The men’s 2026 World Cup is going to be an extraordinary spectacle. Much of the football may actually be rather poor: the players will be more exhausted by the insatiable demands of the sporting calendar; the tournament, expanded to an absurd 48 teams, will suffer a dilution of quality and offer more one-sided games; and the 104 matches to be played, almost double the size of recent iterations, will probably prove too many for even the most devoted fan. What will make it extraordinary is the political context in which these games will be played, and as two new accounts of the World Cup by a couple of our sharpest football writers, Jonathan Wilson and Simon Kuper, demonstrate, this has been true of many of its predecessors. Although co-hosted by Mexico and Canada, who will stage a dozen or so games each, this time around it is primarily the US’s World Cup and that means it is Donald Trump’s World Cup, too.
Hitherto, golf has been his game. Trump has racked up more time on the fairway while in office than almost any other US president. However, he seems to have clocked that football too could be useful to him. “Look at the ratings,” you can imagine him typing. “RATINGS LIKE YOU’VE NEVER EVEN SEEN!!!”
The Club World Cup, held in the US this summer, has been an important moment on his journey. In a masterstroke of flattery, Gianni Infantino, president of the game’s world governing body, Fifa, gave a copy of the tournament’s trophy to Trump. Gold, enormous and overbearing, it was entirely in keeping with the president’s design aesthetic, and for the last few months it has had pride of place in the Oval Office. Subsequently Fifa has let him keep it, and made another for the actual winners, Chelsea. Against all known Fifa etiquette, Trump, after awarding the team the cup after the final, stayed on the plinth with them while they held it aloft and the fireworks went off. Infantino appeared to give him a winners’ medal too.
Quite what state the US will be in by the time the World Cup begins next June is anyone’s guess but the World Club Cup was played out against a background of raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) across its host cites, and blisteringly hot weather; both are likely to be repeated. Rumours that Ice would use matches, especially those involving Latin American sides, to sweep the crowd, might be unfounded, but convincing enough perhaps to keep many away. Meanwhile, tourist arrivals to the country have fallen sharply. It seems likely that some foreign fans will pass on this one, and for some countries, like Colombia, where the queue to get a US tourist visa is so long it will be impossible to attend the tournament, few will be travelling. One wonders how this will match up to Fifa’s tepid one-world cosmopolitanism.
Americans will fill the stadiums whatever, and as with the Club World Cup this year, they will be baked inside them. Climate change is producing significantly hotter and stormier summers across the US. A number of games were played in temperatures around 40°C, in stadiums entirely ill-suited for such a climate, leaving players and crowds vulnerable to heat stroke. It will make for an interesting juxtaposition to the administration’s raging climate denial.
The World Cup is, of course, not unfamiliar with political power plays, gloating heads of state and angry nationalist crowds, as Jonathan Wilson’s The Power and the Glory makes clear. Remarkably, it is the first serious history of the tournament in English since Brian Glanville’s Story of the World Cup, first published in 1980. In the near half-century since then, the greater depth of global football scholarship, and easy access to old video, has allowed Wilson to offer an infinitely more detailed account and one considerably richer in political and cultural context than its predecessor.
Wilson’s account of the 1934 World Cup, hosted by Mussolini’s Italy, for example, offers some interesting historical parallels against which to judge next year’s tournament. Il Duce placed himself front and centre throughout. He conducted the draw, claimed in speeches that he would be buying his own tickets, and commissioned a huge, elaborate trophy, Il Coppa del Duce, to be awarded to the champions alongside Fifa’s diminutive Jules Rimet trophy. Trump won’t be buying his own tickets – that’s for losers – and even the obsequious Infantino will probably draw the line at a Donald J Trump Cup, but expect him to be very present.
It is less obvious what he will want to use the occasion to say. Wilson is good at explaining the many different soft-power messages and domestic political strategies that the World Cup has served in the past. Uruguay in 1930 and Qatar in 2022, the smallest hosts so far, wanted to let the rest of the world know that they existed. Brazil in 1950 and 2014, Mexico in 1970, and South Africa in 2010 wanted to send a message about their own modernity and development, and their rising standing in the world. Argentina in 1978, inherited by the military junta in 1976, became a circus of chest-beating nationalism at home, and an attempt to deflect human rights criticism from abroad; Russia in 2018 was not entirely dissimilar, if infinitely slicker in its dissimulation.
It is not clear that any of these models work for 2026. The nationalist option is made immeasurably harder by the fact that the US men’s national team will be lucky to get out of the group stages. In any case, much of the Maga coalition remains bound to a nativist critique of the game: that it is un-American, effeminate and a sport for immigrants. Perhaps it will just be an opportunity for Trump to be the BIGGEST AND MOST BEAUTIFUL HOST, LIKE NOTHING YOU’VE EVER SEEN! However, if Wilson’s book teaches us anything, it is that every host exposes something of its soul in the process of staging the World Cup. The triumph of unhinged narcissism is not the whole story of contemporary America, but it is certainly part of the mix.
Simon Kuper’s World Cup Fever, a collage of a reporter’s diary and travelogue through nine World Cups, offers something different. On the one hand, much of the book, and much of its bitterest humour, is reserved for the helots of the press room and the grim reality of travelling and reporting on football, day after day, in the tournament bubble. The endless trains, shuttle buses and security checks, the terrible food, the insatiable demand for instant words, and the inanity of the mixed zone as desperate journalists shout pointless questions at players ensconced in their headphones.
On the other hand, when Kuper manages to step outside the bubble, he is a wry and sharp-eyed guide to the high-camp theatre of Fifa politics and the everyday carnival of fans on city streets; to the collective euphoria and national imagining that takes place at giant outdoor match viewing; and to the way hosts are changed by their encounter with their guests (Japan discovering that not all Englishmen are hooligans) and how visitors can come to see their hosts anew (when we learned to love the new Germany in 2006).
While these books differ in many ways – Wilson is more impersonal and synoptic, Kuper more intimate and fragmentary – both struggle in the same way: describing the actual football. Without the immediacy of an on-the-whistle match report, and with the results already known to us, the prose can be curiously leaden, and no amount of tactical and biographical detail – Wilson’s response to the problem – can improve the situation. Kuper often saves us from the pain of hearing how another volley hit the net, or another goalkeeper’s fumble lost a game, by sharply curtailing his accounts; a relief, perhaps, but one that leaves a curious vacuum where a sense of movement, physicality and emotional intensity should be.
These books are an essential warm-up for making sense of the extraordinary World Cup to come, yet they cannot quite capture what it is – when the game is alive and in motion – that makes it humanity’s greatest collective festival, ritual and theatre. I’m not sure anyone has ever been able to really do so in prose. That’s why, despite the macabre political theatre, the world will be watching it in greater numbers than ever before.
The Power and the Glory: A New History of the World Cup
Jonathan Wilson
Abacus, 608pp, £25
World Cup Fever: A Footballing Journey in Nine Tournaments
Simon Kuper
Profile, 352pp, £20
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[Further reading: Thomas Pynchon’s lasting triumph]
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This article appears in the 08 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The truth about small boats