On Friday, the Scottish Premiership kicks off its 2026-27 season. The following Friday, the Dutch Eredivisie begins anew, and England’s Carabao Cup sets off on its ponderous journey. The various European club competitions have already begun their qualifying rounds – and did so on 7 July, in the case of the Champions and Conference Leagues. Liga MX is two rounds into its Apertura season; Major League Soccer resumed its regular season on 16 July. Other soccer is available elsewhere and at other times.
It has been only a week since the World Cup ended.
The sense of relentlessness that soccer impels is never more obvious than in the wake of its signature event, when we are reminded that the sport didn’t stop even as the world sort of did. There is no off-season, no respite. One season just bleeds into the next between postseasons and preseasons and the transfer market. Soccer is a permanent condition.
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The World Cup derives its power from the feeling that it is possibly the last global piece of monoculture. In another time, the moon landing, or a heavyweight boxing title bout or the crowning of a monarch – back when people cared about such things – might have compelled much of the planet to sit and watch and engage with the same thing, more or less together. In our increasingly fractured experience of the world, it’s sometimes nice to share something in common.
Its absence for 47 months out of 48 makes the World Cup rare and allows for anticipation to build. The forces of the sport are arrayed against this moderation, of course, and indeed winning that battle. This World Cup grew by 50% from the last one, to 48 teams. If Fifa had its druthers, it would have a biennial tournament with 64 teams.
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After all, the only idea in the sport’s executive class is more soccer. The one lesson it seems notto have taken from American sports, is that the National Football League retains its status as the sector’s hegemonic power because its product is scarce. Its games feel like events, rather than a routine you can opt out of today and simply make up tomorrow, in spite of the NFL’s own ongoing efforts to lengthen its regular season playing schedule.
For a month and change, once every four years, nearly the whole planet watches the same games. Aside from the final days of the group stage, the matches do not overlap, do not conflict, do not counterprogram. During that time, we entertainment consumers inhabit a largely unified reality.
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And now we shall return to the endless silos dictated algorithmically by our past tastes and behaviors or to our own bespoke suite of players and teams and leagues we currently care about.
Outside the World Cup, pro soccer can feel like the Facebook feed you stopped paying attention to years ago because it is just filled with relentless AI slop. Very little seems to be hugely relevant to you, and much of it might not even feel real at all, making it just so very easy to scroll past. It all feels amorphous, a shapeless static creeping about that roughly coalesces into something like soccer when you look up from your other screen.
The supply of pro soccer seems to so enormously exceed demand that the market for our attention spans is forever flooded. There’s never a breather. There’s never any anticipation. Very anecdotally, it may be that others are feeling this as well. On Saturday, Liverpool and Sunderland didn’t come close to filling an MLS stadium in Nashville for their preseason friendly. Wrexham and Leeds United, meanwhile, drew a sparse crowd to Tampa.
But in a sense, this onslaught has always existed. There is more soccer than there used to be, starting earlier and ending later on whatever calendar it goes by, but there are roughly the same number of domestic competitions. It’s just that they didn’t used to be so readily available across borders. Growing up in Belgium, I had access to a French Ligue 1 highlights show on Sunday mornings, Belgian and Dutch highlights on Sunday evenings and the BBC’s Match of the Day Premier League highlights at night. Every now and again, I’d chance upon a Serie A game on the Italian national broadcaster. Today, sitting in my den in New York, there is seemingly no limit to the games I can access from anywhere in the world.
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This is not a worse way to live, but it is a more muddled one. And it can make the sport feel utterly overwhelming, like a lone man standing before a tsunami of, and we must invoke the dreaded term … content. Another season has already started, as we still consider and process and digest the last one. Thoughts aren’t fully formed on the World Cup yet, what it meant, how it shifted the sport’s assorted paradigms.
We need a break. Yet there is always more soccer.
