Meet the Belgian superfan driving thousands of miles across America just to watch his team play at the 2026 World Cup

Adam El Manawy has been to three World Cups, driven through war zones, slept in strangers' homes, and missed Belgium's entire 2022 Qatar campaign because he was too busy documenting his journey there. This summer, the Brussels-based actor and filmmaker is doing it again, only bigger. He has shipped his 1982 BMW coupe to Baltimore and booked a one-way flight to America. No hotel. No return ticket. Just a car, some gas money, and tickets to Belgium's group-stage games.The car, which El Manawy calls "The Beast," was barely roadworthy not too long ago. Flaking paint, a temperamental engine, oil changes every few hundred miles. He fixed it up before driving it from Brussels to Doha in 2022, and now he has had it freshly painted and mechanically tuned for a coast-to-coast American leg that will cover close to 3,000 miles.The itinerary is loose, deliberately so. El Manawy lands in Baltimore, drives west to Seattle in six days to catch Belgium's June 15 opener against Egypt, then heads down to Los Angeles six days later for the Iran fixture. Everything after that depends on how far the Red Devils go."I just want to travel differently, and this is also why I do it during the World Cup, because somehow the World Cup brings some kind of magic to it," he said.He carries two Belgium jerseys for himself and four to give away. That's the prep work. The rest of it, where he sleeps, who he meets, how he pays for it, he is largely leaving to chance and the kindness of strangers, a strategy that paid off in Russia in 2018 and almost paid off in Qatar in 2022.The Qatar trip is where El Manawy's story gets genuinely interesting. He drove through Turkey, Iraq, and several countries in active conflict, refusing to use highways. The plan was to connect with people, not destinations."Even when I went to countries like Iraq, for instance, I know I took a risk, but it was measured. I don't take stupid risks. Everywhere we go, people are nice, people are people at the end of the day," he said.He bunked with families he had only just met, stayed in hotels most tourists would pass on, and kept filming throughout. The problem was he kept driving, too. Belgium were knocked out before he reached Doha, making his World Cup trip a World Cup trip without any World Cup football."That was bad," he joked. "It was just a terrible World Cup for us."America presents a different kind of challenge. Soccer is not the dominant sport here, which El Manawy sees as an opportunity rather than a drawback. He plans to walk into diners in his Belgium kit, carrying a football, looking for anyone willing to kick it around."I want to see how it's going to be now in the U.S. really. And I understand that football is not the main sport, and that's going to be another element to my story," he said.He is banking on Belgium performing better this time around, too. The Red Devils, while no longer the golden-generation contenders of 2018, have enough quality to get through a group that also features Egypt, Tunisia, and New Zealand. Should they progress, a potential last-16 clash with the USMNT would put El Manawy in a fascinating position, driving through America in Belgian red on the eve of that game.He will document everything on Instagram and YouTube, as he did in Qatar. And if the money runs short, he has friends and family spread across the country."It's all about simplicity in the end," he said.