Get ready for the worst World Cup ever

Have you felt yourself sweating recently? Has this been accompanied by chills, muscle aches, headaches, and a general physical weakness? It has, you say? Oh dear. The prognosis is very grim indeed: you must have World Cup fever!

This is likely to be the absolute worst World Cup to date

Fear not, you’re not alone: the planet’s most popular sporting tournament kicks off today. But don’t get too excited because this is likely to be the absolute worst World Cup to date after its organisers, the international football governing body FIFA, added some novel new innovations that serve only to degrade and debase the game for its most fervent supporters.

The 2026 edition of the tournament, which will mainly take place in the USA (Canada and Mexico will also host a few token matches), is going to be the largest and most commercialised World Cup in the 96 year-long history of the competition after FIFA decided to expand it from 32 to 48 teams. By adding 16 utterly mediocre sides that would never have qualified under normal circumstances — like Cabo Verde, Jordan, and Uzbekistan — the tournament’s organisers have decided to go for quantity over quality. An additional 40 matches and an extra knockout round will now be required to flush out the detritus before we get to the last 16 and some truly high-quality football can finally shine through the spam.

Many have wondered why the organisers have chosen to mess around with the planet’s most popular sporting event. Official FIFA propaganda features a whole load of guff about how this has been done to unite the world through football at a time of seemingly endless global strife. But that’s about as believable as the North Korean nightly news. What’s far more likely is that this redesign is all about generating more money and power for FIFA as it tries to close the gap in revenue and influence between itself and the European footballing body UEFA. Extra matches mean more advertising opportunities that FIFA can sell to its commercial sponsors and more qualification slots for irrelevant national football associations are likely to earn FIFA president Gianni Infantino the loyalty of countries like Curaçao; each of which get a vote on major governance and logistical decisions at the annual FIFA congress.

There aren’t many kind things that can be said about Infantino, the 56 year-old Swiss-Italian lawyer who has led football’s governing body for the past decade. One thing cannot be denied, however, is he has clearly been blessed with what Lyndon Johnson once described as the most important skill in politics: the ability to count. Each of FIFA’s 211 member associations has one vote and there are far more countries on the planet that nobody has ever heard of than there are traditional footballing powerhouses like Italy or Argentina. Since taking up the top job after a corruption scandal brought down his predecessor and mentor, Sepp Blatter, Infantino has consolidated his power by pandering to the minnows. Some call it simple maths. Others call it genius. I call it unnecessary, because it’s not like FIFA is known for being a particularly mutinous organisation.

Quite the opposite: Blatter ruled football’s administrative body for 17 years essentially unopposed before he was eventually toppled by a US Department of Justice corruption investigation. Even the most fervent of football fans, many of whom are known for obsessively hoarding all sorts of worthless information about the sport, couldn’t name you a single noteworthy FIFA official beyond the sitting president. You clearly don’t need to be a Machiavellian strategic genius to retain power within the organisation. In fact, the only essential qualities appear to be greed, tone-deafness, and an ability to provoke extreme antipathy in normal people. Infantino ticked all these boxes and there was no actual need for him to change anything about the World Cup, so what’s more likely is that these innovations were driven entirely by his own personal vanity.

For those who are blissfully unacquainted with the FIFA president, Infantino could be best described as a man who looks like testicle stuck in an unusually taut scrotum. Armed with the chirpy, insincere demeanour of a real estate agent going in for the hard sell, he is far more public-facing than most other football administrators and appears to suffer from a particularly acute case of main character syndrome. Gianni seems to genuinely love the limelight with all the intensity of a serial reality TV show contestant and is so unapologetically shameless that he would have been the perfect spokesman for Colonel Gaddafi, back when the Libyan dictator was at his pompous peak. This became evident on the eve of the previous World Cup in Qatar, where he tried to deflect criticisms of the host’s human rights records by debasing himself before the international media with a speech so cringeworthy that it could have shattered a boxer’s jaw.

“Today I feel Qatari,” he said solemnly. “Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel [like] a migrant worker … If you want to criticise, come to me. Here I am, you can crucify me, I am here for that. Don’t criticise Qatar, don’t criticise the players, don’t criticise anyone, criticise Fifa, criticise me because I am responsible for everything.”

With this speech, Infantino proved that he genuinely does not believe in the concept of bad press. Or, if he does, then he simply isn’t affected by it. He is a man utterly immune to embarrassment because no one can degrade themselves like Gianni can. Bonnie Blue has tried, but her platform is miniscule compared to the grand stage of the World Cup. And far from even attempting to salvage a shred of dignity after the Qatar episode, Infantino has essentially doubled down by acting like a human tapeworm and trying to crawl up the backsides of the rich and the powerful ever since. His burgeoning relationship with Donald Trump during the president’s second term is an illustrative case in point. “Johnny”, as Trump likes to call him, seems to be constantly by his side, popping up in completely inexplicable situations that have nothing to do with him: the Gaza Peace Summit, the ASEAN Summit, and the premiere of Melania’s biographical documentary in New York. Schmoozing with the leaders of World Cup host nations is part of the FIFA president’s job, but this level of access is completely unprecedented.

This constant proximity appears to have convinced Infantino that he’s something of a statesman himself. Last year he launched the FIFA Peace Prize, which he awarded to Trump, after the Nobel Peace Prize committee snubbed the US president once again. In what can only be described as egotistical delirium, Gianni has followed this up by trying to market football and FIFA as some sort of international peace broker that can crack some of the world’s most intractable conflicts. The most spectacular example of this delusion of grandeur came at this year’s FIFA Congress in April, when Infantino spontaneously tried to engineer a handshake between the presidents of the Israeli and Palestinian football associations. Hilariously, this blew up in his face when Palestine’s Jibril Rajoub refused to take part in the embarrassing farce. “To give hope to the children,” Gianni pleaded desperately before Rajoub walked off the stage.

The only reasonable explanation for this deranged behaviour is that, having spent so much time with Trump, the FIFA president has realised that world leaders get a lot of media attention and that he can generate even more photo opportunities for himself by using his role to create new, faux-diplomatic ceremonies that are only tangentially connected to sport. FIFA’s expanding operations have therefore become less about football than setting up soap boxes for Gianni. As an extension of this, the World Cup is increasingly being prostituted to countries without any footballing heritage or infrastructure simply because they have cash to spend. So, like FIFA, the World Cup increasingly diverges from its whole raison d’etre: creating a high-quality football tournament both on and off the pitch. And it’s legacy fans that have to suffer the consequences.

The Qatar World Cup took place in a statelet that, just 40 years ago, mostly comprised of bedouin tents. The country is a blank page in the history of the game and its World Cup mainly catered to Gulf carbon profiteers and rich expats based in the region. Proper fans were largely absent and the only significant contingent to travel to the Qatari kasbah were the Argentines. In the meantime, the 2034 edition of the tournament has been awarded to Saudi Arabia — essentially a giant Qatar with more complicated domestic travel logistics. The US is a continent-sized nation built for car travel, where public transportation infrastructure is inefficient, complicated, and lacking. Something as mundane as transport is essential to the fan experience, which is why the 2006 World Cup and 2024 European Championships in Germany are generally regarded as the most enjoyable tournaments in recent memory by supporters: because they took place in a compact footballing powerhouse with a workable train system and where fan culture isn’t some temporary alien phenomena.

Infantino’s FIFA is a parasite making football measurably worse for the spectator

The US is the complete opposite and, to make matters worse, FIFA has done everything to exacerbate this further with its price-gouging ticketing policies such as variable pricing and the introduction of an official resale marketplace that has further driven up the cost of tickets, making them the most expensive in the history of the World Cup. Refusing to submit themselves to bare-faced robbery, many of the most devoted football fans have decided to skip the tournament and watch it in the pub instead. This is the sensible choice because the knock-on effect of all the aforementioned factors is going to be stadiums with an atmosphere more barren than that of your average Premier League match. And, although this will still be better than what was on offer in Qatar, it will be vastly inferior to watching from a pub beer garden or at home.

Because far from serving as custodians and regulators of the game, Infantino’s FIFA is a parasite making football measurably worse for the spectator. This is why the 2026 World Cup is likely to be the worst one ever — although, that being said, it will still surely be better than what awaits us in Saudi Arabia.