The World Cup hasn't even fully kicked into gear on US soil yet and the away supporters are already lapping the home crowd. The Brits flew in, found the nearest bar with a TV, and immediately reminded America what tournament football actually sounds like. No polite golf claps. No organ riffs. Just bodies, beers, and chants that would get you ejected from a Yankee game.
England supporters packed into City Tavern unloading the classic 'you're shit but your birds are fit' at a sea of Croatia flags.
That's the bar. Literally. A guy in a Rice 4 shirt going toe-to-toe with Croatian checkered flags under a Mavericks jersey on the wall. And because no England crowd is ever going to limit itself to one target, the Scots caught strays from 4,500 miles away — the bagpipes chant got dusted off before the Tartan Army even knew they were being clowned.
Same bar, different victim — England fans serenading Scotland with the bagpipes-up-the-arse standard.
Meanwhile the Scots, who weren't even in the room to defend themselves, are out here building goodwill the old-fashioned way: by getting absolutely hammered and then cleaning up after themselves. NBC10 Boston caught the Tartan Army turning a city park into a not-a-spot-of-litter operation, with a stunned sanitation worker delivering the line of the tournament about how 'they must not got no water over there in Scotland.'
A Boston city worker breaking down the Scotland fan experience in real time.
Naturally, John Henry saw all of this — drunk Scots, full bars, free PR — and the Red Sox brain trust started scheming on how to get them back into Fenway for a second helping. You don't need a marketing degree to know that a stadium full of kilted maniacs singing Freed From Desire moves more beer than bobblehead night.
Leave it to the Red Sox to try and trick the Scots to coming to another game. John Henry 101.
Which brings us to the existential question hanging over the whole tournament: where is the USMNT's version of any of this? Portnoy spent the afternoon on his phone, then on a walk, then back inside, basically begging American soccer fans to invent a single chant that doesn't sound like a halftime jingle. His pitch — get a drummer, get a flute guy — is not going to win a Grammy, but he's not wrong that 250 years is a long time to come up with nothing. The Brits have been in country for about 5 minutes and they already own the soundtrack.