Jonathan Wilson’s World Cup Diary
A day in the life of a reporter on the road, growing his Substack, and contending with the Americanization of the world’s game
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Substack promotes Jonathan Wilson's World Cup Diary, a behind-the-scenes look at a reporter's experience covering the tournament. The diary details Wilson's travels and Substack strategy, including a 40% increase in subscribers during the tournament. Wilson shares his observations on the World Cup atmosphere and Americanization of the game.
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Jonathan Wilson’s World Cup Diary
A day in the life of a reporter on the road, growing his Substack, and contending with the Americanization of the world’s game
Arielle Swedback and Jonathan Wilson
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We caught up with veteran British soccer writer, podcaster, and historian of the game Jonathan Wilsonon the eve of his sixth World Cup final. Over the past six weeks, he’s been all over the map, filing from Mexico City, Guadalajara, Houston, and Boston for The Guardian, Bloomberg, the Paris Review, and more, while bringing literary dispatches and wry analysis to his own newsletter Wilson’s World (of football). We asked him to document the day he covered the Spain-France semifinal in Dallas and chatted with him about his Substack strategy, how he expanded his subscriber base by 40% over the course of the tournament, and his reckoning with the strange atmosphere at World Cup 2026.
Your sixth world cup! How many matches did you get to this time around?
Fifteen, I think. Maybe 16. I did three in Mexico City, three in Guadalajara, two in Monterrey, so that’s eight. I did four in Dallas, two in Houston, one in Boston. So 15 total!
I also loved your dispatches from the games you caught along the way: watching from hotel bars, or restaurant patios, or catching the Germany-Paraguay penalty shootout at an airport Chili’s.
I wasn’t even in it! I was outside the Chili’s. I was rushing through security to see the end, obviously had to make my flight, and I could see the screens. I was like, “Okay, I can just go over there and watch.” There were maybe about a dozen people there when I got there, and I got there at about 117 minutes. By the end of the penalties there were 60, 70, 80 people standing there. If you’d been selecting the most diverse group of people you could have found, you couldn’t have created a better one. There were a couple of security staff, a pilot, a couple of cleaners, a bloke in a Swiss shirt, loads of people with Mexican shirts, babies in pushchairs, old people in wheelchairs. People who clearly knew exactly what was going on, people who said, “I don’t understand this. What happens next?” It was the great World Cup moment of everybody coming together to watch this exciting denouement of the game.
How does that compare to being in the stadium?
In the stadium you get a much better feel for the game. It’s almost like a native speaker of a language. You have to start speaking a language before you’re 6 or 7 to really understand it. Football’s exactly the same. If you start going to games when you’re 4 or 5, you can smell what’s going to happen. You don’t know why, you can’t explain it, but it’s a very common thing for people who have been going from that age. That sense for a shift in emotional momentum—you get a much better feel for that in the stadium.
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