A mall at Columbus Circle has installed a countdown clock nearly three metres tall. The Empire State Building has lit its tower in the colours of the three host nations — red, white and blue for the United States, red and white for Canada, green, white and red for Mexico.

Men dressed as Clutch the Bald Eagle waddle through concourses shaking hands with strangers. Nike’s Rip The Script advertisement, featuring the who’s who of world football, plays on loop.

The NBA Finals — San Antonio Spurs against the local New York Knicks — runs in the backdrop but has not deflected the gaze from what is coming. Two evenings ago, the Netherlands squad made a pilgrimage to Times Square before flying to their training base in Missouri — as if this intersection was a required stop, a place where you confirm to the world that you have arrived.

Forty-eight teams. A hundred and four matches. Three host countries with distinct sensibilities — and not all too cordial relations. Sixteen venues across multiple time zones. It is, as US President Donald Trump puts it in his drawling staccato, “a once in a lifetime opportunity”.

Sections of the local press have called him “America’s first soccer President” — in office when the bid was won, back in the White House for kick-off. At the draw ceremony, FIFA president Gianni Infantino handed him FIFA’s first-ever peace prize — days before the US launched attacks on Iran, one of the teams that will play here, training in Mexico while competing on American soil. He will not retreat to the wings once the games begin.

But the tournament’s real story is not on the billboards.

Walk from Times Square to 46th Street and you are, within blocks, in Little Brazil — nearly a lakh Brazilians call this part of Midtown home. Head north and the streets carry the rhythms of Accra. The Lower East Side has Germans. Roosevelt Avenue belongs to Ecuadorians.

Jones is Welsh by origin, American by allegiance, grieving quietly that his country did not qualify, but buoyed by what surrounds him. “Suppose Brazil is playing in Los Angeles,” he says. “Brazilians in every city and town will huddle into the local pub. Same when Ghana or Senegal or Japan or Croatia play.”

What makes this World Cup unlike any before it is not the scale, though the scale is staggering. It is this: the communities who will fill these streets — who will wave flags, weep and sing in a dozen languages, who will turn a pub on Roosevelt Avenue into a corner of Quito — are the very people this government has spent two years trying to remove.

The geopolitics is heavy. Iran is at war with the US and will play here anyway. Relations with Iraq are frosty. Haiti and Algeria face visa restrictions. Several African nations are managing an Ebola outbreak. Trade ties between co-hosts Mexico and Canada are strained. Hunter drones, robot dogs, X-ray trucks and AI cameras now patrol public space.

A Somali referee — the first from his country ever appointed to a World Cup — was turned away at Miami airport days before the tournament began. ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents, meanwhile, have not been prohibited from making arrests at stadiums. And yet the countdown clock ticks.

The 1994 World Cup on these shores was described by its architect Alan Rothenberg as “football’s ground zero in the States”. It still holds the joint record for the highest average attendance in tournament history. “I wasn’t sure how much Americans would take to it,” he wrote in his book The Big Bounce. “What we did know was Americans love a big event — so we’d make it into a big event.”

What exists now is different. It is a nation that Don Garber, commissioner of Major League Soccer, calls “the ATM of world football”. It now understands the game and wants to own it. Whether it can also feel it — in its bones, in its streets — is the question 41 days will answer.

Outside, the city makes no promises. The billboards blaze on.