The World Cup is B*llocks

When I was a tiny little chap, the World Cup was just about the most exciting thing that could happen, a truly seismic event, on a par with perhaps a new Star Wars film, or the space shuttle blowing up. You looked forward to it for weeks, months even. You had an enormous ‘World Cup Wall Chart’, and perhaps a Panini sticker album, full of obscure players with enormous moustaches that you had never heard of before. You would marvel at the strange and exotic names (‘Ha ha, look! Russia have got a bloke called ‘RATS’!)  You knew exactly who was in England’s group, who England would be losing to in their first game, and you probably had very strong ideas about who was in the England squad. You certainly knew who wasinEngland’s squad.

Fast forward to 2026 and I definitely don’t have an enormous ‘World Cup Wall Chart’ or sticker album, but to be fair it would be fairly worrying if I did. However, I also couldn’t tell you who was playing in the first game, indeed I was vaguely surprised to find out that the World Cup started this week. I certainly don’t know who is in England’s group, when the games are, or who is in the England squad. Now, normally, I would put this general indifference down to the fact that I am a highly cynical 52-year-old with other things to worry about in life. But I also think there are plenty of people like me, for whom the World Cup was once the mainstay of the sporting calendar, but who would now be lucky to watch more than about six games, and who don’t care who wins, or generally what happens in it.

And I’m not certain this is necessarily a reflection upon us, but perhaps equally a reflection of the World Cup and modern international football, so I am now going to explore the reasons why. 

The recent years of the World Cup appear to have moved through 3 distinct cultural stages. Prior to 1990, it was all relatively straightforward. Fans turned up from all round the World, beg stole or borrowed to get hold of tickets, stayed in a big camp site or in cheap hotels, drank beer, moved around with the team, and went home again when they got knocked out. There was a slight exception where England fans were concerned, because in their case several hundred of them would often be deported during the group stages for throwing white plastic tables and chairs at people in the City Centre.

Post 1990, football in general became slightly gentrified, a bit more middle class. I would call it the ‘Baddiel and Skinner’ era. I blame them entirely, in fact. Suddenly it became acceptable to wear retro shirts from the 1970s, or indeed obscure modern ones from the  Czechoslovakian second division, and to re-create Iordan Letchkov’s winner against Germany in the park with your friends, with very few picnic chairs being thrown at people, if any at all. If you happened to be at the World Cup, you might suddenly decide to attend a first-round dead rubber between Algeria v Ecuador, so you could show off about it to your friends or write a letter about it to 'When Saturday Comes'*

*nothing against 'WSC' by the way, a hugely respected publication.

I would say 2026 heralds the 3^rd age, that of the ‘Total and utter commercial pillage of the World Cup’. To be fair, I only need to give basic details as to why I might say this. Better and more noble writers than myself have taken their time to expose this particular event’s dynamic ticket pricing, deceptive stadium maps, extortionate hotel and travel fees, elaborate crypto-based purchasing schemes, tickets for the final going for 10 grand (I really, really hope it ends 0-0 just to annoy whoever pays 10 grand to watch it), and of course, beer (warm, I've heard) costing the equivalent of £18 a pint. We now appear to have entered a universe where only the bankers and billionaires of the world could sensibly consider watching more than one game at this World Cup. It calls to mind the HBO Series ‘WestWorld’ where the super-rich paid millions of dollars to spend time in an enormous amusement park themed around the wild west, staffed by androids, and where they could then pretend to be cowboys. But here, the super-rich are entering an enormous World Cup theme park/country, staffed by footballers (who are also being paid far too much money), and where they can all pretend to be football fans.

Then you’ve got the by now extremely tedious commercial saturation of the World Cup on a more basic level at home. Every single radio or TV advert, whether it be for a frozen pizza, 10 inch wood screws, or chlamydia ointment, has to be themed around football, with a roaring crowd in the background and music that sounds very like the Match of the Day theme tune, but isn’t, for copyright reasons. And of course, like clockwork, the ‘Why not buy a new Television?’ adverts have started as well. Because everybody needs a new TV when it’s the World Cup, don’t they -  ‘It’s Ecuador against Switzerland tomorrow Derek, so we had better throw our TV away and buy another one…’

And, as if the World Cup wasn’t already ruined, they have tried to destroy it even further, by inviting about 50 extra teams to it. Have you seen the schedule? There’s a whole extra knock-out round in it now. The whole thing goes on for about two months. This is a huge miscalculation in my view, no doubt fuelled solely by hoping even more people will spend even greater extortionate sums of money in the home cities (and I really, really hope this backfires). There is a very simple truth here, and that is - nobody is hugely interested in the World Cup Qualifying rounds, they are simply an elimination process for whittling things down to the bigger teams in the actual World Cup. There are only ever going to be about four teams that can win it, irrespective of whether you shoehorn the Cayman Islands and Outer Mongolia into the tournament group stages. So, moving what is effectively a large portion of the qualifying rounds, to the ACTUAL World Cup, is simply diluting the World Cup itself, with no actual effect on the usually fairly predictable process of confirming who the best team in the World is.

The US have form for mucking about with the sacred fabric of football as well. In 1994 legend has it that the US TV Companies wanted the corners of the pitches rounded, like an ice hockey rink, so that the pitchside adverts looked better. And they also asked to make the game into quarters, while they were about it, to accommodate even more Budweiser adverts. This time round I believe we have narrowly avoided players being announced and walking out onto the pitch one by one (‘LADIES AND GENTLEMEN – PLEASE WELCOME MR DJED SPENCE…’, but I believe we will still get ads halfway through each half, plus ridiculous rock concerts at half-time, when all anyone wants or needs is a nice marching band.

Then there’s FIFA. I think my patience with FIFA probably ran out when the police arrested an extremely large number of its officials for their alleged involvement in alleged systematic corruption and alleged self-enrichment going back an alleged 25 years. And all the while we had to put up with Blatter, who reminded me of a kind of football version of Michael Jackson, banging on about ‘charity’, ‘the children’ and the ‘football family’ in that nauseating way big corporate figureheads tend to do, whilst all the while (allegedly) trousering vast amounts of other people’s cash. This was around the time they awarded World Cups to Russia, whose political conduct was even that time pretty doubtful, and then Qatar, despite the latter having precisely no football stadiums and requiring the World Cup to be moved into the middle of the European football season. Luckily, Qatar built all the football stadiums extremely quickly, and at a relatively low cost. I’m not going to go into how they achieved it here, but the information is freely available on several human rights websites. 

You would think FIFA would have cleaned their act up after the Blatter and Platini era or at least have become slightly more self-aware. But obviously they had no such intention. In an episode that really had me questioning whether I had crossed into an alternative reality, here they were in 2025 awarding the inaugural ‘FIFA Peace Prize’ to Donald Trump. Now two things here, firstly, I am fairly certain FIFA doesn’t need to award a ‘Peace Prize’, but even if it REALLY did, there are surely people other than Donald Trump who they could have awarded it to. And given that Donald then very nearly started the third world war about four months later, they could then perhaps have withdrawn it again. But they didn’t of course, because these people are all in it together. And, indeed, this all might be a rather large clue as to why this World Cup is being held where it is in the first place. 

So yes, the World Cup, its not for me anymore. I wasn’t going to go anyway, but I doubt I will even watch it. And before you say  - ‘Of course you will’, I barely watched the last one. To me, it’s just another nice thing we once all enjoyed, now filed under ‘Things taken away from ordinary people by the unseen hand of voracious capitalism and corrupt officialdom’—like going to the cinema, or a concert, buying a house, and soon, ‘going shopping in the supermarket’, probably.