Guillem Balagué's 2026 World Cup preview

Football journalist and author Guillem Balagué previews the 2026 World Cup as the greatest show on earth commences on Thursday.

Is this World Cup designed for the fans or for the business? I have been asking myself that question for months.

The tickets are expensive — though before you complain too loudly, have you ever tried to buy a seat for an NBA game? Expensive is relative. But the broader point stands: this is a tournament built around power, money, and political calculation on a scale we have rarely seen.

Well, with the exception of Qatar. And South Africa. I might have to admit power and football have never been too far apart.

FIFA have played the power game with remarkable skill, positioning themselves close enough to the current American administration to ensure everything runs smoothly. And yet — and this is what troubles me — when members of the football family were denied visas to enter the country, that carefully cultivated influence suddenly counted for nothing.

An organisation that can bend the ear of presidents could not help a referee, or federation officials. Something is very wrong with that.

Outside the stadiums, the noise will be about culture wars, nationalism, the return of borders and walls in a country whose leader has made both his trademark. Football will land in that environment and do what it always does — quietly insist that there is another way to love your country that has nothing to do with fearing or hating someone else’s.

Football used to be a peripheral thing in the United States, played on the edges, politely tolerated. Now the country is about to be flooded by nations that the self-regarding centre of the world has always considered peripheral. There is a poetry in that.

Because here is the thing. Football does not fully belong to whoever tries to own it. Not to FIFA. Not to governments. Not to television deals and pricing strategies and geopolitical alignments.

When that first ball is kicked in the Azteca, something will happen that no boardroom can manufacture. A feeling that is collective, irrational, universal. The Romans had bread and circuses. We have this.

And then the stories begin.

Let me give you one that made me laugh and then made me think. About a decade ago, Patrick Kluivert, with local blood in his veins via his mum, was coaching Curaçao’s national team and took a decision that outraged the locals: he started calling up players from the Curaçaoan diaspora, kids who had grown up in the Netherlands and elsewhere, rather than relying solely on homegrown talent.

The arguments were fierce. The identity debates raged. So Kluivert did something beautiful: he organised a match between his selected squad and the best players born on the island. His team won 7–1. The debate, more or less, ended there.

Curaçao are at this World Cup. That journey, from a small island in the Caribbean to the biggest stage in football, is one of thousands of stories this tournament will proudly tell.

That is the thing about a World Cup with 48 teams. Critics will tell you it’s diluted. I’d tell them they’re missing the point. Look at what qualification alone has done for Cabo Verde, for Uzbekistan, for Haiti. It brings extreme pride (the good type) and happiness to all sort of places.

Cabo Verde, Uzbekistan, Curaçao and Jordan are the four nations making their World Cup debut this summer

Haiti’s coach, Sébastien Migné, has never set foot in the country he manages.

Haiti is currently a nation where armed gangs control around 90% of the capital, where 1.4 million people have been displaced, and where half the population require humanitarian assistance to survive. Migné coaches by video conference and qualified them for the World Cup from a screen. If that isn’t a story worth following, I don’t know what is.

Meanwhile, Bielsa is where he belongs — on the touchline with Uruguay, brooding and brilliant.

I mention him anyway because I cannot help it. His teams lose and win with an intensity (and should I say, naive beauty) that feels almost improper in modern football.

After a defeat to the United States in a friendly, he stood at a press conference and described himself, with complete sincerity, as a toxic person. The man agonises, and with that ingredient he creates poetry. I will be watching Uruguay too.

On the field, Spain feel a level above the rest.

When you have a player who can win a game by himself and a team that has played together so long they barely need to look at each other, you start every tournament as favourites.

France have less collective fluency but carry dynamite in their forward line — the kind that can detonate on any given night. England have chosen structure and Harry Kane, and in a tournament played in extreme heat, with matches broken into four parts by hydration stops, that combination might be exactly right. Slow football suits disciplined teams.

Argentina have Messi and a group of street wise players who would run through walls for him. Brazil have appointed their first foreign head coach in Carlo Ancelotti, and his first major decision, bringing Neymar back, was very Brazilian: generous, crowd-pleasing, emotionally correct… and tactically debatable. But he thought, it is better to have Neymar close, than at home, he will be easier to control.

At high temperatures, with stop-start matches, tactical discipline wins tournaments. That is where coaches matter most, and I am genuinely looking forward to watching friends of mine in the dugout — Roberto Martínez with Portugal, Luis de la Fuente with Spain, Mauricio Pochettino with the United States, Julen Lopetegui with Qatar, Carlos Queiroz with Ghana, Davide next to his dad with Brazil.

This may also be a farewell tournament for some of the game’s greatest. Messi, Modric, Van Dijk, Neymar, Ronaldo, the generation that defined the last fifteen years could take their final bows here. But watch too for the arrivals: Nico Paz for Argentina, Gilberto Mora for Mexico, Desiré Doué for France, Yan Diomandé for the Ivory Coast.

The winner will have played eight matches. They will have created memories that people discuss for the rest of their lives. There are very few events that occupy this much space in the collective memory of humanity all at once.

Football can belong to business. It can belong to politics. It can belong to television deals, ticket pricing, and geopolitical calculation. And that will always mean that football is more than ninety minutes. But also, for ninety minutes at a time, it belongs to nobody but the game itself. All of that is fascinating and beyond sport.

For all those reasons I still do this.

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