Roger Bennett, one of football's great evangelists, promises the 2026 World Cup will deliver "pure moments which can drive out darkness and let in light." He may well be right. But right now, the tournament arriving on American soil next week feels less like a celebration and more like something to survive.
48 nations. 104 matches. 16 cities spread across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Messi, Mbappé, Ronaldo, Salah — all playing. On paper, this should be the most anticipated sporting event in a generation. Instead, 54 percent of Americans surveyed last week said they were not at all interested.
That number stings. But it doesn't exactly surprise anyone paying attention.
Everything that could complicate this tournament has
Start with the tickets. Face value for nosebleed seats runs $400 to $600. The secondary market for the final — to be held at MetLife Stadium in the swamps of New Jersey — currently opens at $8,000 on StubHub and tops out above $84,000. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani had to personally intervene to secure $50 tickets for city residents, describing standard World Cup pricing as requiring you to "mortgage your house." Hotels near host cities are half booked. There is no buzz on the streets.
Then there's everything outside the sport itself. Security officials have compared protecting the tournament to safeguarding "78 Super Bowls." Fans from the Democratic Republic of Congo face concerns over the Ebola outbreak there. Some international supporters are blocked by travel bans. Others are nervous about the prospect of ICE activity near stadiums. The ongoing war in Iran — which involves several competing nations — has raised genuine terror threat concerns around large fan gatherings.
And hovering over all of it is the FIFA Peace Prize, which organisation president Gianni Infantino quietly invented and then handed to Donald Trump, who had been publicly aggrieved at not winning a Nobel. Trump accepted it warmly, wore it around his neck — and then launched a military operation in Venezuela and a war with Iran. The Iranian team, originally scheduled to train in Arizona, has since moved its base to Mexico.
This isn't the first complicated World Cup
Four years ago in Qatar, the concerns were real and loud: migrant worker deaths, corruption allegations, a country so hot the tournament had to shift to November, and not a drop of beer in sight. Every worry was largely swallowed whole by the final — Messi versus Mbappé, Argentina versus France, one of the greatest matches ever played. The sport won.
It can happen again. Host nations have a habit of outperforming expectations — South Korea reached the semifinals on home soil in 2002, a run that still feels slightly unreal. The U.S. men's team enters with modest expectations, but stranger things have happened under tournament pressure. And if they go on any kind of run, the indifferent majority will suddenly become very interested very quickly.
The 1994 World Cup was played here as a curiosity, a novelty for a country that still called it soccer and treated it as something children played before discovering real sports. That tournament ended with Roberto Baggio's penalty kick sailing over the bar in the final. Since then, MLS has grown into a legitimate domestic league, the NWSL is expanding rapidly, and the women's national team has won four World Cups. Both football and its American audience have changed.
Bennett, who chronicles this evolution in his book We Are the World (Cup), thinks the tournament will reconnect Americans with something older than their sports preferences: "Americans will reconnect with their generational roots, as they did in 1994 at the Meadowlands when Italy played Ireland, and the whole of New Jersey was there, half the stadium like The Sopranos, the other half Angela's Ashes."
TV numbers will be enormous regardless — an estimated 1.4 billion people watched at least part of the 2022 final. The sport will pull its audience. The question is whether the tournament around it can get out of its own way long enough to let that happen.
Mexico opens the tournament against South Africa in Mexico City next Thursday. The United States play Paraguay in Los Angeles the following day. The football starts whether the politics cooperate or not.
