South America that live in New Jersey. A lot of our citizens have family there, and they’re going to kill me because nobody down there likes Argentina, right? But I will tell you, I… I feel like Argentina with Messi playing for the MLS. It’s just it’s almost like the closest thing we were getting this year to a hometown team.
POLITICO asked some of the most dedicated tourney followers in American politics to share their predictions for the final.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul: “Coming from Buffalo, we root for the underdogs, those who have not had the championship. Argentina’s had their opportunity. When was the last time Spain won? That was a long time ago.”
Rob Bonta, California attorney general, former Yale soccer player and father to professional soccer player Reina Bonta: “The South American champs vs. the European Champs. Messi vs Yamal. The current 39-year-old GOAT vs the 19-year-old wunderkind. Argentina vs Spain. Argentina has come from behind in the final minutes multiple times and grittily found a way to defend their World Cup title, led by the little magician #10. Spain dismantled France with their tiki-taka/rondo possession, tactical dominance and beautiful football on full display. Two teams at the top of their game, playing for the most coveted trophy in football. It should be a final for the ages! I’m so conflicted! Love them both.”
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie: “1-1 after extra time, Argentina wins on penalties. After what we have seen in three knockout games from Messi and his team, they will win back-to-back, and he will be considered the greatest player of all time, surpassing Maradona.”
Mia Bonta, assemblymember and mother to professional soccer player Reina Bonta: “I’m rooting for Argentina, the team including Messi have just played a phenomenal, gritty tournament. But most Bontas are thinking Spain is going to walk away with the trophy.”
Tammy Murphy, former first lady of New Jersey and current chair of the World Cup host committee: “As we approach the final, I’m wearing two hats. As chair of the New York New Jersey FIFA World Cup Host Committee, my focus is on delivering an exceptional experience for everyone — from seamless transportation and strong security to a safe, welcoming atmosphere and a lasting economic impact for our region. As a fan of the game, it’s hard not to get emotional knowing we’re about to witness Match 104 after an incredible 39-day tournament. While I have to admit I was disappointed to see England fall in the semifinal, given my family’s English roots on my mother’s side, it’s hard not to be excited about a historic first: the reigning European champions facing the reigning South American champions in a World Cup final. It has all the makings of an unforgettable match. Game on!”
San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan: “Given San Jose’s Spanish roots as the first official pueblo in ‘Alta California,’ I’m going to call it 2-1 for Spain with a late-match Argentinian surge that falls just short.”
Tom Steyer, Democratic megadonor, former California gubernatorial candidate and former Yale soccer player: Spain, 2-1.
Randy Villegas, a Bernie Sanders-backed progressive running against GOP Rep. David Valadao: Spain, 2-1.
State Sen. Ben Allen, chair of the Senate Special Committee on International Sporting Events: Could not comment because he was too devastated by England’s loss to Argentina.
New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill: “In my heart, I just feel connected … to Argentina. In my head, I guess just watching Spain’s midfield, it’s hard to imagine that that doesn’t prevail.”
Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.): 2-1 Argentina, with a goal and an assist for Lionel Messi.
NEW YORK — There’s no bots about it.
The New York City-themed World Cup jerseys announced by Mayor Zohran Mamdani in June and released online from July 8 to July 16 sold out every morning within minutes, though the Mamdani administration tells POLITICO there was no foul play involved.
Frustrated shoppers suspected scalpers using automated bots to buy the jerseys within seconds during each morning’s release at 10 a.m., but New York’s Department of Citywide Administrative Services said it only detected two out of 3,500 orders that came from bots.
“The NYC soccer jerseys have been tremendously popular—thousands have attempted to purchase through CityStore online every day. One thousand very real, very happy New Yorkers have already picked up their jerseys in person—we have not seen widespread bot activity,” a DCAS spokesperson said in a statement.
The two detected bot orders were canceled, the spokesperson added.
The jerseys’ high demand and low supply is a more likely explanation for why they sold out so quickly. The website limited releases to 500 jerseys every morning, and averaged 25,000 visitors to the store during the week it was for sale.
DCAS said it used Shopify’s bot prevention services such as CAPTCHA tests and required in-person pick-ups to prevent automated purchases.
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