Travellers to Qatar in 2022 were left in no doubt that the tiny Persian Gulf outpost was hosting the World Cup finals.
There were 22,000 street banners and 3300 flags. Around 87km of fencing bore 900,000 square metres of FIFA branding across the eight stadiums, featuring desert dunes and Arabic influences.
Every bus was a World Cup bus. Every subway station in Doha was encased in World Cup barriers overseen by stewards and volunteers in World Cup uniforms.
From the airport to the fan zones to the Palm Tree Island in Doha Corniche it mattered to Qatar that the world knew of their arrival as a wealthy, nouveau riche footballing nation. Even if the real goal was to sport wash their human rights record.
America is a vast nation with a President who likes to tell everyone that they do things bigger and better than everyone else. Everything, it seems, but promote the World Cup.
Journalists arrive in a tournament venue and the first priority is always to track down their FIFA tournament accreditation pass, football’s equivalent of Willie Wonka’s Golden Ticket. It always helps if the distribution centres are sign-posted and where Qatar’s branding was visible from Mars, the Uber driver who dropped print journalists off at Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium was oblivious to the fact a tournament was taking place.
Ditto the stewards, who struggled to offer any directions at all to the accreditation centre. Tracking down Gate 5A in oppressive heat, the realisation dawned that Scotland playing Brazil here will be a breathless slog. Finding the small, modestly marked office where FIFA distribute press passes was draining enough.
The buses in Florida, where Scotland set up their training camp, bear no World Cup regalia. There are no flags draped from the lampposts. For all the hype over ‘WE ARE 26’ there is precious little FIFA signage or marketing fanfare suggesting that the United States is hosting anything at all.
America is now the biggest foreign market for the four largest European leagues and football has become the third favourite sport in the US, with a 10% share of fans behind American football (36 per cent) and basketball (17 per cent) according to Ampere Analysis.
Always regarded as a slightly soft, liberal and foreign pursuit ‘soccer’ has witnessed a century of false starts since Scottish working class immigrants made the New Jersey town of Kearny – 15 minutes from where Steve Clarke’s side play Bolivia – ‘Soccer Town USA’ in the 1870s.
Leagues, like interest, have come and gone, but the underlying trend is encouraging. Amongst 18-34 year olds the share of Americans who say they actively follow football has increased from 13 per cent to 22 per cent.
How much traffic World Cup 2026 will drive remains to be seen. A You Gov survey this week explored how much interest Americans have in the tournament at large. The results said that 13% were very interested, 16% were somewhat interested and 14% not very interested. A majority – 54% - said that they had no real interest of any description. Most Americans (59%) say that they don’t expect to watch any World Cup games at all.
Staging the Greed is Good World Cup on US soil is an odd way to stimulate interest levels. The expansion of the tournament from 32 to 48 teams could dilute the quality of the games. Fixtures such as Cape Verde and Saudi Arabia or Uzbekistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo – a nation at the centre of an Ebola crisis – will hold little appeal for the neutral while the price of tickets, travel and accommodation exclude the very people FIFA need to reach.
While Gianni Infantino says that a record five million tickets have been sold – generating more than $3billion in revenue - the New York and New Jersey attorneys-general have announced a joint investigation into ticket pricing in the States, alleging that fans ‘may have been misled’ and that the process has been a ‘gauntlet of confusion, fake scarcity and impossibly high prices.’
From its bloated format of 104 games across sixteen cities in three countries to the prohibitive pricing this is a World Cup Gordon Gekko might struggle to love, let alone the rank and file Americans FIFA seem hellbent on locking out on the street.
Every tournament comes with politics these days. And this World Cup could hardly be any different when Infantino gerrymandered the award of the first FIFA peace price to an American counterpart who threatened to invade Greenland, launched a military strike in Venezuela and entered into a needless war with Iran.
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Iran, awkwardly, has qualified for the World Cup. And the Islamic Republic’s training base has now been moved to Mexico from Tucson, Arizona with FIFA approval after growing concerns over security and safety.
Mexico has a few security concerns of its own after drug lord El Mencho was shot dead during a special forces operation in late February, sparking a surge of violence nationwide. While Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum claims necessary measures will be in place to protect football fans and players from organised crime groups, the negative headlines keep on coming.
This is the way of things with a FIFA World Cup. The build up to Qatar was also beset by rows over the gulf outpost’s laws on homosexuality and One Love armbands. Once the football got under way the politics began to take a back seat and this tournament will be no different.
Bowing out for the last time will be Argentina’s Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal and the little Croatian maestro Luka Modric. Making their World Cup debut will be Norway’s Erling Haaland, Michael Olise of France and the outstanding Lamine Yamal of Spain.
Different nations will go to the ball. Strong displays from the likes of Cape Verde, Curacao, Jordan and Uzbekistan would justify the decision to add another 16 teams to the tournament. More one-sided cakewalks - or an athletic, flamboyant Haiti side giving Scotland a bloody nose - would make it feel like a calamitous misjudgement.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup will incorporate more rule changes from the perennial meddlers of IFAB. Five second countdowns for throw-ins and goal kicks. Red cards for players covering their mouths during confrontations. Punishments for teams walking off the pitch in protest, Senegal style. Mandatory one minute off-field treatment periods. VAR interventions if a foul is committed before the ball enters the field of play at a set-piece. VAR’s creeping incursion continues with the power to overturn wrongly awarded second yellow cards and corner kicks.
Incorporating hydration breaks in each half this will be the most technologically advanced World Cup of all time. FIFA’s Trionda ball, made by Adidas, is equipped with a 500-hertz motion-sensor chip that gives officials insight into its every movement. Officials will be able to identify the kick point - the exact moment when a player makes contact with the ball – to facilitate quicker and more accurate offside calls and help to identify handballs or penalties by recording any touches made during play.
Whether 3D player avatars really make any real difference to offside calls will be a source of intrigue. However it works, this will be the first AI World Cup.
For now, at least, the games continue to be played by human beings and not robots. And human failings have always been Scotland’s undoing at the World Cup. From Billy Bremner missing that chance against Brazil in ‘74 to Don Masson missing a penalty against Peru four years later or Willie Miller and Alan Hansen colliding in 1982 the Scots have been masters of their own downfall.
A mammoth 72 group games will eliminate just 16 teams after the first stage and while Clarke’s side will never have a better chance of history key players like John McGinn looked out on their feet after a long hard season during Euro 2024.
Training sessions in Miami were played in 32 degrees celsius and heat, travel and squad management will test even the best of teams in America, Canada and Mexico if conditions at the Florida training camp or the friendly between Haiti and New Zealand were any gauge the Scots might benefit from the kind of the biblical summer rainfalls witnessed in Fort Lauderdale for much of the last week.
In eight appearances at the finals since 1954 the national team have played 23 games and won just four. The last victory of any description came against Sweden in Genoa at Italy 90, the year Margaret Thatcher stepped down as British Prime Minister and Nelson Mandela was freed from a South African prison.
Their opening game in Group C against a dangerously off-the-cuff and carefree Haiti side is one that Steve Clarke’s team must win to have any hope of securing a place in the second stage of the tournament for the first time ever. History shows that three points and a goal difference no worse than minus one tends to be enough, but could entail an agonising wait after the Brazil game on June 23 to discover if they have managed to do enough.
Finding new and convoluted ways to fail at the World Cup finals has become a hallmark of Scotland’s national team through the ages. This will be the one where the rot finally stops, right?
