"I could not see one single player. It ruined a little bit my experience today." Thomas Tuchel said that out loud, to reporters, after England beat Croatia — and FIFA actually did something about it.
Within 24 hours, the governing body updated its protocol for pre-game national anthems. Coaching staffs can now stand to the left or right of credentialed photographers during the ceremony, giving managers a clear sightline to their players. The new procedure was already in place for Thursday's match between Czechia and South Africa. That's a fast turnaround by any standard, let alone FIFA's.
Why it happened in the first place
The root of the problem is the venues. Most of the stadiums hosting World Cup games were built for NFL football — different dimensions, different layouts, different spatial logic than a soccer-specific ground. AT&T Stadium in Dallas, where England played, had to be modified to accommodate a proper pitch. Those modifications ate into the sideline space coaches normally have, pushing Tuchel closer to the photographer line than he or anyone else anticipated.
FIFA is usually rigid about ceremony positioning — this is the organization that fines clubs for warming up in the wrong shirt. The fact that they moved this quickly suggests Tuchel's complaint landed somewhere it mattered, or that enough other managers raised the same issue privately.
Either way, it's a minor logistical fix with an outsized symbolic meaning: a World Cup being played in NFL stadiums required a last-minute rule rewrite just so a manager could watch his team sing the national anthem. That's the kind of detail that captures the slightly improvised feel of a tournament being held in a country still building its football infrastructure in real time.
Tuchel got his moment. Future managers will too. But the fact that it needed fixing at all says something about how these venues were prepared — or weren't.
