You do not, under any circumstance, have to hand it to Fifa.
You do, however, have to acknowledge that the 2026 World Cup was successful in all of the ways it was intended to be successful. The soccer was interesting and competitive and dramatic, albeit mostly not great – not that this really a necessary ingredient for a compelling sporting product. People came and watched in overwhelming numbers. There was fun and folklore; underdog surprises; heroic storylines that might have been hackneyed had they been works of fiction. The whole thing made vast sums of money for its organizer. More money, by an order of billions, than even Fifa itself had projected, per the Guardian’s reporting.
The tournament even went some way towards normalizing the controversial and mandatory hydration breaks, whether needed or not. This time around, we booed; next time, we’ll shrug. And while Fifa claims that it made no additional revenue from these glorified commercial breaks – the way Fox Sports chose to fill them in the United States, at any rate – you can be absolutely certain that the value created for broadcasters will be brought up in the next round of rights negotiations.
The expanded field of 48 teams worked out fine, as the worst teams were, by and large, not the debutants. So fine, in fact, that a further bloating to 64 teams is now, in a growing number of rooms filled with sportocrats, evidently being talked about less as a fringe idea by heretics than as a not-unreasonable and even natural next step.
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In the end, it was all there. All of it happened the way it was supposed to.
This fully Americanized World Cup took a great deal from the United States – the countdowns; the half-time show; the championship rings; the commercial breaks; the “let’s get ready to rumble” guy telling us to get ready to rumble; not starting either half of the final on time; the dynamic pricing; and more.
But what did it give? What did it leave behind?
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Not all that long ago, Fifa still insisted the World Cup was about spreading the sport, conquering new lands, evangelizing in the emerging territories. Will a boring and quarrelsome final have a tail long enough for any sort of momentum to affix itself to it? Will we remember it at all in a few years? What will soccer look like in North American now that all is said and done?
This is a three-pronged question. Mexico hosted the thing for a third time and will be broadly pleased with how it went. El Trifinally made it to the elusive “fifth game”, but nevertheless stranded at the same stage – the last 16 – they did at every World Cup from 1994 through 2018.
Canada, who stood to gain or lose the most as the only first-time hosts, scaled new heights on the field and nevertheless felt good about what they had shown when they were trounced 3-0 by Morocco. The country had, after all, put on a series of good parties that its guests will long remember.
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And what of the United States? The legacy of the tournament may prove complicated here. The games were exclusive and inaccessible. And Fifa structured the thing in such a way that every penny of its mammoth haul will first head back to Switzerland. There will be no pot of money left over from the tournament for local organizers to reinvest up and down the game, the way there was in 1994. The US Soccer Federation was largely marginalized, in fact, and left to work around the edges in hopes of actually accomplishing something lasting and meaningful at the grassroots level.
Did soccer make new fans? Probably not very many in the stadiums, since it’s doubtful that any significant number of people will have dropped several thousand dollars on a lark, hoping they might have a good time at this sport they’re just getting into. Certainly, the TV ratings suggest a raft of new viewers tuned in, but did they catch the soccer bug? It will be some years before we really know.
Besides, soccer did not, and does not, have a popularity problem in the United States. It was already on a steep ascent. Certainly, any and all converts will be welcomed into the tent. But the global game was already very much a part of the American fabric.
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What soccer in the US has is an access problem. Access to a recreational youth game that hasn’t been devoured by the hypercapitalist, pay-to-play travel scene. Access, for those who do have talent and ambition, to the right coaches at the right ages, who prioritize development over winning. Access to fields and equipment and fresh air and a good old run-around.
Will this World Cup help with any of those issues?
As far as Fifa is concerned, this edition offered proof of concept. That it can expand without penalty. That it can get away with price-gouging, and that it will be rewarded enormously for it. That it will get away with all the extra contrivances and perversions and embellishments it can conjure up.
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By the same mechanism that allowed Gianni Infantino to engineer a 2034 World Cup in Saudi Arabia, a return to the US in 2038 seems a strong possibility. There is talk, too, of hosting the Fifa Club World Cup in the US again in 2029, same as in 2025. A 2031 Women’s World Cup co-hosted here is all but a done deal.
That, in the end, may be what Fifa has built here: a colony.
