World Cup 2026 Health Check: Bigger, greedier, and more grotesque than ever
With just under two months to go to the 2026 World Cup, it's fair to say it hasn't exactly been plain sailing off the field.
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”
As World Cup 2026 swells into view, it doesn’t so much arrive as it expands - bloated, stretched, and slightly out of shape.
It swells in participation — 48 teams for the first time.
It swells in scale — 104 games across three countries.
It swells in ego — Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president turned geopolitical wheeler and dealer.
And it swells into a world that feels increasingly unstable and politicised, going head on with Donald Trump’s American juggernaut — a country that is currently flaming wars in the Middle East and having a public spat with the Pope.
Rather than skidding excitingly round the bend four years on from Qatar, the World Cup 2026 has almost had to be dragged into place — like the struggle of Homer dragging the Stone of Shame. It’s sweaty, it’s heavy. It’s not particularly pretty to look at. But it’s here and we’ll watch it anyway, I guess?
For many, it will be hard to separate the basic purity of kicking a leather ball around and the geopolitical tightrope that’s brought us here. With just under two months to the competition, Iran are in conflict with Donald Trump, who is TACOing in and out of various positions. It remains unclear if the Iranian national team and their fans will be able to safely attend the tournament and support their team, and step foot in a land where just two weeks ago in an expletive-laden Truth Social post, Trump vowed to end their entire civilisation if they didn’t back down.
Last year, Infantino was lauding Trump with the inaugural FIFA “Peace Prize”, a moment that now feels less like diplomacy and more like parody. It wasn’t the first time Trump butted into view on a FIFA stage, having been bizarrely inserted into the Club World Cup celebrations when Chelsea won the inaugural tournament last summer.
If this was some genius gambit from Infantino to keep Trump onside so he could carry FIFA through this summer’s tournament unscathed, he’s failed utterly and made himself look like a sniveling Yes-man. The FIFA Peace Prize has become an oft-referenced meme as far as Trump is concerned, an award that is unlikely to see the light of day again.
Infantino has seemingly moved heaven and earth to strike a close friendship with the U.S. president, attending Trump’s inauguration, making several appearances in the Oval Office, attending Trump’s Board of Peace meetings and last weekend he posted a photo on Instagram alongside Trump at a UFC event in Miami. Infantino has also opened a FIFA satellite office in Trump Tower in New York.
Infantino has somehow become a pitiful and disdainful figure in an occupational pipeline that delivered us Sepp Blatter.
Such has been Trump’s overriding influence on the hosting of the tournament, recent reports from The Athletic suggest FIFA and Infantino are planning to request an amnesty from ICE raids across America while the World Cup is under way, seemingly leveraging off his new-found friendship. Several FIFA member countries have raised concerns over the safety and viability of travelling to the host nations, with ICE arrests reaching thousands per day and in almost half of cases, targeting people with no criminal records.
In addition, the mass inflation and skyrocketing fuel prices Trump has induced through his escalation with Iran will likely not help draw people to matches in the U.S. or the surrounding carnival of football.
Previously lauded as the most inclusive World Cup ever, this edition instead looks to be the most financially challenging ever. Beyond the difficulties of obtaining VISAs and attending the tournament, exorbitant price hikes and ticket gouging are rife, with local host cities announcing transport cost rises to help cover the significant costs of handling the World Cup wave.
Boston are to charge fans $95 for buses to Gillette Stadium, while a round-trip rail ticket from New York Pennsylvania Station to MetLife Stadium will cost $150 per passenger, impacting eight games and the World Cup final on July 19th.
New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill accused FIFA of taking fans “for a ride”.
“FIFA is making $11billion off of this World Cup and charging fans up to $10,000 for a single ticket for the final. I won’t stick New Jersey’s commuters with that tab for years to come. That’s not fair.”
Meanwhile, FIFA has created a new category of tickets in an apparent effort to milk even more money out of prime seats. They released new batches of tickets listed as “Front Category 1” for seats in the first several rows of certain sections, being charged at upwards of $900.
Suddenly, seats purchased from the original standard Category 1 ticket that, if bought beforehand, should have been eligible for placement in those exact same rows and sections.
Fans in the ticket lottery have reported feeling “scammed” and “misled” by FIFA’s ticketing system, further alienating fans who were willing to go, and likely convincing other fans to stay at home and not travel to the tournament. It’s one further Americanisation of the World Cup, where VIP culture is rife at big events, with exorbitant ticket levels and dynamic pricing strategies all contributing to inflated prices of attending an event.
On an economic front, leaders of hotel associations in major host cities told Forbes that the economic boon FIFA promised isn’t coming to fruition. That same Forbes report spotlighted thousands of room cancellations FIFA made in host cities across the United States, Canada and Mexico.
With travelling fans priced out and stretched thin, the atmosphere and soul of the tournament is at major risk of diluting away. The football pyramid is already oversaturated, with more games than ever before, and the 48 team structure will likely dilute the quality even more, with several mismatches and dead rubbers likely, granted the likes of Curaçao and Cape Verde will offer great underdog tales and a beacon of light with their unlikely qualification.
With so much chaos off the field, perhaps some serenity will be found on it once it all kicks off. Plenty of geopolitical fears as well as infrastructural challenges hounded the approach to the Qatar World Cup, but a lot of it was largely forgotten once the action got underway.
But the 2026 edition has managed to become the most greedy, grotesque offering yet. Somehow it will go ahead, amidst all the chaos of exorbitant prices, worldwide inflation, wars and geopolitical knife-edges, but it’s another example of FIFA managing to cultivate calamity and highlighting a world rife with division and unrest. It claims to “unite the world”, and is doing so manages to take all the attention away from the game itself.
Stay tuned for more World Cup 2026 writing before and during the tournament here on Game Over, Ball Burst.
This is a great piece, supremely well written and informed. Glad you mentioned the price of public transport. FIFA is such a con. Whenever I read about football, football finances and politics it reminds me of how difficult the working classes had to fight for the right to watch, and play association football in its conception. They tried to take the game away from us and it is happening again. The only difference is, this time around it looks like they are succeeding.
Such a fiasco and with every passing year, my interest in football, a game I've loved for so long, wanes and wanes. I said before Qatar 2022 that I wasn't going to watch much of the World Cup, and I definitely watched it less than usual, but I have so little excitement for this summer's version. On one hand I feel horrible for the fans travelling to the US, but on the other...not sure how I wanted to finish my point!