What the World Cup Taught Me About Changing the World

I need to confess something: I have watched more videos of a German man named Freddy the German eating Waffle House at 2 a.m. than I am proud to admit.

If you haven’t met Freddy yet, allow me to introduce him. He’s a World Cup fan from Germany who decided that his real assignment this summer wasn’t just cheering on his team, it was reviewing America, one American experience at a time. He called Taco Bell “the holy land.” He treated a Buc-ee’s like it was the Louvre. Somewhere out there, a man who has never seen a Waffle House menu before is now more invested in hash browns, scattered and smothered, than most of us will ever be. And the internet could not look away.

Then there’s Boston. The Tartan Army, Scotland’s famously thirsty, famously joyful traveling fanbase, arrived, drank the city dry (we’re talking actual breweries running out of beer), marched ten thousand strong in kilts and bagpipes to Fenway Park, and then… quietly grabbed brooms and trash bags and helped clean up after themselves. “We want to be respectful to your country,” one fan told a reporter, standing outside a bar, beer in hand, completely sincere. A Parks and Rec worker said she’d never seen anything like it: the chaos and the cleanup, back to back, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

And then there’s Japan. After every single match, win, lose, or draw, Japanese fans stay behind. While the rest of the stadium empties out, they’re still in their seats with trash bags, picking up cups and wrappers, leaving the section cleaner than they found it. They’ve done this at every World Cup since 1998. Nobody asks them to. They just do it, because, as one 20-year-old fan put it, “we have to think about everyone.” It’s spread far enough now that the Mexican host city of Monterrey ordered twenty thousand extra trash bags just to keep up with the request.

And then DR Congo walked off a plane in Houston and reminded everyone what fifty-two years of waiting looks like when you finally show up. The “Leopards” hadn’t qualified for a World Cup since 1974, back when the country was called Zaire. So when they landed, they didn’t just walk through the terminal. They arrived in matching black silk suits with leopard-print velvet collars, gold leopard brooches, and star-shaped leopard luggage, looking like they’d been styled for Paris Fashion Week instead of customs. Designer Alvin Junior Mak built the whole look as a tribute to the legendary 1974 squad and to La Sape, the Congolese fashion movement where elegance has always doubled as a statement of dignity and pride. Every piece was made in Congo, by Congolese artisans. 

And then, somehow, an entire country turned itself into one color. The Dutch have a tradition called the Orange Fanwalk, and once you’ve seen it, you understand why it’s become legendary. Thousands of fans, dressed head to toe in orange, gather hours before kickoff and march together for miles behind an actual double-decker bus, painted Dutch-flag orange and stickered with every World Cup it’s ever attended since 2006, that shipped over by cargo boat just to lead the parade. In Houston, they walked two and a half miles  (3.3 KM) from Rice University to the stadium, jumping left and right in unison to a song the whole crowd seems to know by heart. The bus driver, a man named Frans Peeters who has been hauling that bus across the world for years, said it plainly: everywhere he goes, people are “yelling and singing and dancing and making movies and photos.” An entire nation, color-coordinated and on foot, just to walk to a game together. You couldn’t manufacture that kind of unity if you tried. You can only earn it, one World Cup at a time.

A Waffle House tour. A beer-soaked apology tour. A quiet trash bag brigade. A nation’s tailors dressing an entire team like royalty after fifty-two years of being overlooked. A sea of orange marching two and a half miles just because that’s what you do together. On paper, none of that sounds like it should move me. But it did. And I think I finally understand why.

The World Cup Didn’t Just Bring Soccer. It brought people.

Here’s what’s actually happening underneath all of it: strangers from 48 countries showed up in unfamiliar cities, and instead of staying in their own corners, they leaned in. They got curious about each other. They borrowed each other’s customs. Norwegian fans started rowing imaginary Viking longships in the stands, and other countries’ fans started doing it too. Japanese fans cleaned up, and other sections started following their lead. Scottish fans drank a city’s bars empty, then showed up the next morning to sweep its parks. Dutch fans proved that thousands of strangers can move as one if they just agree to wear the same color and walk the same direction. None of this was organized by FIFA. Nobody put it on a schedule. It happened because people, when given a shared reason to be in the same place, find their way toward each other.

That is, in miniature, exactly what we believe at World Merit.

We’ve always said it, but the World Cup is proving it on a global stage: when people come together around something bigger than themselves, good things multiply. Community isn’t a slogan, it’s what happens when a Boston city worker and a Scottish tourist end up shoulder to shoulder with the same broom. It’s what happens when one fan’s instinct to leave a place better than she found it spreads three sections over, then to a different stadium, then to a different country.

That’s the part I can’t stop thinking about. Not the cleanup itself, but the spread of it. Good behavior is contagious when people are paying attention to each other. Right now, with millions of strangers packed into stadiums and fan zones across three countries, the whole world is paying attention to each other in a way it rarely does.

Action Is the Bridge. Conversation Is What Walks Across It.

Here’s what I believe, and what I’ve watched our members live out for years now: it is not enough to feel moved by a video of fans cleaning a stadium. The feeling has to turn into something you do, and then, just as importantly, into something you talk about with someone who sees the world differently than you do.

That Scottish fan picking up litter on a Boston sidewalk wasn’t just doing a chore. He was having a conversation, in the language of action, with a city that welcomed him. The Japanese fans staying behind after every match aren’t lecturing anyone, they’re modeling something, and trusting that the example itself starts a dialogue that words alone couldn’t. Freddy, ridiculous Waffle House videos and all, has spent weeks getting strangers in small-town America to open up to him, and gotten his own followers back home rooting for towns they’d never heard of a month ago. That’s a bridge. A goofy, beautiful, two-way bridge.

DR Congo’s delegation didn’t just hire a designer, they hired their own artisans, in their own country, to tell their own story to the entire world. That’s community action in its purest form: a nation deciding that when the world finally looks at you again after fifty-two years, you make sure the people who look back see you, your history, your craftsmanship, your pride, not someone else’s idea of you.

This is the whole theory of change behind World Merit. We are a global network of young people, eighteen to thirty years old, from more than 190 countries, who believe the same thing those fans are demonstrating without even realizing it: that the way you change a community, and eventually the world, is by showing up, taking real action on the ground, and then sitting down with people who don’t share your background, your passport, or your politics, and talking it through anyway.

Our members run local councils in more than 30 countries, each one tackling the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals in whatever way fits their own community best: clean water in one city, girls’ education in another, climate action somewhere else entirely. We don’t hand people a script. We hand them a framework, a global family of peers who’ve tried things that worked and things that didn’t, and the encouragement to go act on what they see in front of them. Through our Action University, members learn the practical skills, project management, leadership, communication, to turn good intentions into real, sustained change. 

But the heart of it has always been the same thing Boston, Miami, and Dallas and Mexico City just gave the world a beautiful glimpse of: people from wildly different places, choosing to show up for each other, and then staying in the conversation long enough to actually understand one another.

The Cleanup Is the Easy Part. The Dialogue Is the Work.

I’ll be honest about something else: it’s easy to admire a viral video. It’s much harder to sit across from someone whose country, religion, politics, or life experience is nothing like your own, and actually listen, especially when the topic isn’t a tidy stadium but something that genuinely divides people. That’s the harder, less photogenic work. It’s the work that lasts after the trash bags are gone and the stadiums are empty and everyone’s flown home.

That’s why, at World Merit, we don’t just ask our members to do good, we ask them to do it with people unlike themselves, and to keep talking even when it’s uncomfortable. Because a community that only acts together but never talks together never quite becomes a community at all. And a world that only talks but never acts stays exactly the way it is.

The fans I’ve been watching all month didn’t set out to teach anyone anything. They were just being themselves, curious, joyful, a little chaotic, occasionally over-served at the bar, in front of the whole world. They reminded me that bridging the gap between people doesn’t require a grand plan. It requires showing up, picking up the broom, asking the question, having the conversation, and trusting that it matters more than it looks like it does in the moment.

Here’s my ask, to every one of you reading this: find your own version of the trash bag. Find the conversation you’ve been putting off having with someone who sees things differently than you. Show up for your community this week, in whatever small, unglamorous way is in front of you. And if you want company while you do it, a global community of people already doing exactly that, you know where to find us.

The world doesn’t change because of one match, one cleanup, or one viral video of a guy falling in love with Taco Bell. It changes because millions of small actions, and the conversations that come with them, add up. That’s what we’ve watched happen this World Cup. And it’s exactly what we get up every morning to build, together, at World Merit.