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Trump’s World Cup, 2026
11/06/2026
John Williams, University Fellow in Sociology, considers how the 2026 FIFA World Cup differs from the last time that the tournament was played in the United States.
I was present the last time the FIFA World Cup finals were played in North America. It was 1994, and the USA was hosting alone. In a bar in New York city, just before the tournament began, I had the classic exchange for a sporting visitor with a young Brooklyn bartender:
“Hello, bub, why you here?”
“I’ve come to see the World Cup.”
“The World Cup, huh? Is that the NBA?”
“Nah, its football – soccer.”
“Yer got me there, buddy. What, here – in New York? Are you sure?”
It’s fair to say that 30-odd years ago, the World Cup finals were no big deal to most Americans. Even when I saw Ireland famously kick off by defeating Italy 1-0 in the in the New York Giants stadium in East Rutherford, there was little of interest here to stir the locals. In fact, it was difficult to tell that any international sporting event could be happening in New York back then; anything, that is, that did not speak directly to the local sporting franca of NBA, baseball or the NFL. One condition that FIFA imposed on the US as hosts in 1994 was that they should create a professional soccer league – Major League Soccer was founded in 1993 and began operating in 1996. But initially it struggled.
The game, the FIFA World Cup – and US attitudes towards it – these have all changed quite a lot since the mid-1990s. In 2026 the only thing FIFA has ‘insisted’ upon this time from its co-host, is that US president Donald Trump publicly accepts FIFA’s own invented global ‘peace’ prize. Make it up, one could not. Fellow co-hosts, Canada and Mexico, looked on perplexed. The truth is that the pastime most Americans still insist on calling ‘soccer’ has colonised much of the global sport market in the past three decades – at least outside the USA.
I had spent most of the 1980s as a researcher at the University of Leicester following disorderly football fans from England around Europe; we had even published in 1984 the first academic study of such behaviour anywhere in the world. Our book Hooligans Abroad certainly made some headline news: it achieved the considerable distinction of being the most stolen academic book in publishing history. Naturally, we were very proud.
In the months before the 1994 finals, I was invited as an ‘expert’ to talk at a conference in Chicago about the ‘threat’ posed by visiting European fans at the forthcoming event. Frankly, it was hard to take such matters especially seriously. Even then, the costs and logistics of attending a World Cup across the Atlantic were forbidding. And there were other discouraging issues, too. During the weekend I was in Chicago, local fatalities through gun crime exceeded anything in a year (or much more) that European football hooliganism could possibly hope to deliver. I told the assembled audience to focus instead on protecting unsuspecting visitors from potential attacks by what the US authorities called non-sporting local ‘street kids.’ There was little serious crowd trouble at any match in the 1994 finals. I suspect the same will be true in 2026 – especially given a reported minimum $350 ticket price tag. For most Europeans, this is a tourist’s World Cup.
When FIFA was formed back in 1904, the public school-influenced Home national associations refused to join, partly out of sporting snobbery, but also because they feared international sport might not be played as it should be, ‘for its own sake.’ The FA in England certainly believed that, even as a potential substitute for war, global sport played overly-competitively by neighbouring countries, risked mixing politics with things that didn’t – and shouldn’t – really matter. They feared the loss of the glories of friendly sporting exchange. And, in many respects, they were proved right to be concerned.
The very first World Cup finals, held in Uruguay in 1930 for example, were a very public celebration by a strongly nationalist government of 100 years of independence from Spain. Local communists organised their own event out of disgust. The 1934 and 1938 finals were effectively used as promotional tools for fascist ideologies; Mussolini’s Italy won both tournaments. It was made clear to those involved that failure to do so might mean death. The principled Scottish FA refused to sanction its team from travelling to Brazil for the next finals, in 1950, because the Scots were not Home champions. But England finally did get involved – some 46 years after FIFA had been formed. And their relative isolation soon showed: the inventors of modern football lost 1-0 to the United States in the Estádio Independência, in Belo Horizonte. Domestic newspapers back home, disbelieving the news lines as obvious errors of transmission, initially reported that England had won this mismatch – and by 10-0!
By the time England finally won the World Cup in 1966, local man and ex-school master and referee, Stanley Rous, had become FIFA’s president. At this stage there were still only 16 countries involved in the finals. The new leaders of FIFA after Rous sought to escape the limiting patrician rule of the British by expanding FIFA’s membership and establishing one-member-one-vote statutes. They also fully embraced the new economics of the global sporting order by cosying up to pushy new sponsors and making deals with increasingly influential TV companies. From the election of, firstly, João Havelange in 1974, and then Sepp Blatter in 1998, the rapid globalisation of the game meant smaller nations were given more of a voice in deciding the sport’s policies and future direction. Effectively, they were ‘rewarded’ with development grants and more inclusion in exchange for supportive voting. As a result, the mammoth finals in 2026 will involve an improbable 48 nations, including the little Caribbean island of Curacao (pop 180,000). Multiple World Cup winners Italy have failed to qualify.
However, allegations of corruption and vote-buying have long since mired FIFA’s image in relation to its new commercial deals and the allocation of major events. Under current president, Gianni Infantino, the World Cup finals have been held in Russia, Qatar, Trump’s America (plus Mexico and Canada), and is soon scheduled for Saudi Arabia. FIFA’s rationale here is its determination to ‘spread the game’ outside of its traditional strongholds, but it is difficult to resist claims that opaque financial rewards and attempts at sportswashing lie at the heart of recent choices. Current stories that a Somalian FIFA referee, as well as some Iranian fans, have been denied visas to travel for the 2026 finals do little to dispel the view that the World Cup today is as much about political choices as it is about sport.
Which means that when the 2026 World Cup final takes place, on 19 July at the MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford (memories here of my Ireland adventure back in 1994), no matter the combatants just keep an eye out in the TV pictures for an oldish-looking familiar guy who is insistently pushing centre-stage. He will be wearing a blue suit and red tie, sporting a very dodgy blond quiff hairstyle. In fact, don’t be surprised for a second if Donald Trump himself actually presents the 2026 World Cup trophy: after all, he may need the votes in the US mid-terms. And, today, hosting global sporting events like these increasingly means battling over political prizes.