Narrative Non-fiction · Hardback

The Finals

Norwegian title: Sluttspill

A travelogue of a tournament under pressure and a nation in crisis.

Yes, we loved America. During the 1994 World Cup, eight-year-old Eirik Grasaas-Stavenes hung a poster of the bohemian American center-back Alexi Lalas on his bedroom wall. America represented freedom, democracy, and dreams.

Thirty-two years later, the tournament is once again hosted on American soil, Norway has qualified for the first time since 1998, and Grasaas-Stavenes – now a US correspondent for the Norwegian daily Klassekampen – returns to a superpower where everything has been turned upside down. The country we once looked up to has become a threat to Norway and Europe. Lies have been exposed, old heroes have faltered, and Alexi Lalas has become one of Donald Trump's loyal supporters.

What had happened to the country so many Norwegians loved? What kind of America was Norway returning to? And through football, could one find not just warnings of how terribly wrong things could go, but also hope and solutions to save our own democracies and communities?

Eirik Grasaas-Stavenes has covered the United States for fifteen years. In this travelogue, written leading up to and during the World Cup in the US, he tracks down old heroes, maps out the concentration of power among oligarchs, and depicts the rise of economic inequality that threatens what was once considered the world's most powerful democracy.

Yet on his World Cup journey, he also finds resistance, hope, and historic political shifts that could change both the United States and the entire world forever.

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