Stars, stripes and scepticism: The football World Cup returns to America

The last time the US staged a football World Cup, it went off-script from the start. American singer Diana Ross , star performer at the opening ceremony of the 1994 tournament, had been scheduled to complete her act, broadcast live, by shooting a penalty into a makeshift goal – a choreographed coming together of pop, glamour and the globe’s most popular sport. Unfortunately, she missed the target . Millions giggled. Here, many thought, was a demonstration of how Americans might be expert at dressing up the Super Bowl like it’s a rock concert, but they just don’t get “soccer”. Thirty-two years on, the US, lead partner with Mexico and Canada in a joint hosting of the biggest World Cup ever staged, is welcoming the event again. The nature of that welcome feels very nuanced to a number of fans, for whom the tournament is an exciting quadrennial odyssey in which to discover countries as distinct as Qatar, South Korea and South Africa. Taking the World Cup beyond football’s traditional centres of excellence, Europe and Latin America, has become a priority of Fifa, the event’s owners. While the benefits of that for the growth of the game have been mostly positive, the 2026 edition opens to a rare, even menacing mood of exclusion. The price of entry, not only of tickets but of access to venues and accommodation, has inhibited some of the most intrepid would-be travellers – as have various aspects of US domestic and foreign policy. One competing nation, Iran, hastily relocated its team’s training base to Mexico – a consequence of Tehran’s military conflict with the US. Five African countries who qualified – Algeria, Tunisia, Senegal, Ivory Coast and Cape Verde – were informed, with only weeks left before the tournament, that targeted restrictions on issuing visas to their citizens had been temporarily lifted. And that’s only provided visiting Algerians, Tunisians, Senegalese, Ivorians and Cape Verdeans can show proof of their tickets to matches. Among some of the football-supporting diaspora communities of the US – groups who gave the atmosphere at the 1994 World Cup much of its vibrancy – there is widely reported hesitancy about joining in the festival this time around. A cultivated hostility towards immigrants by the administration of US President Donald Trump, says the American Civil Liberties Union, has put “people travelling to the United States and domestically … at risk of arrest, detention and/or deportation, violent and unconstitutional immigration enforcement, and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment” from ICE, America’s immigration and customs enforcement agency. This has risked upstaging a tournament that Fifa intended to look more like an Olympic Games in scale and inclusiveness than any previous World Cup. Its number of competitors has swelled from 32 countries to 48 . The expansion has made space for the likes of island nations like Curacao and Cape Verde , who have never taken part in a football World Cup before. But the list of those countries missing is just as eye-catching. To the great disappointment of a significant number of Italian Americans, Italy, who have won as many World Cups as any European country, failed to qualify. So did Nigeria, depriving the event of the sort of joyous crowd scenes that accompanied the Nigerian men’s team to a gold medal in the Olympic football at the 1996 Games in Atlanta, Georgia. The potential downside of so many extra participants and with so many more matches is saturation in a sport of ever heavier schedules and ever higher standards being set by the elite, monied clubs of Europe and parts of the Gulf and Latin America. Fifa’s greatest property, the month-long meeting of nation-against-nation that is the World Cup, is obliged to look over its shoulder nervously at the magnetic appeal of competitions like the Uefa Champions League and the English Premier League and their attractiveness to global audiences though nine months of the year. It must also acknowledge that while a patriotic impulse will always draw audiences to rousing World Cup stories like Morocco’s run to the semi-finals of the 2022 tournament, or South Korea’s to the same stage in 2002, the football itself needs to be of high quality and the recognised stars of the sport need to rise to the occasion. Club football holds a huge advantage over country-versus-country. Players at clubs practise together daily. Their clubs can recruit from far and wide. If, say, Paris Saint-Germain lose Lionel Messi one year and Kylian Mbappe the next, they find resources to still build a flamboyant team strong enough to win successive European Cups . Messi’s Argentina, meanwhile, and Mbappe’s France – the winners and runners-up in Qatar four years ago – have barely a handful of days training together to work on a winning strategy. As it happens, Argentina and France are this weekend worrying about the fitness of Messi and Mbappe with less than a week to go until kick-off. Then there are the conditions. The heat of a summer in parts of North America and Mexico will stifle at times, a concern for the quality of the spectacle and for the famous veterans pushing their long careers into a last World Cup – a sixth for 41-year-old Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal and for Messi, who turns 39 this month; a fifth for Luka Modric, of Croatia, and 2014 winner Manuel Neuer of Germany, both 40 and mindful that their sport looks increasingly like the domain of prodigies propelled to the top from early childhood in sophisticated academies. Spain’s status as narrow favourites owes much to Lamine Yamal , just 18 and already a European champion with his country, as to any of the match-winning talents in their squad. As for the main host nation, for all its size, its facilities and its enthusiasm for sport, the US has yet to unearth a Lamine, or a footballing equivalent to the retired basketball superstar Michael Jordan . Since Diana Ross fluffed her penalty kick, soccer has developed significantly in its popularity in the crowded market of American sports. Yet nobody mistakes the current men’s national side for potential champions, nor would anybody argue that watching a team ranked 16th-best in the Fifa hierarchy would in any other tournament be among the more sought-after tickets in the overpriced 2026 World Cup. For the players of Team USA, there are burdensome tasks ahead: to gain the faith of doubting compatriots and, beyond that, to do their little bit to make their country a little more likeable for a sceptical world.