The Feel-Good Story of the World Cup Is Too Good to Be True - The Atlantic

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Every World Cup propels a breakout star into the firmament; this year’s might just be a seemingly random German soccer fan who goes by Freddy. In the World Cup’s opening week, his X posts extolling a Taco Bell as “the holy land” and chronicling his rapturous 1 a.m. visits to a Waffle House and a Buc-ee’s have attracted more attention—from Americans, at least—than most of the actual matches.

Freddy from Germany is the standard-bearer of an emergent social-media genre: A World Cup visitor from overseas encounters American culture and excess—and loves it. The Spanish soccer wunderkind Lamine Yamal loaded up a grocery cart at a Walmart in Georgia. “Why did no one tell me ranch sauce is like crack?” a Swedish fan posted on X from an Indiana diner. “EUROPE WE NEED RANCH ASAP.” A Japanese man raved about Texas Roadhouse steak. Freddy’s Buc-ee’s post showed customers flowing into the cavernous convenience store, its cartoon-beaver logo a towering beacon that illuminated the night sky. In another photo, a row of pumps stretched, like a horizon, beyond both sides of the frame. Freddy was overawed: “DUDE LMAO THIS IS A GAS STATION😭😭😭,” he wrote.

Americans, of course, are eating it up with a spork. “This is genuinely making me patriotic,” one wrote of a video showing a rotund New Jersey–deli guy dancing with a visitor from London and giving him a chicken-parm sandwich on the house. Another observed: “It’s sick to see how many Europeans came over here to actually enjoy US culture. Saw a guy look at a Buc-ee’s gas station the same way I’d look at Stonehenge.” The caption on a video of an Italian’s astonished reaction to unlimited soda refills captured the half-winking exceptionalism in a familiar meme: “The European mind cannot comprehend this.”

The videos have been covered in the media as a refreshing antidote to our polarized political moment and as an indication that American greatness resides at least partly in conveniences we take for granted. It’s a nice thought. But not all of the videos, or the people behind them, are quite what they seem.

Take the Swedish soccer fan who swooned over ranch dressing. Elsa Thora, a photogenic 24-year-old blonde, has been featured in a number of news stories about foreign soccer fans’ American exploits, exuding a gee-whiz gusto for the country’s food and culture. “I feel like I’m in a movie,” she posted, holding bags of Hostess Twinkies and cheese-stuffed Combos outside a convenience store. “OK so Amish people are real,” she marveled.

What many of the news stories have failed to mention is that Thora is not new to the social-media spotlight. She’s a star on the adult platform OnlyFans and a fixture in the British tabloids, where she’s made headlines for expressing her desire to have sex in space, to birth Elon Musk’s first baby on Mars, and to sleep with a player from every English Premier League soccer club. (“Three down, 17 to go,” she told The Irish Sun in 2024.) She already has some 388,000 followers on Instagram. When I reached her by phone, on her way to Los Angeles, she told me that she works in digital marketing but that the trip to the States was just for fun and the love of soccer. She acknowledged that her posts here have raised her social-media profile but insisted that she isn’t trying to monetize them: Her enthusiasm for American culture is genuine, she said.

Thora may have more to gain from gushing than an ordinary soccer fan, but at least she’s a real person who’s really here for the World Cup. The same cannot be said for Nobunaga, a user whose viral X post purports to recount a Japanese visitor’s experiences at an American hibachi restaurant. “I witnessed a ritual I have never seen in eight hundred years of being Japanese,” begins a deadpan story that goes on to describe the chef building a flaming volcano of onion rings and hurling a shrimp through the air for the narrator to catch with his mouth.

The post is part of a series in which Nobunaga takes on the persona of a samurai traveling around the world and into space. (The account shares a name with Oda Nobunaga, a powerful 16th-century samurai.) Running the posts through Pangram, an AI-detection tool, yields a consistent verdict of “100% AI.” Nobunaga told me via X message that the aim of the stories is comedy, not “realism, journalism, or persuasion.” But at least in the context of the World Cup, some of the account’s audience seems to have taken its American-restaurant reviews at face value. “I am enjoying your posts with enthusiasm and a few tears,” a woman, whose X bio identifies her as a Trump supporter and patriot, replied to the hibachi post.

Between the influencers and the AI-slop accounts lies a spectrum of inauthenticity. The New Jersey–deli guy, for instance, is real, but the Parkwood Deli’s 400,000-follower Instagram account suggests that the shop is canny about marketing his old-school...