Commentary: How this World Cup finally taught me to love soccer

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Set us as preferred I’m one of those rare Mexicans who never cared for soccer.My family is from the north-central Mexico state of Zacatecas, where baseball is king and even volleyball was more popular in the ranchos of my parents than futbol.The childhood sports idols for my generation of cousins were Dodgers pitcher Fernando Valenzuela and boxing champ Julio César Chávez, not Mexican soccer legends Hugo Sánchez and Jorge Campos.

Our dads bought us hats and bats to occupy our summer, not kits and cleats.I don’t even remember any of us ever owning a soccer ball — and I have nearly 100 cousins.The first World Cup I remember was the 1994 edition hosted by the United States, I remember reading a huge Times special preview section on the affair and collected some of the commemorative pins that McDonald’s sold.

But the matches were background noise in our living room during family parties as we splashed around in the swimming pool at our Anaheim home.When the tournament finale happened at the Rose Bowl, my favorite cousins and mutual best friend instead caught a baseball game at Angel Stadium and only knew about Brazil’s victory over Italy because the people above us in the a private suite let us know.

Soccer Spain, Cape Verde, Erling Haaland and many magical moments helped spread World Cup fever, making the ambitious tournament expansion a success despite flaws.As a sports fan, I paid enough attention to soccer as the decades passed to know who was who and what team was what and which sides kept winning — and that was mostly because I enjoyed EA Sports’ excellent video game version of it.What made playing soccer on consoles so fun — an exponential number of domestic leagues and international tournaments, the fact that every English-language match seemed to have a Scottish color commentator, the seeming aimless...