World Cup giddiness diluted by that ‘decomposing orange creature’
This World Cup feels like the peak of what elite football has become. Less a sport that unifies nations of regular people, more an exercise in grotesque profiteering, content creation and ugly capitalism at every turn.
People’s goodwill is just something to be exploited, not celebrated.
It will be focused around a stinking golem made of a slurry of semi-digested meat who already looks like a corpse left out in the sun who has such a fragile ego that he calls people who disagree with him stupid. Couple that with an administration of stupid bigots and idiots that has no inhibition about lecturing everyone about things they are wholly ignorant about. It’s undeniably rancid, repulsive and evil. It all turns all our guts and yet they seemingly have no idea how loathed they are across the world.
READ: Trump, Infantino, Trump and Infantino, Hydration Breaks: five reasons the 2026 World Cup is sh*t
And yet, I hope it’s entertaining, even if we have to just ignore the many sins, I really do. You mark your life by World Cups. This will be my 16th dating back to 1966. They are or were culturally important. But it’ll take some effort because I think we all know that the decomposing orange creature is a cultural ignoramus and wallows in that fact. What will he do to put himself at the centre of the whole thing? Whatever it is it’s bound to be vulgar, crass and self-obsessed.
We all want it to be a celebration of football but it’s impossible to ignore the multitude of issues behind the competition that encompass everything from prices of tickets and transport to just being safe from the murderous American government. No longer the regular people’s game, it is shamelessly the wealthy person’s game. How will the corporatisation affect the game’s atmosphere?
If there was ever an in-your-face example of how football and politics are indivisible, it’s this tournament. Some are promising not to watch it. That’s understandable given the appalling politics particularly of America, whose masked ICE agents patrol the streets, arresting and even murdering anyone who looks foreign or protests. Land of the free? Not any more, bubba. Get in the van. Many people will just hope the whole thing is absolutely humiliating in every possible way. But these people don’t feel shame and would just lie their way through it, as they do all the time.
Mexico is football crazy but they have just 13 games, as do Canada to USA’s 70-odd. But as many of you will know, football fans in America are often much better educated than your average British fan and are naturally looking forward to it all despite it largely taking place in what increasingly looks like a fascist state that seeks to crush anyone criticising its government and presidential dictatorship. Even American fans know this World Cup couldn’t come at a worse time politically.
But what will it be like? The costs are ludicrously prohibitive for many. Will the stadiums be full? Dynamic pricing and the resale market ensures those at most at the big games have to be wealthy. Stories of sky-high ticket prices are legion. Reportedly, hotels are half-empty. Ticket demand has slumped and the cheapest final ticket on resale is $8,000.
Some of these reports are probably catastrophising by people who understandably want the whole thing to humiliate Trump, but they fail to understand he can’t actually be humiliated. He lives in a perpetual state of delusion, lies and fictions and has apparently just learned to spell ‘dumb’. No matter how bad things get, he’ll just lie about it or use it to perpetuate his warped, immoral bigotries.
Unless you want to support one of the less popular teams, can people even afford it? And how many Iranians, for example, will even risk travelling to America?
No one should underestimate the degree of bitter antipathy towards America in 2026. It’s been brought low by an administration that is deluded, dishonest, shallow, violent, deceitful and corrupt which has achieved a toxic blend of historical deafness, grotesque stupidity and comically ludicrous self-importance and doesn’t know when to shut its mouth.
As many long-time readers will remember, I was a frequent visitor to America and loved it, once filing my piece from the middle of the Nevada desert via a primitive phone back in 2006. Some of us F365ers even shared a house in Las Vegas in 2009. I can’t imagine wanting to do that now. It feels like an unwelcoming, hostile country with danger on every corner, where lies and misinformation have created a dystopia, nearer to The Handmaid’s Tale than to a democracy.
But football is a resilient beast. As soon as the action starts, it tends to wipe away other worries. Will that be the case this time? Will football’s sugar sweeten the sour taste of Trump’s dysfunctional America? The tourist trade has already been hit, leading to an unprecedented $50 billion travel trade deficit, as the world stays away.
The paucity of enthusiasm for this tournament is unprecedented, as much as we’d like it to be different. Not that World Cups have all run smoothly before. It’s often been a chance for various groups to make an impression on the world stage. And host countries have successfully held the tournament under an oppressive dictatorship before. So maybe we’re not in wholly uncharted territory. Argentina ‘78 was certainly exciting even though it was bent.
What good would boycotting the tournament on TV really achieve? You know that even if no one watches it, Trump will just lie about it being the best watched and no American journalist will have the courage to tell him the truth to his somnambulant, sagging, stupid face. But even as it is, with some games taking place at 11.30pm and 2am, many won’t stay up to watch and will perhaps take in highlights the following day, so viewership in much of Europe will inevitably be reduced. The passion for it appears lukewarm.
Infantino shows no sign of the massive contempt everyone holds him in having any effect at all on him or Fifa. Quite why teams don’t divorce from Fifa wholesale, I can’t really explain. It is and has been such an inadequate, horrible organisation and this tournament illustrates that perfectly. Why stay part of it?
At the top end of football, where owners compete to be the biggest soulless entity in the room, it has already alienated many and this World Cup looks set to carry on the spirit of selfish, money-grabbing corporate alienation and seems destined to keep circling the drain, becoming ever more irrelevant to our lives as they take the game away from us and hand it to Bud Light for a fee.
The good news for fans is that as long as you ignore this self-appointed elite, all the aspects that you love about football do still exist. Just not here. The World Cup used to be the pinnacle of the sport and still is in the women’s game, but would you care if it didn’t even happen this time? Not really.