Colin Sheridan: why this World Cup could be defined by chaos

What we may be heading into is not just a football tournament, but a nuclear collision of narratives.

COMING TO AMERICA: FIFA President Gianni Infantino. Pic: Sam Corum/PA Wire.

The World Cup is eight weeks away. So much has happened in the last two months, it feels like over a year ago since the Republic of Ireland decided to boycott the tournament by losing on penalties in Prague. God knows what will happen in the next eight weeks, and - once it starts - in 39 days after that. If football was supposedly the real winner in Qatar, it’ll be doing well to get a look in this time round.

There has always been tension humming beneath the surface of every tournament. It is there in the anthems sung a fraction too loudly, in the military flyovers, in the careful choreography of smiling hosts who know the world is watching. Football, for all its talk of universality, has never been able to fully detach itself from the politics of its stage. This World Cup, then, does not arrive in a vacuum; it lands in a place, at a time, under a regime, and carries all of that baggage with it. Yet even by those standards, what awaits in two months’ time feels different - more volatile, less containable, more prone to veer off script.