Tommy Martin: How modern world has vaccinated me against World Cup fever
COMING TO AMERICA: FIFA World Cup signage at the New York New Jersey Stadium in East Rutherford, commonly known as the MetLife Stadium.
The worst thing about being a columnist is figuring out what to write about, but the worst thing about being a sports columnist is figuring out what not to write about.
It’s a bit like what people say about dating apps being responsible for a decline in long-term relationships – no one will commit on the off chance that Adriana, 23, pilates instructor from Rio De Janeiro, is just a swipe away.
Similarly, writing a sports column about something means not writing a sports column about something else, so you end up in an indecisive funk about whether to go with Saudi retrenchment in global sports investment, the sinister nexus between organised crime and professional boxing, or fave retro footy jerseys from the 1990s.
This week’s intellectual paralysis was interrupted, however, by the realisation that when this column went out into the world, it would be but five short days until the start of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Five days before a World Cup and you’re wondering what to write about in a sports column? This is like a priest on Christmas Eve wondering what he could possibly talk about in his sermon the next day.
And especially so for this columnist, for whom World Cups are waypoints through life’s journey, like sacraments but without the frilly white dresses and bouncy castles (apart from that one opening ceremony a while back).
Spain ’82 is a barely remembered blur of colour, a time before reason and consciousness. Mexico ’86 is the one that started it all, the boyish fuel for lifetime’s passion. Italia ’90 finding an adolescent parallel with Ireland, stepping out into the world for the first time. USA ’94 the first time getting properly drunk. And so on and so forth up to recent World Cups, collecting Panini stickers with your own son.
And yet this time it’s five days out and you’re wondering what to write about? Why have the classic symptoms of World Cup fever – temperature, hot sweats, irresistible urge to buy a manga-themed Japan away jersey – not yet manifested? Confession, dear reader: I don’t even have a wallchart yet.
There are good reasons why this World Cup has failed, as yet, to whip people into the normal, Brazil ’98-squad-freestyling-at-the-airport enthusiasm for the beautiful game’s greatest festival, and not all of them are to do with Gianni Infantino.
Thursday’s opener between Mexico and South Africa (in the Azteca Stadium! Come on, in the name of Manuel Negrete, what more could you need?) will come just 12 days after the club game’s climactic showpiece, the Champions League final between PSG and Arsenal.
At the time of writing, post-Budapest think pieces have been mostly tidied away but social media feeds are still belching out reactive content to PSG’s win, not to mention the various other loose ends of the club season, which include the not insubstantial talking points of a new Liverpool manager, Jose going back to Real Madrid and Robbie Keane maybe or maybe not going to Celtic.
Previous summer World Cups had a full extra week to gather momentum and breathe and for, say, hot tempered captains of middle-ranking European nations to have time to get pissed off enough to storm out of pre-tournament training camps. It’s tantalising to think that were the 2002 World Cup to happen today, there probably wouldn’t have been time for Saipan.
Take the fact that Ireland haven’t qualified and that domestic issues like disciplinary ructions in the GAA Championships, the fall of the house of Leinster and the protests against the Israel game have also been demanding their share of oxygen and it has almost felt like the World Cup has struggled for airtime. How ironic that the great blancmange of a tournament that FIFA have created is finding itself squeezed?
It’s not just a lack of time that has prevented the usual World Cup buzz from building up. How we consume sport is so different to the days when we sat in front of a handful of television channels who would be duty bound to build up the hype for tournaments that they held the broadcast rights for. One of the reasons embarrassing World Cup squad songs are not a thing anymore is because Top of the Pops doesn’t exist for the squads to embarrass themselves on.
Sure, your individualised social media algorithm is serving you some World Cup content, but it’s also giving you slow cooker recipes, top 10forgotten grunge anthems and geopolitical rage-bait. It’s easy to get distracted from key questions about Julian Nagelsmann’s tactical plan or the relative wokeness of England’s third jersey design.
But mostly it feels like the size thing is now a real issue. This World Cup feels too big to get your arms around just yet. The expansion from 32 to 48 teams means an extra 40 games on top of what we would usually get, which means that the group stage will take 72 games to eliminate sixteen teams and get us back to a 32-team, straight knockout tournament, which seems like a sensible entry point for any mind not powered by a data centre.
You’ll have noticed that we have only briefly mentioned the cackling mastermind of all this, FIFA president Infantino, whose push to expand the tournament is the least of his crimes. So much of the actual, published build-up to this World Cup has surrounded his enthusiastic role as craven lickspittle to Donald Trump, FIFA’s scandalous profiteering and the need for a second mortgage to get a train ticket to a stadium. News this week that FIFA were banning water bottles in stadia when temperatures are likely to be hotter than the sun seemed to put the tin hat on things.
But it would be disingenuous to suggest that the slow burn of World Cup enthusiasm is down to unease about FIFA and, in turn, the troubling state of Trump’s America. We have, after all, gotten all giddy about World Cups hosted by Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the repressive slavedrivers of Qatar, ones held in countries run by military juntas and corrupt regimes, ones bought and paid for by bribes and systematic grift. Normally, it’s not a problem.
Generally, what happens is that the football starts and everything else falls away. Let’s hope that happens again this time: that the goals start going in and star players and dark horses and surprise packages and controversies and heartbreaks and penalty shootout dramas sweep you up like they always do.
But the football has a big job on its hands. I’m looking at Canada vs Bosnia and Qatar vs Switzerland next Friday and Saturday in primetime and I’m a bit worried. If World Cups are markers through life’s journey, do you get to a point where you are no longer excited about them?
Only one thing for it. I’m off to get a wallchart.
