Safe, rational and bountifully lucrative as the Fifa decision is to have the 2026 World Cup hosted by the US, Canada and Mexico, it is also disappointing for romantics fancying another tournament in Africa – and laced with contradictions, too.
Fifa’s president, Gianni Infantino, looked opportunistically quick to immediately put himself forward for re-election next year, and he was followed by US president Donald Trump with a self-congratulatory tweet. Hosting World Cups and Olympic Games is openly a politicians’ prestige-burnishing project now, not only for Russia’s president Vladimir Putin or Qatar’s Emir, seeking soft power from hosting in 2022.
There was a feeling before the world’s football associations gathered at the Moscow congress that more might sentimentally favour Morocco’s bid, but all the numbers were stacked in North America’s favour. As the joint bid officially put it, it has 23 “fully built, occupied, and operational” stadiums already, “150 existing world-class training facilities, millions of hotel rooms, and advanced infrastructure”. Most importantly flowing from that, of course, is a munificence of dollars promised from the tournament for Fifa, and therefore for the voting countries.
The projections of revenues from Morocco, all 14 of whose proposed stadiums would have had to be newly built or renovated, were half the $14bn now promised from TV and stuffed stands in the US, and that is a language all the Fifa family understands.
But it would be wrong to criticise this too readily as a basis for the decision, which England’s FA voted for too, given that the Qatar vote was so ridiculed partly because the tiny Gulf emirate had no stadiums ready and has had to undertake a vast construction project.
The majority of the executive committee then, 15 of whose 22 members have since been found guilty or accused of corruption or ethics breaches (two more were already suspended), was derided and suspected for going against the “technical” assessment that Qatar was the least suitable country bidding. So the rationality of this decision has to be acknowledged, the congress of national FAs who now vote in the new system chose the bid assessed as far superior in the technical inspections.
Yet basing the decision on the US’s financial and infrastructural superiority poses another important question, about whether any but the richest countries or those led effectively by dictators can now host sporting mega-events. Morocco came so far behind partly because Fifa’s nations under Infantino awarded themselves an expansion of the 2026 World Cup, from 32 to 48 teams. The logistical requirements are so huge, needing so many stadiums and training camps, to host 80 matches and so many supporters, it is difficult to see Morocco, a serial bidder, or other less privileged countries, having the opportunity. The English FA, which lost its £21m bid to host the tournament which starts on Thursday will consider this expansion to be in its favour, as it ponders bidding again, for the 2030 tournament.
As for the contradictions, one was couched in the joyous statement by MLS, welcoming the vote as “a monumental step in our collective mission to further advance the game of soccer in North America”. Fifa and the US football crowd have been promising for decades that the sport will crack America, and while the game’s profile is certainly growing there, this is now the second World Cup granted in modern times to a country which has never fully embraced the world’s most popular sport.
Then there is the fact of Fifa granting the World Cup to the US even as its Department of Justice continues to investigate football’s financial corruption. It was always a complaint of Infantino’s fallen predecessor, Sepp Blatter, that the US authorities levelled corruption allegations at Fifa in Zurich, when the wrongdoing the investigators found was mostly in the Americas. A chief culprit, the late Chuck Blazer, criminally filled his offshore bank accounts and evaded his taxes from his personal fiefdom – in Trump Tower. Now, with so many more dollars promised, Trump’s US and Infantino’s Fifa are good friends again.
