Why the Knicks Win Feels So Big

And what the World Cup also teaches us about organizing around joy rather than critique.

Hello sports fans!

Yes, this really did appear over Manhattan the day of the Knicks victory in the NBA finals

Between the NBA Finals, which culminated with my home-town New York Knicks winning their first title in 53 years, and the start of the World Cup, it’s a great time to soak in the communal joy of mass fandom and ponder as well how sport can be a force for social good.

First, the Knicks’ win shows that a lot of people on the progressive left clearly yearn for a relationship with the public that somehow matches both the reach and depth of successful fandom. Here, as just one example, is Waleed Shahid, a progressive Democratic strategist who is now working inside the Mamdani administration as Deputy Communications Director of Economic Justice. On Substack’s Notes channel, he wrote about what it was like to be in NYC Saturday night after the Knicks won:

“I keep trying to name what got lifted that night, and the closest I can come is a set of instructions we’d all been quietly following. A public is, among other things, a set of beliefs about other people, and ours had curdled.

From the pandemic: that another person’s breath was a danger. From Biden, more gently: that a public is largely unnecessary, that we could let the grown-ups handle it and stay spectators to our own governance. From Trump: that a public is a mob, everyone in it a competitor, softness something you’d pay for. From Adams: that the subway car was a hazard to be scanned.

And then a Knicks championship run unlearned it for us. The win picked every one of them up off the street and held them there, suspended for a few hours, a couple of feet above the city.

There were just people dancing and embracing strangers, a public that looked at itself - all of itself, pressed together, messy, completely nuts even - and for one night did not flinch.”

On BlueSky, Ben Collins, the CEO of the company that owns the satirical newspaper The Onion, wrote, “Fascism’s a fever you break with shit like what happened in New York last night. Create more excuses to feel things like that together.” In lots of places, “collective effervescence” was trending, a term that sociologist Emile Durkheim coined to describe the feeling when thousands of people share the emotions of joy, hope and belonging together at the same time.

Or just watch this:

Ironically, the very fact that it was impossible for most Knicks fans to afford a ticket (when I looked, seats in the very top nosebleed section were going for $7,500 a pop) drove many hungry for the communal experience of fandom to watch-parties all over the city, many spilling all over the sidewalks where everyone normally grimaces silently at each other on their rush to work or home. (This roundup from Curbed.com captures the flavor of those scenes really well.)

One thing to acknowledge is that this moment of mass solidarity and joy was not created by a social movement or a political victory. It was created by capitalism, by a team owner, James Dolan, the scion of a cable magnate, who let’s just say is not a nice person. Indeed, nearly every team across the whole professional sports pantheon, including women’s basketball, which is probably the most progressive sport, is owned by a capitalist. (The one exception in the United States is the NFL’s Green Bay Packers, which is owned by a half million of their fans via shares in a community nonprofit.) The Knicks’ team spirit and charismatic players could not have reached a mass audience without Dolan’s vast media operation.

But hey, we’re living in America. That said, in other ways American sports put our laissez-faire, oligarchic political system to shame. Games have clear rules and referees, and when a team loses it accepts its loss. While billionaires can buy unlimited amounts of influence in politics, in many sports their teams are subject to salary caps, to keep the ones in rich markets from buying up all the talent and dominating the weaker teams. How socialistic of them! Indeed, right now the NBA is investigating billionaire owner Steve Ballmer (gift link) for allegedly circumventing the cap by giving one of his star players on the LA Clippers a lucrative no-show endorsement deal on the side. That’s more billionaires than the Trump administration is investigating, if I’m not mistaken. So how do you like them apples?

Football Belongs to the People

With all this in mind, consider football (aka soccer) and the World Cup, an event that regularly produces collective effervescence on a global scale. As I write this, there are at least three efforts that I know of by American progressive organizers to use the Cup’s presence in the US to focus attention on ICE and its concentration camps. There’s “OurCopa”, backed by Working Families Power and Mijente Support Committee; NoIceintheCup, a sister effort led by artist groups; and LetThemGo.us, a joint initiative by Minuto 90, a Chilean sports media station, and Brave of US, a coalition of US immigration groups.

Of these three, only one—LetThemGo.us—is likely to gain much traction, thanks to its partnership with Minuto90. That’s because there’s a big difference between organically using football to spread a progressive message of solidarity and attempting to claim the sport for the left without doing all the seed work needed to connect with the sport’s massive fan base.

OurCopa’s main call to action is embodied in a petition demanding a moratorium on ICE raids and a lifting of travel bans so that fans from Haiti, Iran, Cote D’Ivoire and Senegal can come cheer their teams on. So far it has just over 1,000 signatures. Less than two dozen people have signed up to volunteer with OurCopa in response to its call for hosts of safe watch parties. Just forty-two signed up to attend its June 9 mass call on Mijente’s page. Without some highly provocative action by ICE at one of the World Cup matches, or by raiding a watch party, it’s doubtful anyone will tune into this effort. “They don’t want us to have joy in this moment,” Nelini Stamp, one of OurCopa’s organizers, told Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman last week. Her critique of Trump administration policy is great, but in my humble opinion, political criticism is exactly the kind of thing people tune into sports spectacles to escape.

The podcast launched by OurCopa to accompany the rest of its campaign also illustrates how hard it is to bend all that attention toward leftist politics. I tuned into the first episode, which covered how an underground Algerian soccer team fought for liberation from France, and gave up before it finished. There’s a difference between show and tell, and the program’s three hosts spent far too much time telling listeners that the Algerian team did something noble rather than describing what they did.

Contrast this with Minuto90, a two-year-old digital native media operation that intensively covers football in Chile. According to my friend Felipe Heusser, who is its co-founder and director, across Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube, Minuto90 has had 40 million views over the last 30 days. That’s on top of the 450 million views it has garnered in its first 19 months.

This promotional video for Minuto90, which Heusser shared with me, gives you the full flavor of its approach. (Make sure your sound is on.)

Minuto90 covers football the way any sports channel does, with intensive attention to every game, team, player and stats. But it also finds social issues from inside the game, with stories on how rising ticket prices are taxing fans for whom attending games is a family tradition, or how a local team owner screwed his top players by ordering their coach to bench them before they played enough games to trigger an automatic contract renewal.

This video reel gives some examples of how Minuto90 does that coverage.

So far, Minuto90’s initial Instagram posts about the LetThemGo.us effort have garnered half a million views. Next week its team is going to do more reporting from the ground about ICE detention centers near some of the US match cities, and Heusser predicts this will gain more attention as well.

As far as I know, there’s no equivalent in America to Minuto90, in terms of its approach to its country’s favorite sport. But we could sure use something like it.

Towards a Politics of Joy

Starting where people gather for joy rather than where they gather for critique inverts much of what the American liberal-left has done for decades. Back in February, Dakota Hall, the executive director at the Alliance for Youth Action, who writes the Substack newsletter The Ground Game, laid out a striking vision of how this could work (have worked?) around the World Cup:

A FIFA World Cup watch party brings together people across lines that traditional organizing struggles to cross. Young men who work in construction watch next to college students. Recent immigrants sit with third-generation Americans. People who’ve never voted and people who canvass every cycle all show up because they love soccer and they want to watch it with other people who love soccer. That’s the on-ramp. Not a clipboard. Not a ten-page reading on neoliberalism. A World Cup watch party.

The organizing model I’m proposing inverts the traditional pipeline. Instead of recruiting the already-engaged to do more political work, it focuses on bringing new people into the base by creating spaces they actually want to be in. Spaces that start with culture, community, and shared experience, and only later, organically, introduce questions of power, fairness, and collective action.

Here’s what that could look like in practice:

You organize a March Madness watch party at a community center near campus. You make it free, you provide food, you have a big screen and decent sound. You invite everyone, the political science majors show up, sure, but so do the nursing students, the guys from the football team, the international students, the kids who work full-time and go to school part-time. Half the people who show up just want to rep their school, wear the jersey, and scream at a screen with other people who care. You’re not asking anyone to sign anything or commit to anything. You’re just creating a space where people can enjoy something together.

Next week, some of those same people show up to a pickup basketball tournament you’re organizing. Then a few come to a Cultura y Comunidad night with a live banda performance and local food vendors. Then a retro game night. Over time, you’re not just hosting events, you’re building a community of young people who trust each other, who have shared experiences, who feel like they belong to something.

And here’s the thing: When you’ve built that foundation of trust and belonging, the conversations about power, fairness, and collective action emerge naturally. Because these young people are already experiencing economic precarity, they’re just not using that language to describe it. They know healthcare is broken because half of them can’t afford to see a doctor. They understand labor exploitation because they’re working two jobs while going to school. They get that the system is rigged because they’re living it.

The gaming community that started meeting just to play starts talking about how tariffs affect the price of consoles. The fitness group that bonded over training routines has conversations about health access and the politics of bodily autonomy. The anime watch party crew starts connecting the dots between the stories they love and the political fights happening around them.

You didn’t lead with politics. You led with joy. And the politics followed because you created space for people to think together about the systems shaping their lives.

End Times

The medieval king of pop.