Who do we cheer for?

Chyung Eun-ju

“Who are you cheering for?”

It is one of the simplest questions in sports and one we are constantly hearing now that the World Cup is underway.

At first glance, the answer seems obvious. You cheer for your country.

The world of sports, after all, is among the few remaining institutions that require us to declare where our loyalty lies so openly. Flags hang from buildings, national anthems echo before matches, and television broadcasts divide the world into familiar categories of “us” and “them.” In doing so, sporting events transform abstract ideas of identity and belonging into something visible, shared and deeply emotional.

Joel Cho

During the matches we are keeping up with this World Cup, for 90 minutes, the complexity of modern life gives way to a simple proposition: choose a side.

Yet the more we talked about it, the more we realized how difficult that question has become for many people. Defining what “your country” means is no longer a straightforward answer.

Perhaps it was easier in another time.

Many of our parents and grandparents spent most of their lives close to where they were born. Their identities were often rooted in a single community, a single language and a single national story.

Today, that is increasingly less common.

People move abroad for education. They relocate for work. They marry across cultures. They raise children whose lives are shaped by multiple countries at once.

The result is a growing number of people who feel connected to more than one place.

We know this feeling well.

Like many people living in an interconnected world, our lives have been shaped by different cultures, different countries, and different communities. Some of our most important friendships were formed far from where we were born. Some of our most meaningful memories belong to places that do not appear on our passports.

And then the World Cup arrives.

Suddenly, a question that usually remains in the background moves to the center of the conversation.

Who are you rooting for? Where do your loyalties lie? Which team is yours?

What makes the question so fascinating is that it assumes belonging must be exclusive, that supporting one place somehow means turning away from another.

Yet our experience suggests the opposite.

One of the gifts of living between cultures is discovering that affection is not a finite resource. We can appreciate one culture without abandoning another. We can celebrate one country’s success without diminishing our connection to another.

The world often presents identity as a choice. This or that. Here or there. Us or them. But many people no longer experience life that way. Instead, they carry multiple places within them.

This does not mean that national identity has disappeared. If anything, the act of choosing a side in global sporting events shows how powerful those connections remain. The difference is that, for many people today, identity is no longer shaped by a single location, it is built through movement, relationships, memories and experiences that cross borders.

A person can feel a deep attachment to the country where they were raised, gratitude toward the country that welcomed them and affection for places that became meaningful along the way.

Belonging is no longer always a matter of choosing where we come from, it is, increasingly, also about recognizing everything that has shaped who we have become.

A match between nations may still require choosing a team for the evening, but it does not require choosing a single story for a lifetime.

That may be why international sporting events remain so fascinating. They remind us of the power of belonging while also revealing how much belonging itself has changed.

Though Korea ended its World Cup journey early, millions of fans will continue to cheer for their team in the post-World Cup games. So will we.

And yet, even as we do so, we will also find ourselves cheering for Brazil, the other country we both grew up in, and one that is equally part of our personal histories. In moments like these, allegiance does not cancel itself out, it layers. The same match can hold multiple forms of attachment at once, each rooted in different parts of who we are.

What we are reminded of, then, is that identity has become more layered than many of our institutions acknowledge. For some people, home is a single place. For others, it is a collection of places, people and experiences carried across borders and through time.

The World Cup asks us to choose a side.

So, who are you cheering for?

Chyung Eun-ju (ejchyung@snu.ac.kr) is a tech research associate at Donghyun ASP. She earned both her bachelor's in business and master's in marketing from Seoul National University. Joel Cho (joelywcho@gmail.com) is a practicing lawyer specializing in IP and digital law.