“Our nation is back – bigger, better, richer and stronger than ever before,” Donald Trump said in his State of the Union address in February, relying upon that distinct brand of Americana culture: saying how much better everything is than it could be anywhere else. “You’ve seen nothing yet. We are going to do better and better and better.”
The United States is the least obvious major Western host of a Fifa men’s World Cup in terms of its football heritage and widespread public interest. It was the most obvious choice for Fifa for every other reason. If you want someone to loudly and blindly trumpet your self-inflated message of bigger, bolder and unbeatable – and Fifa really is – the US in 2026 offers perfect laboratory conditions.
And now the football itself has been dressed specifically for the theme of capitalist mania. After seven straight tournaments with 32 competing nations, appropriate both mathematically and competitively, we have entered the age of 48 and who knows how long they will be able to resist further expansion.
Take every single match from Qatar 2022 and add in the quarter-finals, semi-finals, third-place play-off and final from Russia 2018. That is how many games will be played in this World Cup just to determine which countries make the last 32, which you may recall is what we started with last time.
