“Our nation is back – bigger, better, richer and stronger than ever before,” Donald Trump said in his State of the Union address in February, relying upon that distinct brand of Americana culture: saying how much better everything is than it could be anywhere else. “You’ve seen nothing yet. We are going to do better and better and better.”
The United States is the least obvious major western host of a Fifa men’s World Cup in terms of its football heritage and widespread public interest. It was the most obvious choice for Fifa for every other reason. If you want someone to loudly and blindly trumpet your self-inflated message of bigger, bolder and unbeatable – and Fifa really is – the US in 2026 offers perfect laboratory conditions.
And now the football itself has been dressed specifically for the theme of capitalist mania. After seven straight tournaments with 32 competing nations, appropriate both mathematically and competitively, we have entered the age of 48 and who knows how long they will be able to resist further expansion.
Take every single match from Qatar 2022 and add in the quarter-finals, semi-finals, third-place play-off and final from Russia 2018. That is how many games will be played in this World Cup just to determine which countries make the last 32, which you may recall is what we started with last time.
It creates a football orgy on an unprecedented scale. Between 13 and 27 June, there will be 68 matches played. That’s almost a fifth of an entire Premier League season in just 15 days. Feeling nice and fresh after that long season, guys? Declan, wake up!
Trump faces his Putin moment
At a diplomatic summit in Helsinki in 2018, Russian president Vladimir Putin reminded the world, with Trump next to him, how much a success his World Cup had been on and off the pitch. And he was right. Hosting the tournament was a projection of an image of Russia, a Potemkin village of new stadiums, free train travel and a fan culture that railed against the warnings of heavy-handed policing and hooliganism. Supporters expressed their surprised delight. The trick worked.
Trump now faces the same scenario with far less control. The midterms come later in 2026 and the world is watching. This is Trump’s best opportunity to display power and capability on a grand scale. He will stand front and centre if the next seven weeks are a success, he will say it is down to him and many people will believe him. Empty seats, surveillance issues, extreme heat, security incidents and the experience of foreign travellers are Trump’s roadblocks.
In Russia and Qatar, the political leaders knew when to say nothing at all – let football be the whole of the truth for a while. Does Trump have that in his locker? He has already told the Iran team that they shouldn’t come to the US and admitted that he wouldn’t pay the prices for games in New York.
And now to someone who has far fewer re-election issues to fret over.
Infantino’s gross betrayal of football
Off the pitch this is broadly a tournament of two men and Gianni Infantino is the other. The 2026 World Cup is so controversial for the manner in which the latter has tied himself to the former beyond Fifa’s statutory requirements.
The awarding of the newly-created Fifa Peace Prize to Trump at the World Cup draw in Washington DC wasn’t just an image burned onto the retinae of sporting politics. It wasn’t simply a gross betrayal of what the world’s governing body is supposed to stand for. It also destroyed the concept of the Potemkin village.
No longer can WorldCupland, that temporary mirage, reasonably exist. The audience is hyper-aware like never before. There is no curtain big enough to draw. Before the geopolitical white noise could be turned down if you wanted; now it’s the backing track to the main event.
My message of hope
Football almost always finds a way. It is one of the great inevitabilities of the sport that however much baggage and bullshit is piled onto the something we considered (wrongly) as pure when we were young, no matter how much it is warped by bad-faith actors, the spectacle itself wins out.
It wins because your cynicism gives way to auto-response memories of World Cups past when the football starts. For that we should be grateful. But it still creates an impossible conundrum: if we enjoy it, they win; if we don’t enjoy it, they still win and we lose out. We are growing ever more powerless, and curbing our own enjoyment gives us no greater power.
Read more
Daniel Storey: Eight outrageous ways fans are being ripped off at the World Cup
Kevin Garside: Thomas Tuchel has fallen into a classic English trap with Jude Bellingham
I hope you can feast upon the football without feeling too uncomfortable; I certainly intend to and I’ll be reporting upon the less pleasant stuff. This is a transition World Cup: the last of the Messi-Ronaldo era and the fight for others to become their heirs, the first of the post-Southgate years for England and all that brings with it, the first tournament of the post-expansion world. If the non-elite nations have bridged the gap it might just be brilliant.
Either way, this promises to be the maddest, baddest World Cup in history: more nations, more matches, more noise, more travel, more money made, more supporters priced out, more politics from those supposed to remain apolitical, more sense that international football has become dystopian. And still it excites me. And still it probably excites you too. Therein lies the riddle, the paradox and the moral dilemma.
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