Late last year, an England football fan, seized by an onset of optimism, scribbled out a budgetary estimate for taking his family of five to the World Cup in which the intrepid Lions would make it all the way to the final on July 19th in the MetLife stadium, New Jersey. He included ticket prices, accommodation, travel and food and he came up with a total of just over £42,000 (€49,000).The estimate provoked a hot response across social media platforms, ranging from predictable outbursts of disgust at US capitalism gone rogue to the counterpoint that an £8,000 per person average is not bad for the madness of carting a family of five through a five-week football odyssey, and to the rationale of how he shouldn’t worry because England will probably be gone by the quarter-finals. More tempered observations pointed out that, if anything, he had drastically underbudgeted for internal travel costs, food, hadn’t accounted for the automatic 20 per cent tip that is an embedded element of US society and that he could forget about having a drink on that 42 grand.The post appeared around the same time as the Fifa World Cup draw took place in the now-moribund Kennedy Center on a snowy Friday morning in December in Washington. The event was hijacked by the servile performance of Gianni Infantino, who presented the notorious Fifa peace prize to Donald Trump, the unofficial master of ceremonies that morning. “I remember I shouldn’t say this, because it’s a long time ago, watching Pele playing for a team called the Cosmos. He scored three goals that day. And I said, ‘That man can play’,” the US president reminisced before participating in the draw along with Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum and Canadian prime minister Mark Carney. Gianni Infantino, Donald Trump, Claudia Sheinbaum and Mark Carney carry out the World Cup draw last December. Photograph: Hector Vivas/Getty The image of the three leaders standing with miniature banners bearing the name of their respective nations served as yet another imperishable Fifa image of where the beautiful game and murky politics merge. The World Cup draw marked a pause in the fraught and frosty year of diplomacy among the host countries, defined by the threatened on-off import tariffs of the Trump regime, the persistent threat by the White House to employ unilateral force to deal with Mexico’s drug cartels, Trump’s casual, insulting references to Canada as the “51st state” and Carney’s acclaimed and persuasive, if premature, Davos speech in which he told a receptive gathering that “the world is in rupture, not transition”.Trump’s hazy recollection of Pele was an accidentally appropriate reference point to an origin point of the growth of “soccer” within the US. When Carney welcomed Infantino and the World Cup trophy to Canada in late May, he had a memory of his own.“Forty years ago I sat in the basement of my house and watched every game of the 1986 World Cup,” he said of Canada’s inaugural participation in the tournament.“A group of amateurs against Michel Platini’s France. That was our first game. It was a bit sobering. But it was close,” he said in a seven-minute address in which he presented himself as a fluent student of the game. Like the US, Canada has made immense strides in developing football in the decades since. Mexico, host nation in 1970 and in 1986, has no need to burnish its credentials as a football-mad country. But the terse political climate and geographical distances reinforce the sense that three separate and distinct football extravaganzas are about to take place. Only when the matches start coming thick and fast and the world tunes in will the idea of a cohesive tournament featuring all three countries begin to take shape.Anticipation of the event has been overshadowed by advance reporting of the prohibitive costs for fans travelling to the US, of concerns over safety and immigration fears, including the possibility of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids at Fifa events in the US. In Los Angeles, a city labour union representing more than 2,000 hospitality employees warned that workers at the SoFi stadium would strike if ICE agents are stationed at the venue during games.The SoFi Stadium is to host the United States team's opening game, which is against Paraguay. Photograph: Alex Welsh/The New York Times “So there was a couple of weeks ago some reporting or rumours about ICE potentially being at the Fifa games or events,” Robert Luna, the LA county sheriff, said on Monday.“I personally called the head of Homeland Security for the LA region. And what he stated was that there will be federal agents ... it is going to take all of us to ensure that all the venues are secure, but in regards to civil immigration enforcement they told us that specifically would not be occurring at any of the games. “Any of that is subject to change, but I have trust that they’re giving me the appropriate information because if that starts occurring we are going to have a whole new host of problems.”It wasn’t the most convincing assurance. But the general assumption is that the White House will have no wish to conduct controversial immigration operations in and around the most high-profile sports events on the planet.The opening weekend of the tournament will be a busy one for the US president. On Friday night, it is expected Trump will be in attendance for the US team’s opening game against Paraguay in Los Angeles. (As of Wednesday, “category one” tickets for the best seats were still available at $1,000 (€860) a pair. Prices for tickets for the Knicks-Spurs NBA finals ranged from $4,500 for the rafters to $60,000 to sit four rows behind the celebrities). Then it’s back to the White House where he will enjoy the UFC cage-fighting programme of events to be staged on Sunday evening in honour of his 80th birthday (the latest national No Kings protest is being organised for the same day). By the time Trump leaves Los Angeles – a “sanctuary city” and one of the most prominent administration flashpoints between ICE agents and protesters – the Iran national football team will be preparing for their game against New Zealand in the same stadium on Sunday night.In mid-March, just a few weeks into the Operation Epic Fury attacks on Iran, Trump issued a post saying that while the Iran team “is welcome” at the tournament, he didn’t believe “it is appropriate that they be there, for their own life and safety”.Following the US-Israeli attacks on Iran, the Iranian team switched their training ground to the Caliente Stadium in Tijuana, Mexico. Photograph: Guillermo Arias/Getty On Tuesday this week, the Iranians departed for their training base in Tijuana, Mexico, having abandoned their original intention to base themselves in Tucson, Arizona. President Sheinbaum spoke last week about Mexico’s decision to accede to the Iranian football federation’s request for a training base, despite all three group games taking place in the US. “The United States does not want the Iranian team to stay overnight, but they are going to play three matches there,” she said. “So they asked us can they stay overnight in Mexico and we said, ‘Yes, no problem’. We have no reason to deny them the possibility of staying in Mexico.”Their opening match, at the SoFi stadium in Los Angeles, places the team in the heart of Iran’s American diaspora, with more than 700,000 living in the city and southern California, for whom their team’s appearance will generate complex and conflicting emotions. Travel visas are strictly limited to members of the Iranian team. In May, the US state department announced it would waive the visa bond requirements for fans from Algeria, Senegal, Ivory Coast and Cape Verde, but it’s a gesture that is unlikely to generate a rush of late applicants for tickets from those countries.[ Paul Howard: You’ll spend the rest of your life chasing the way your first World Cup made you feel ]Meanwhile, media have been forecasting an underwhelming international response to the World Cup.The American Hotel and Lodging Association (AHLA) has said that 80 per cent of hotel bookings in host cities have not met official forecasts. An Oxford Economics analysis was equally subdued, forecasting GPD growth in the host cities but little by the way of permanent infrastructural improvements. Kansas NPR reported that residents who signed up for short-term Airbnb rentals to accommodate the expected 650,000 football visitors have been taken aback by the lack of bookings. The flip side is that analytics show that Kansas City, which straddles Kansas and Missouri states, has experienced the highest rise in Airbnb rentals of any small US city within the last year. The Argentina, Netherlands and England teams are all using the city as their base and Kansas is navigable, distinct and sports mad: it could be the success story of the tournament as a fan experience.The AHLA report was based on research carried out in early April while many fans might still have been holding out waiting for room prices to drop – which they have done in recent weeks. And it has become commonplace for advance forecasts on global sports spectacles to concentrate on the civic, political and social worries. The London Olympics in 2012 was beleaguered with predictions it would be a nightmare for locals and visitors. As it turned out, the event was a triumph and an unforgettable two-week party for the city – the lone, unqualified success of then London mayor Boris Johnson’s ill-starred political career.There are 11 US host cities for the World Cup, so it is difficult to get a sense of World Cup “fever” given that tournament has been dispersed across three enormous countries. And in the US, media coverage is limited to day-of intensity: the World Cup will be nowhere until the eve of the tournament when it will be suddenly and flamboyantly everywhere.There is no doubt that many thousands of football fans decided to sit this one out through a sense of prohibitive expense and a reluctance to visit Trump’s America. But as the tournament warms up and a unique, sprawling, flawed tournament produces the flashes of magic, which is the point of the entire carnival, they may feel a lasting pang of regret.