This World Cup, soccer fans are making a scene—and bringing people together, in the process.
At Boston's South Station in mid-June, a group of Norwegian football fans created what could have been an awkward moment. The fans sat one behind another on an escalator, leaned forward and back in synchrony, "rowing" through the station as if the moving metal stairs were ferrying them across the North Sea.
Train stations are not forgiving stages. They are places of delay, impatience, platform changes, garbled announcements, and people trying very hard not to make eye contact. Escalators are even narrower social spaces, governed by a universal public etiquette: face forward, keep moving, and avoid becoming the reason anyone else has to stop.
By every ordinary rule of public life, the South Station scene should have induced annoyance or caused embarrassment. Instead, commuters stopped. Phones came out. Some locals took up an imaginary oar and joined in. The fans were performing the "Viking Row," a ritual that has followed Norway through the World Cup. It carries the theatrical shape of something ancient, but its social force is contemporary. Its power comes from participation itself: people finding one another in public, copying a gesture, repeating it, teaching it, altering it, and making it feel like their own.
Unusual fan rituals like these show us how to actually create a sense of belonging. With communities across the country facing a “loneliness epidemic,” this lesson could not have come at a better time.
To be sure, the Norwegians are not alone in broadcasting their rituals during this FIFA World Cup. In Houston, thousands of Dutch supporters marched through the heat in a river of orange on the Oranje Fanwalk, joined by almost anyone willing to enter the procession. After matches, Japanese fans once again stayed behind to collect trash from the stadium rows, continuing a practice that has become one of the mo
