Follow the match. Discover the country behind the flag.

I have been a football fan for thirty years, which means the World Cup has measured my life in a strange and faithful rhythm. I remember tournaments by the room where I watched them, by the friends who shouted beside me, by the late-night food on the table, by the names that suddenly became part of ordinary conversation. I have also spent much of my adult life chasing the opposite feeling: leaving home, buying a ticket with room for uncertainty, walking through a city before I understand its streets, and letting a country teach me its pace. Travel the Teams began where those two old loves met. It began with the World Cup on a screen, a notebook open beside me, and the sense that every unfamiliar flag was not only a football story but a doorway.

Most years, I travel for nearly two months. I do not travel like someone checking boxes. I like the loose days: a bus station at sunrise, a market where I cannot read every sign, a road that turns from city dust to mountain light, a small restaurant where the menu is explained with hands, smiles, and the one shared word everyone understands. Nature pulls me first, then society, then people. I love coastlines, deserts, rivers, volcanic hills, old towns, music, tea, bread, and the quiet drama of daily life. I like to feel how a place lives when nobody is performing for me. This year, the World Cup kept me at home. I thought I was only staying in to watch football. Instead, I found myself traveling in a different way.