Melissa Urbain has watched World Cup matches on TVs around the world.
But the Davenport native – who teaches middle school in San Jose, Calif. -- witnessed history in her hometown Friday afternoon, celebrating with her family the USA men’s soccer team victory in the 2026 World Cup, at Great River Brewery, Davenport.
The U.S. men's national team shut out Australia 2-0 Friday, in the teams' second 2026 World Cup group stage match, taking a huge leap towards a spot in the knockout stage, winning their first two World Cup games since the first international soccer tournament in 1930.
“The World Cup is this incredibly fascinating tournament where people just come together, they know each other immediately, and they're ready to celebrate and cry together in like nothing I've ever seen,” Urbain said at Great River, at 322 E. 2nd St., which was filled with other soccer fans cheering on the host team.
“So like if you are traveling anywhere and the World Cup's on, get to a bar. Because even here, it's not like you don't see groups of people intermingling. If you go to anywhere else in the world, I've seen the World Cup in a lot of places in the world, people are just automatically friends. It's a pretty interesting social phenomenon.”
In other parts of the world, soccer is generational, passed down among families, she said.
“Soccer really wasn't introduced to the States and to kids until like the '70s, '80s,” Urbain said. “My folks didn't grow up playing it. My folks grew up playing baseball. And so you're talking about countries with endless generations of history behind it. And so that's part of it.”
She has taught (English as a second language) some summers in China, Japan and Burma.
“In Hong Kong, where it is such a mix of cultures, you get a lot of expats there. So everybody's cheering for everybody,” Urbain said of the World Cup, and watching it in Grenada in 2014. “We were teaching in Grenada in the Caribbean. That was great. We were working with a bunch of students from Africa that were going to medical school. And so that's what we did after class all the time is we watched World Cup with them.”
Where she lives in the Bay Area, it’s also very international. “If you get them talking about soccer, they're very interested and it's a good way to connect with people.”
“You're focused on the same thing and you're working on the same goal, focused on the same thing,” she said. “You're cheering vehemently for your team, but once your team gets out, you're cheering for another team, right? Or you're cheering for this team because if that team loses or gets a certain goal differential than my team gets, so it's just fun.”
Melissa and her brother Nick (at Great River Friday with their father, and Nick’s two kids) played soccer from grade school through college – she at Scott Community College and Central (in Pella, Iowa), and he at the former Marycrest in Davenport.
This year’s World Cup (like the Summer Olympics, it happens every four years) is 39 days of soccer and 104 matches, hosted by the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Forty-eight teams across three countries. It began on June 11 and the 2026 FIFA World Cup all comes down to one game.
The World Cup ends Sunday, July 19, in the shadows of the New York City skyline at MetLife Stadium, or New York/New Jersey Stadium according to FIFA, in East Rutherford, N.J. Kickoff is at 2:30 p.m.
It is the biggest World Cup ever – the first with 48 teams, up from 32. The old format had 64 games. This one needs almost six weeks and 16 stadiums to settle on a champion.
Last time the U.S. hosted the was the 1994 FIFA World Cup, the first and only time the U.S. hosted the men's tournament before this year’s edition. In 2022, the U.S. team was knocked out in the Round of 16 by the Netherlands.
This time, there are 12 groups of four teams each. Each team plays three group matches in the group stage. The top two teams in each group automatically advance to the knockout stage, and the eight best third-place teams also qualify.
Argentina claimed its third World Cup title in 2022, defeating France.
“Absolutely, it's special for the U.S. to host,” Nick Urbain, 46, of Eldridge, said Friday. “It's the most popular sporting event in the world. With all the fans coming into the United States, loving the game, and the economy, it's exciting. It's exciting to have it in North America, throughout Canada, the United States, and Mexico. I think it's extra special that we're sharing the love throughout North America with the event. Rather than holding it all in one location. So yeah, it's great.”
“Ever since my boy was a little guy, I've been trying to get him interested into the sport,” he said of his son Eli.
“I think it's a really good thing because it's a free-flowing game. It encourages expression, free play,” Nick said. “The clock is continually running, it's going up and up and up, and the play is continually running and you gotta figure things out on the clock. It's more of a game of chess than checkers, I would say.”
He noted soccer players tend to have longer careers than other major sports, citing superstar Argentinian Lionel Messi, turning 39 on June 24th. Messi is playing in his sixth World Cup.
“They do have a longer career than most other sports that are, that are more physical as far as football and basketball and stuff like that,” Nick said. Professional soccer fields are also larger than American football – World Cup matches are played on fields up to 120 yards long and 80 yards wide, compared to football fields of 100 yards in length (not including end zones), and 53 1/3 yards wide.
The U.S.-Australia match kicked off at 2 p.m. from Lumen Field in Seattle with both teams on three points in Group D after convincing wins in their World Cup openers. The USMNT routed Paraguay 4-1 in Los Angeles to open its campaign while the Socceroos beat Turkey 2-0 in a surprise result in Vancouver.
“America's doing good. Like in soccer, that's like almost a blowout,” Shelby Jack of Davenport, said Friday watching from the Great River bar, when the U.S. was up 2-0 in the 90-minute game. “They get one more score, that's like out of hand.”
A 38-year-old Davenport native, his friend James Robinson coached an FC America team (boys soccer under 12) in Davenport for years. He really likes the teamwork nature of the sport, where it’s not known for leading scorers.
“It's very personal, right? Your players have your back, you have your players' back, and that level of intimacy is great,” Robinson said. “If you might not be as skilled as another team, you can counteract with speed, you can counteract a lot of different things, work together as a team.”
Great River event coordinator Alyssa Meincke was busy serving beers Friday, noting the brewery on the night of June 12 hosted the first USA watch party, when the team beat Paraguay.
“It was so much fun. It was packed in here,” she said during a break Friday. “We had a line going out the door, kind of similar to today, but even more,” she said.
They didn’t do a watch party for the recent NBA Finals, but did one for the last Super Bowl in February (when the Seahawks beat the Patriots), which wasn’t well attended.
“It was a lot smaller though,” Meincke said. “We had a tiny one. Nobody came to watch it. Everybody was at other places.”
“This one I got in contact with, so I have a friend from Brazil and he was the one that was like, ‘Do a watch party, do a watch party’,” she recalled, noting they also had the Brazil World Cup game on Friday night. “I'm like, ‘I'll try, I'll try it, absolutely.’ And so we ended up, we did it and we did a big one. And so I think that's why we're gonna do the Brazil game here now tonight as well.”
For the World Cup, Great River is offering $2 off its Irish stout and then once that’s out, they’ll offer $2 off the Mexican lager.
It certainly helped the Friday game was during a federal holiday, Juneteenth (when many people had the day off work), Meincke said.
“I was expecting a lot— a good lunch crowd, but it ended up being kind of like similar to last Friday, but it's a little more tame,” she said. “Definitely that line that kept going to the door.”
It also helps to have the U.S. host games, and for the team to win, she noted.
“I never found a big interest in it. But we have a lot of people sitting at the bar right now who are just some regulars who are getting really into it,” Meincke said. “So it's a really fun form of community to bring everybody in.”
Great River will host another World Cup watch party Thursday, June 25 at 9 p.m., as the USA is scheduled to take on Turkey at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. For more information, visit its Facebook page.
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