Surprise over Algeria’s World Cup welcome shows how media misunderstand Kansas and Lawrence
Banners throughout the city of Lawrence welcomed the Algerian national soccer team to the host city during the 2026 World Cup. (Photo by Eric Thomas for Kansas Reflector)
When Spain won the 2026 World Cup Sunday, journalists and the sports media reflected on the highlights of the 104-game North American tournament: the top goals, the funniest social media memes and the heartwarming stories.
The city of Lawrence — and its hosting of the Algerian national team — came up often.
The joyful bond between Kansas’s most famous college town and the Desert Foxes, as the Algerian team is known, was catnip. The team’s weeks-long stay in America before and in-between matches showed Lawrence locals welcoming and celebrating their adopted team.
Heartwarming indeed.
However, in addition to the sweet vibes, some media types frequently saw — if not manufactured — something curious as Lawrence happily hosted Algeria.
“Unexpected,” wrote one YouTube channel. A Kansas City news channel called it “the surprise of the tournament.”
In those word choices and others, media folks hoped to signal something about the relationship between Kansas and Algeria, between Lawrence and a foreign soccer team, but they ended up saying more about themselves as media creators in a clickbait culture.
After all, what did they mean by “surprise” or “unexpected?” Reading the stories and watching the videos doesn’t explain why they used those words — especially so prominently, often in the headline or first few key words of the story.
The YouTube channel HumanKind titled one video, “A surprising bond: Algeria and Lawrence, Kansas.” The video provides interviews with Algerian fans and Lawrence residents explaining the relationship between the two groups. We see footage from watch parties and the Algerian bus arriving. The surprise of it all? That is never explained.
A story by KMBC called it “a World Cup connection as unexpected as it is tough to describe.” The footage and interviews from Lawrence portray a close and gracious bond during the team’s stay, but no explanation of why it was unexpected.
The first sentence of the description for a June 29 story on KSHB read, “Lawrence, Kansas, has become an unlikely love story of the 2026 FIFA World Cup — and the people who live there say it’s simply who they are.” What a frustrating construction of a sentence. It first imposes an ad hoc narrative on the story (it was “unlikely”) before acknowledging the people who were interviewed and their sensible explanations.
Because these stories leave the unexpected unexplained, we must assume why some many people were caught off guard. And the possibilities are not wholesome.
Did the reporters see the bond as surprising because conservative Kansas would not be welcoming to brown-skinned, Arab players and fans?
Or was the unity surprising because liberal Lawrence might not welcome a soccer team from a nation known for suppressing civil and political liberties?
The two possibilities rest on stereotypes, both of Kansans and the African visitors.
And so, with just a word or two — “surprising,” “unexpected” or “astounded” — a YouTube script or travel story could wink, hinting that “these two groups of people are wildly different” while getting away with not explaining the differences they were winking at.
That wink reads like clickbait, a way to give a soft, endearing story a brief sharp twist in the headline. In an attention economy like ours, a story of kindness might attract limited eyeballs.
How to bring more viewers? A story of unexpected kindness: people who shouldn’t be kind to each other doing exactly that.
It’s a puzzle that at least one reporter considered. At the end of a YouTube video on the MiddleEastEye channel, the narrator says, “Maybe the question isn’t why Lawrence embraced Algeria, but why everyone online is so surprised that this union just makes sense?”
In these stories, a rare reporter did find someone on the street to describe their surprise, backing up the framing of the story. But the interactions often felt like the reporter was looking for a quote to back up their headline.
“I didn’t expect to be welcomed like this from people of Lawrence and Kansas,” Aimad Benarab, an Algerian fan living in the United Kingdom, told KCTV’s Grace Smith. “Everyone’s just super nice. I didn’t expect it to be this good.”
Certainly some journalists reported on Lawrence’s hosting without slipping into the cliche of the unexpected.
Daniel Sperry, a reporter from the Guardian, a publication from the United Kingdom, quoted Stan Herd as saying: “I think everybody’s surprised at it. We’re not.” (Nevertheless, Sperry’s headline writer lazily leaned on the surprise of it all with this: “How Algeria won over a Kansas town — and became the World Cup’s unlikeliest love affair.”)
When I teach journalism students how to find newsworthy stories, I explain the value of novelty, or the unusualness of a piece of news. The story of a Kansas city hosting a national soccer team for the first time ever certainly delivers novelty.
However, I also remind the students not to project a news value like novelty onto a story that isn’t there because it misrepresents the people in your stories.
I see that repeatedly happening with the Lawrence-Algeria story in a way that slights Lawrence. It’s misleading to treat the city as a close-minded backwater town that miraculously welcomed foreigners who are among the most talented and famous athletes in the world.
In fact, Lawrence is the most predictable city that I have visited in terms of welcoming diversity, whether cultural, ethnic, racial or sexual orientation. Look at the city’s calendar or the downtown shops on Massachusetts Street and marvel at how the city struts its inclusivity.
In the KSHB story, consider these quotes from the people of Lawrence: “If you live here, you know how it is,” one woman said. “It’s like, they are just our people,” another said. And finally, “The world gets to see what a friendly community Lawrence is.”
A particular danger is that these stories, ones that emphasize the surprise in their headlines and never deliver, ones flawed by simplistic framing, are the world’s rare window into Kansas and Lawrence. Representing the city accurately matters more than ever because so many people are reading and watching.
With that in mind, it was particularly frustrating to hear one of my favorite media people fall into this trap when discussing Lawrence hosting Algeria. The soccer podcaster Roger Bennett interviewed comedian Jon Stewart in a preview to the World Cup final last week.
Comparing the Midwest to his home of New York City, Stewart said: “Where it’s really been astonishing has been in Kansas, in Lawrence, when the Algerian and the people of Kansas. You’re seeing them in areas where it really is unusual to have an influx of other cultures and, you know, large blocks of people that want to share their lives.”
Stewart’s comments along with the other headlines and stories fundamentally misunderstand the accepting nature of Lawrence locals and most Kansans, pegging them as extraordinary because they welcome Africans, Europeans or South Americans.
Later, Stewart redeemed himself by explaining how media narratives get twisted. It’s easy to read these words as a comment on how a city like Lawrence has its reputation twisted by just a few poorly chosen words in a headline.
“It goes to show you that the narratives that are portrayed are never the narratives of reality,” Stewart said. “They are just slices out of context meant to evoke negative emotion. That’s how papers get sold. That’s how people stay online.”
That dynamic, dear Lawrence, is likely no surprise to you.
Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.