| Andres Martinez
A year from today, we will be feasting on three “Round of 32” (there’s a new one) matches in Mexico City, Dallas, and New York during the FIFA men’s World Cup in North America. At this point, we only know 13 of the 48 teams who will be in the tournament, and we don’t know which teams will be based where (other than the three co-hosts), so we can speculate on the possible offerings with abandon.
Anyone fancy an Uzbekistan vs. Ecuador in Dallas, a Jordan vs. Senegal in New York, or a Norway vs. Iran in Mexico City? Classic encounters between heavyweights are box office, but these more unexpected World Cup matches are still what provide the World Cup its magical sense of wonder and occasion, of different footballing cultures coming into contact that otherwise wouldn’t.
With the game’s ongoing globalization, encounters between the game’s heavyweights are no longer clashes between nations with contrasting styles who don’t clash outside of a World Cup context. Nowadays, if Germany takes on Argentina or England takes on Brazil, the players on the pitch will all be rivals or teammates on the same small number of top European clubs. They’ll have been playing each with or against other, under the same handful of managers, all year-round.
It wasn’t always like this, even amongst the top powers. Back when most Brazilians still played in Brazil, their dazzling jogo bonito style could still be an utter mystery to fans around the world, until they tuned in to watch a World Cup. In Fever Pitch, his memoir of growing up an Arsenal fan, novelist Nick Hornby recalls the awestruck shock with which he and his classmates in school, but really all Brits, watched what the Brazilians led by Pelé had made of their sport during the 1970 Mexico World Cup (appropriately the first televised in color):
“It wasn’t just the quality of the football, though; it was the way they regarded ingenious and outrageous embellishment as though it were as functional and necessary as a corner kick or a throw-in. The only comparison I had at my disposal then was with toy cars: although I had no interest in Dinky or Corgi or Matchbox, I loved Lady Penelope’s pink Rolls-Royce and James Bond’s Aston Martin, both equipped with elaborate devices such as ejector seats and hidden guns which lifted them out of the boringly ordinary. Pelé’s attempt to score from inside his own half with a lob, the dummy he sold to the Peruvian goalkeeper when he went one way round and the ball went the other… these were football’s equivalent of the ejector seat… In a way Brazil ruined it for all of us. They had revealed a kind of Platonic ideal that nobody, not even the Brazilians, would ever be able to find again… At school we were left with our Esso World Cup coin collections and a couple of fancy moves to try out; but we couldn’t even get close, and we gave up.”
In 2026, no English fan or opponent will be shocked to see anything done by the Brazil team, whose stars mostly play in England and other top European leagues. The serendipitous treats and surprises will come from the lesser-known protagonists, and I can’t wait for those.
In the meantime, though, brace yourself for 12 months of skepticism and angst in the lead-up to the tournament. I can’t remember a World Cup or Olympics in recent times that wasn’t preceded by a long trail of doubts – about the surrounding politics, the public’s appetite for the event, the readiness of the infrastructure, the organization, the weather, and so on. I also can’t remember any of these being a disaster (OK, Sochi, maybe) in the end.
You can almost set your calendar for the “Despite all those concerns over recent months, this World Cup/Olympics is proving to be a big hit that fans everywhere are embracing.”
The 2026 World Cup will be no exception; you can expect those stories to start appearing a year from now after that classic Uzbekistan – Ecuador showdown in Dallas.