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Fifa’s gargantuan revenue influx from the tournament, with little left over for locals, will beget more exploitationYou do not, under any circumstance, have to hand it to Fifa.You do, however, have to acknowledge that the 2026 World Cup was successful in all of the ways it was intended to be successful. The soccer was interesting and competitive and dramatic, albeit mostly not great – not that this really a necessary ingredient for a compelling sporting product. People came and watched in overwhelming numbers. There was fun and folklore; underdog surprises; heroic storylines that might have been hackneyed had they been works of fiction. The whole thing made vast sums of money for its organizer. More money, by an order of billions, than even Fifa itself had projected, per the Guardian’s reporting.The tournament even went some way towards normalizing the controversial and mandatory hydration breaks, whether needed or not. This time around, we booed; next time, we’ll shrug. And while Fifa claims that it made no additional revenue from these glorified commercial breaks – the way Fox Sports chose to fill them in the United States, at any rate – you can be absolutely certain that the value created for broadcasters will be brought up in the next round of rights negotiations.The expanded field of 48 teams worked out fine, as the worst teams were, by and large, not the debutants. So fine, in fact, that a further bloating to 64 teams is now, in a growing number of rooms filled with sportocrats, evidently being talked about less as a fringe idea by heretics than as a not-unreasonable and even natural next step.In the end, it was all there. All of it happened the way it was supposed to.This fully Americanized World Cup took a great deal from the United States – the countdowns; the half-time show; the championship rings; the commercial breaks; the “let’s get ready to rumble” guy telling us to get ready to rumble; not starting either half of the final on time; the dynamic pricing; and more.But what did it give? What did it leave behind?Not all that long ago, Fifa still insisted the World Cup was about spreading the sport, conquering new lands, evangelizing in the emerging territories. Will a boring and quarrelsome final have a tail long enough for any sort of momentum to affix itself to it? Will we remember it at all in a few years? What will soccer look like in North American now that all is said and done?This is a three-pronged question. Mexico hosted the thing for a third time and will be broadly pleased with how it went. El Tri finally made it to the elusive “fifth game”, but nevertheless stranded at the same stage – the last 16 – they did at every World Cup from 1994 through 2018.Canada, who stood to gain or lose the most as the only first-time hosts, scaled new heights on the field and nevertheless felt good about what they had shown when they were trounced 3-0 by Morocco. The country had, after all, put on a series of good parties that its guests will long remember.And what of the United States? The legacy of the tournament may prove complicated here. The games were exclusive and inaccessible. And Fifa structured the thing in such a way that every penny of its mammoth haul will first head back to Switzerland. There will be no pot of money left over from the tournament for local organizers to reinvest up and down the game, the way there was in 1994. The US Soccer Federation was largely marginalized, in fact, and left to work around the edges in hopes of actually accomplishing something lasting and meaningful at the grassroots level.Did soccer make new fans? Probably not very many in the stadiums, since it’s doubtful that any significant number of people will have dropped several thousand dollars on a lark, hoping they might have a good time at this sport they’re just getting into. Certainly, the TV ratings suggest a raft of new viewers tuned in, but did they catch the soccer bug? It will be some years before we really know.Besides, soccer did not, and does not, have a popularity problem in the United States. It was already on a steep ascent. Certainly, any and all converts will be welcomed into the tent. But the global game was already very much a part of the American fabric.What soccer in the US has is an access problem. Access to a recreational youth game that hasn’t been devoured by the hypercapitalist, pay-to-play travel scene. Access, for those who do have talent and ambition, to the right coaches at the right ages, who prioritize development over winning. Access to fields and equipment and fresh air and a good old run-around.Will this World Cup help with any of those issues?As far as Fifa is concerned, this edition offered proof of concept. That it can expand without penalty. That it can get away with price-gouging, and that it will be rewarded enormously for it. That it will get away with all the extra contrivances and perversions and embellishments it can conjure up.By the same mechanism that allowed Gianni Infantino to engineer a 2034 World Cup in Saudi Arabia, a return to the US in 2038 seems a strong possibility. There is talk, too, of hosting the Fifa Club World Cup in the US again in 2029, same as in 2025. A 2031 Women’s World Cup co-hosted here is all but a done deal.That, in the end, may be what Fifa has built here: a colony.Leander Schaerlaeckens is the author of The Long Game: U.S. Men’s Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts, which is out now. He teaches at Marist University.

Football News

It ended almost as Gianni Infantino and Donald Trump had planned. Earlier on a seemingly endless World Cup final day, the trophy had, in a scene perfectly of a piece with the event’s excess, been let out of a Louis Vuitton trunk. Now they shuffled up to the podium together and presented it to a beaming Rodri, fumbling the moment slightly when Trump lingered for Spain’s team photo. After shrugging off anything resembling embarrassment they had made their exit, golden glitter sparkling on a bobbly pitch and the reverberations from a football event of unprecedented scale pulsing far beyond this concreted mini-state in New Jersey.How to make sense of a heady, intoxicating, often deeply strange tournament that at once appeared totally welcoming and chillingly distant? It concluded with a disorientating fever dream beneath a bright blue American sky, football appearing a sideshow for much of the afternoon even if the game did not exactly help itself. Anyone straining for a parable could, if they wanted, take pleasure in Spain’s success. This was ultimately the triumph of a collective idea in a World Cup nurtured to indulge the cult of the individual.Through it all Infantino and Trump sat abreast, absorbing the spectacle behind reinforced glass. What kind of advertisement for football’s health was this? The past month’s controversies demonstrate that football’s leaders, and Trump must be considered one given the influence conferred upon him, have never been remoter than this and nor have they been more bulletproof. On the other side of the divide Argentina and Spain passed, niggled, snarled, sometimes crawled through one of the worst finals of all time, although at times one wondered how much that really mattered.The punters who paid $1m (£740,000) for pitchside seats from one hospitality provider, sun hats included, may have learned the hard way that football tends not to guarantee a dopamine fix on demand. But this was primarily an occasion for being seen rather than seeing. A document circulated by Fifa before kick-off proudly named 235 of the celebrities and VVIPs in attendance. One of them, Tom Cruise, attempted a speech in the oddly featureless pre-match show; he was drowned out by Argentina’s fans and it was one of the only moments in the day when a football atmosphere could be said to have prevailed.This tournament has wrenched, tweaked and torn at football’s fabric. Perhaps the view among Infantino’s circle is that all publicity can be optimised, polished, made to bellow louder and mainline the sport’s brash, gaudy modern exterior into non-believers. Football’s governing body has certainly succeeded in imprinting itself upon the US public, a swathe of whom appeared to believe the tournament was named some variant of “the Fifa” throughout the summer.But the Folarin Balogun affair has caused incalculable damage to trust in Fifa’s mechanisms, not to mention its proclamations of political neutrality. It has tested the patience of football insiders whose fealty may once have been beyond question, although not enough to prevent the certainty that Infantino will be re-elected by a landslide in March. Just as worryingly it teaches newcomers to the sport that every outcome is up for grabs if the relevant relationships are in place. Trump has made no secret that he would like solo host status handed to the US before long. The cooperation between him and Infantino is unlikely to scale back to that of golfing buddies. By the next available slot in 2038 his country may be staging football’s equivalent, in ethical terms at least, of the Enhanced Games.For now the game has its ways of pulling through even if most of the final was a slog until, with afternoon blending into early evening, Ferran Torres confirmed Spain’s supremacy. Cape Verde’s story, and particularly that of their goalkeeper Vozinha, was one for the ages. Lionel Messi, Erling Haaland, Kylian Mbappé and Jude Bellingham did what stars ought to. Belgium destroyed a previously likable US side in the last 16, meaning Balogun’s reprieve at least had no material consequence.Beyond the scandal and shame there have been genuine reminders of what a World Cup can foster. Cities such as Kansas City and Houston delighted in unfurling the red carpet for fans, teams and other visitors using them as bases. Hospitality and generosity were sincere, often disarming. From overseas it had been easy to tar the entire US with the dirtied brush of its administration. But human beings are essentially good, kind and curious. Travelling around the US at length offered a rare chance to remember that.The US is big enough, its immigrant communities sufficiently engaged and its more obscure outposts adequately far flung, that evidence of this tournament could be found everywhere and nowhere. In Canada, the same applied to a greater or lesser extent. Mexico provided the injection of raw, unvarnished football passion. It offered the summer’s best venue, the peerless Azteca, and should have hosted matches beyond the last 16. The fear is it may not receive another chance.Over and out, then, for a World Cup that has gobbled up money, resource, airtime and attention as never before. As Infantino and Trump departed, a tearful Messi stood before Argentina’s support. Here, at last, was the kind of intensely human moment the occasion had lacked. An era is over for football’s greatest-ever player and the fans who turn his every appearance into a vibrant homage. This was the month when an entire sport appeared to enter a fresh dimension of its own.

Football News

Donald Trump spoke to Fifa president before ban liftedHuman rights body FairSquare sent complaint to IOCGianni Infantino is poised to escape without sanction after complaints he breached rules on political neutrality in his dealings with Donald Trump over the Folarin Balogun affair.The International Olympic Committee this week received a formal complaint from the human rights organisation FairSquare regarding Infantino’s conduct after Trump revealed he had called the Fifa president asking him to review Balogun’s ban from the USA’s last-16 tie against Belgium. The ban was subsequently suspended for 12 months after an unprecedented ruling from Fifa’s disciplinary committee.Infantino has been an IOC member since 2020, and its charter states that members must act independently of political and commercial interests. It adds that they cannot accept “from governments, organisations, or other parties, any mandate or instructions liable to interfere with the freedom of their action and vote”.FairSquare claims that Infantino’s discussions on the matter with Trump represent a breach. Infantino denies this and the Guardian has been told there is unlikely to be a formal investigation.IOC sources have disclosed that there is an extreme reluctance on its part to intervene in an international federation’s application of its own rules, particularly when internal appeals processes have not been exhausted.Another source said the balance of power between the IOC and Fifa has shifted significantly over the past two decades, with the former increasingly reliant on the latter for commercial revenue and relevance among younger audiences.With the next summer Olympic Games taking place in Los Angeles in 2028 the IOC will hope to capitalise on the football boom in the US that has brought record ticket sales and revenue raised from the World Cup, making any action on Balogun even more unlikely.Significantly the IOC has yet to receive complaints from Uefa or the Royal Belgium Football Federation, who both condemned the decision to suspend Balogun’s ban.The Belgian federation said it was keeping all legal options open, including a possible appeal to the court of arbitration for sport, but has been silent since the team were knocked out of the World Cup in the quarter-finals by Spain, with sources indicating it is ready to drop the matter.The federation’s president, Pascale Van Damme, is a member of Fifa Council, the governing body’s main decision-making organ.Infantino appears to have emerged from the scandal with his powerbase intact, with more than 200 of the 211 Fifa members having sent letters of personal endorsement to Fifa before next year’s presidential election.Infantino has admitted speaking to Trump about the issue, but a statement made in his name by Fifa last week said they spoke regularly on a range of subjects, and that he does likewise with other heads of state.Infantino also said the decision to revoke Balogun’s ban was taken independently by Fifa’s disciplinary committee. “They operate autonomously, apply the Fifa disciplinary code, and decide cases based on the applicable regulations and the specific facts before them,” he said. “Their independence is essential to the credibility and integrity of football, and this must always be respected.”The Times reported last weekend that the decision to lift Balogun’s suspension was taken solely by the chair of Fifa’s disciplinary committee, Mohammad al-Kamali of the United Arab Emirates, but other sources within Fifa have indicated that he is being offered up as a scapegoat.A unilateral decision from al-Kamali would represent a significant departure from the disciplinary committee’s usual processes during a World Cup, which are based on three-person panels being appointed to oversee disciplinary matters and decisions taken by a majority vote.Panel members are selected from the 18 members of Fifa’s disciplinary committee, with Thomas Hollerer, the general secretary of the Austrian Football Association, chairing the panel from the quarter-finals.The Guardian has been unable to establish the identity of the panel members for the last 32, the stage of the tournament where Balogun was sent off in the USA’s 2-1 win against Bosnia and Herzegovina.

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Ex-Concacaf executive Mel Brennan reflects on the Fifa corruption scandal, missed reforms and why football’s governance remains stubbornly opaqueMel Brennan has seen every level of world football. “I know what the World Cup looks like from the 17th floor of Trump Tower … I know what it looks like from a grass-strewn field in Trinidad where children cannot play because money that was supposed to maintain it went somewhere else entirely,” he says.Brennan worked as an executive at Concacaf during the corrupt reign of its infamous former president Jack Warner and the late general secretary Chuck Blazer, who once helped run the organization from Trump Tower.Brennan was also a confidential source for investigative journalists and law enforcement as they looked into the corruption that was rife within the organization for decades. Brennan’s book about his time at Concacaf, Fixing Football is out now.“Football survived Sepp Blatter,” he writes, optimistically, in the book. “It survived Jack Warner. It survived Chuck Blazer. And it will survive Gianni Infantino.”The Guardian sat down with Brennan to talk about Fifa, Concacaf and the future of the game.Were you surprised when law enforcement raided a Zurich hotel and Concacaf headquarters in Miami in 2015 to indict so many Fifa and Concacaf officials? No. The FBI had stopped and started dialog with me about what was going on at Concacaf. On two separate occasions I was on my way to New York to [meet] with investigators and they said “Wait – we’re not quite ready”. I literally turned my car around. So I knew something was percolating. On the other hand I never really thought there would be comeuppance with this group.Why did you think there would be no accountability for Concacaf bosses after everything you saw while working there?When I was with Concacaf the office was on the 17th floor of Trump Tower. Chuck Blazer lived on the 49th floor. Before that, Chuck and Jack Warner shared an apartment on the 10th floor across from Donald Trump and Marla Maples. They were all so intertwined and so much a part of the interlocking elite that accountability was a distant dream. I would imagine that Chuck, Jack, and others would do anything to stay out of jail. These were not gangsters. These were opportunistic cockroaches. They were not tough guys. They would run with any real sustained sunlight. [Chuck Blazer became an undercover informant for FBI and IRS investigators in 2011.]Were you surprised Concacaf featured so prominently in the 2015 scandals?No. I felt like Concacaf was among the least competent of the continental actors. You had other confederations with people who were European glitterati or ran legitimate businesses but you didn’t really have that in Concacaf. Jack was a former history teacher but he knew that the Caribbean was a sleeping giant that could subvert the Guatemalan-Mexican football power structure at the time. And you had Chuck who was an extractor but you couldn’t really point to a lot that he had built. They were not sophisticated corporate guys. They were not sophisticated business guys. They were born opportunists. That the mistakes were so easily revealed to law enforcement was not a surprise.Blazer and Warner had tight control over Concacaf but there are usually always enablers in these environments. Was that the case at Concacaf?In a larger sense, all of us were enablers but I think that the Concacaf executive committee and the Concacaf member associations would have made a different choice with different political pressure at the time. From 1990 to about 2015 they were operating within a North American context where the world’s sport was sixth or seventh on the media table. It was arguable that wrestling had more media attention. So the media landscape also has to take its fair share of the blame. Often folks would want to maintain access and instead of doing investigative journalism that requires document review and truth-telling, and speaking truth to power, it was more reporting and more like Pravda rather than “the institution said this now lets’s really dig in to see if this is true or not and if it is not true why didn’t they tell us the truth?” There was not a lot of that in the LA Times or the New York Times. Everybody played a role in enabling this.So Blazer and Warner lined their pockets with cash from deals they made. Why do we care how they made money? The cost was that people didn’t gain access to sporting opportunities [they were entitled to through]. The football bubble and the rise in the dollars available for them should have created access. If you are a girl and you play sport, you only have a small chance to go pro but if you play sport and you stay in sport you are more likely to lead an organization as an adult. But these types of opportunities were lost for so many because Jack and Chuck were too busy acting like they were building fields and programming but Chuck and Jack were actually on a game show called “Who is Stealing Money?”. And they were on it every week.Where was the US, Canada, and Mexico – all big players in Concacaf during this? People like [former US Soccer president ] Sunil Gulati were fully present when I was there. The role that Sunil played under [his predecessor] and then as US Soccer president himself felt more like him being a World Bank guy – which is the world he comes from. Admiring this economic engine that Chuck and Jack had built from a distance rather than deploying the power of US Soccer to shine a light on this stuff and make a difference.In your book Fixing Football you recall an amazing scene at a Concacaf conference in Miami where women, who were not delegates, left the hotel en masse at 5am. There were more than 15 and less than 30 [women]. All from the same floor. And you see how they are dressed and you see the time and see what is going on. You feel like you want to call somebody because maybe you are crazy. Everyone else who was there and had been [at Concacaf events previously] was, like, “Well, yeah, let’s get them in the car and get them off …”Has anything changed at Fifa since your era?Transparency International laid out a framework that would have [made things less opaque at Fifa]. Fifa could have meetings of the Fifa Council that are broadcast live and minutes that are in real time. We could see the bank accounts in real time if they wanted us to see it. Some cockroaches have scattered and other cockroaches came in but the overall smell remains the same.Was Victor Montagliani the right person to lead Concacaf after the 2015 crisis?Victor Montagliani had an opportunity to demonstrate he was the right person to lead. There was a moment where Concacaf could have gone in a different direction: democratic, transparent, inclusive, diverse. Instead, what Concacaf did was rely on the fact that [Montagliani] was not Jack and Chuck to say that this meant change. In the end, we still cannot see and it is not clear how Concacaf doles out its dollars. The question is, will Montagliani and other leaders step back just a moment to build something that would matter beyond themselves? That would matter for more people. I was naive to think that Montagliani could be this radical change when most of the status quo is still in place.Should Concacaf be making sponsorship deals with Saudi Arabia and accepting investment in the region from the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund?Any nation state that is murdering journalists has to be marginalized. I would not want to see Concacaf engaging with Saudi Arabia without some sort of weight to the decision-making process of sponsorships and partnerships that included human rights records and human rights abuses. How Saudi Arabia treats women and the most vulnerable matters. If Concacaf is considering a partnership with them then they should have a mechanism that is going to evaluate some of [the issues]. They might not get a deal at all but to not have those considerations in the conversation as to whether you are going to partner somebody is an abandonment of the spirit that makes sport matter at all.Does the USA, Mexico, and Canada hosting this year’s World Cup make this tournament a success for the sport in the region?It is an opportunity. [But] who gets left behind? In my local town in Maryland, all [organized] youth soccer is white kids. But a 10-minute walk from my house a park is reserved by Latino communities but these two communities don’t meet. One community is going to the Dallas Cup and the Florida youth soccer tournaments and the other one is not. There is something wrong here and there is an opportunity for us to reshape how this looks or to call for and get better answers from our leaders as to why it looks the way it looks.This interview has been edited for length and clarity.