Trump, Infantino, Trump and Infantino, Hydration Breaks: five reasons the 2026 World Cup is sh*t | OneFootball

By the end of this weekend it will be March. No, we’re not sure how that happened either.

The boffins need to start investigating how it can be that January lasts roughly four years while February lasts less than a week.

But the fact it is March, or will be in about five minutes’ time anyway, is important. For March is when the final spots at this summer’s World Cup will be decided, and with that comes the horrifying realisation that the tournament will be less than three months away.

Which, as we’ve established, is about half-an-hour in real money. It will be here before you know it and, to be honest, we’re a bit worried. In fact, we’re kind of dreading it. And we hate that.

We’re not sweet summer children here. We’re not about to pretend the 2026 World Cup in Trumpland is some sort of first. The last World Cup was in Qatar in December. Before that everyone was off having a lovely time in Russia.

So problematic World Cups are entirely commonplace. To the extent it’s actually quite hard to imagine how you’d even go about having an unproblematic one ever again, or whether such a thing has even ever existed.

But there are a few reasons why this World Cup makes us especially queasy. Many of them are a result of our own moral failings; this World Cup already feels like it’s far more brazen about placing its problems front and centre. There won’t even be the privileged option this time of burying one’s head in the sand and just trying to enjoy the football.

Qatar was already a lot like that, but it’s definitely a feeling that has escalated across these last three World Cups.

We also wish at this point to head off a retort that usually surfaces at this point: “If you don’t like it, don’t watch it?” To that we say… why should we? Why should we be forced to give up something we love because it’s been entirely bought and paid for by absolute f*ckers? To us, that’s just an equally illogical extension of the old “If you don’t like this country then leave” trope. Your car’s broken down? Just abandon it on the roadside. You’re not sure about the new curtains in your lounge? Burn the house down.

We’re angry about how much we hate this World Cup specifically because we want to love the World Cup. We should be able to love the World Cup. The World Cup should be great. Here are five reasons it won’t be.

Donald Trump

Obvious answer is obvious, but it does need saying. Again, we acknowledge a big part of this reflects badly on us. Bad people have benefited hugely from hosting the World Cup before and will do so again; none has ever been so shit-eating-grinningly pleased and in everyone’s face about it.

If you wanted to pretend everything was fine in Russia and Qatar, you kind of could. You could put your fingers in your ears and ignore that small voice inside your head telling you this is all bad actually and just enjoy Eric Dier scoring a shootout-winning penalty in something approaching peace.

You could have watched the entire 2018 and 2022 World Cups while barely seeing or hearing from the problematic host country’s leaders at all. There will be absolutely no avoiding Donald Trump this summer. The man can and will insert himself into every nook and cranny of the tournament.

He will be front and centre and claiming credit for the victory and trying to steal the trophy until someone manages to find another fake one to give him before he has a tantrum that starts a world war.

This is a man who seems to genuinely believe he won Winter Olympic ice-hockey gold for the USA. Not the women’s one, obviously, he’s entirely unarsed about that one. But the men’s one, the proper one, he did that. He won that.

And this isn’t the ‘we’ that fans and supporters of a team or even citizens of a country use when talking about their team. When we say ‘we won gold in the snowboardcross mixed team event’ we don’t actually think we personally won that gold medal, nor do we entirely know what the words we’ve just said mean.

Trump does believe it with his whole tiny heart. We’re not doing a bit. We honestly think that he’s watched that AI video he posted of himself on the ice in his full standard-issue uniform of ill-fitting suit and comically long red tie and his burger-addled brain believes it to be a real thing that happened.

He will steal the team’s medals if they give him half the chance. He tried to steal the Club World Cup and whoever wins the World Cup this summer, he will be there and think he should leave with the trophy.

Remember how weirdly grating it was to see Salt Bae position himself as a main character in Argentina’s celebrations four years ago? Imagine that, multiplied by Trump at the Club World Cup, and you’ve got an absolute horror-show spectacle.

And that’s the best-case scenario. In the best possible timeline for this World Cup, Trump merely makes the whole tournament all about him and takes personal credit for it. In other less likely but still alarmingly plausible timelines he gets up to all manner of mad king sh*t, from moving fixtures out of blue states at the last minute on a whim, to declaring war against Mexico during the opening game to denying Canada even exists.

We know Trump will ruin this tournament; we just don’t know how much.

Gianni Infantino

And then there’s his weird little enabler, the man who unilaterally decided to throw the entire heft of the world’s most popular sport behind the ‘peace’ plan of the most divisive leader in the world.

Again, we’re not naïve enough to think that sport and politics can or even should be kept apart. The very idea of keeping politics out of a competition contested by nations is patently absurd.

But the sight of Infantino believing he can speak for the entire sport itself in so nakedly endorsing the current occupier of a political office was dizzyingly nauseating. It would be problematic even if Trump were not. Even if Trump was a figure universally loved and respected across the continents there would be valid concerns about the precedent set by offering unquestioning support to a serving politician.

When Trump is in fact Trump it becomes perhaps the single most dangerous act FIFA or its spokeshole has ever committed.

Although we, like the rest of you, remain fascinated to see who the second recipient of the prestigious FIFA Peace Prize might be.

Also important at this point to remember that his guileless and transparent infatuation with Trump is in no way Infantino’s only offence.

Trump/Infantino sycophants

And we don’t even have to just put up with Infantino sucking up to Trump. You’ve got sycophanception going on with others queuing up to tickle one or other or both men’s wrinkly balls.

We don’t really care if Tom Brady inexplicably thinks Infantino is a “man of the people” because at no point in our lives have we invested any energy into caring what Tom Brady thinks about anything.

We’re not even that bothered about Rio Ferdinand’s shilling because we can say with some honesty that we respect Ferdinand just as much today as we did before any of this. But finding yet more of our dwindling respect for Arsene Wenger ebb away is genuinely upsetting.

This was the man who invented footballers eating pasta instead of Mars bars and ketchup, for crying out loud. How can he have fallen so far and so fast?

The state of this, honestly.

I never thought I’d say this, Arsene, but can we hear more about your brilliant plan to definitely solve the offside problem?

If anything, Clive, for me, it’s almost too much football

Weird one, this. And we do kind of think that actually when the tournament is here this might go the other way. That the sheer overwhelming volume of footballtainment raining down upon us will distract us a little bit from all the bad things that happen.

It hasn’t escaped our attention that the first three things on this list are mainly about the same two wrong ‘uns and not at all about actual football, and that if nothing else the presence of several thousand football matches (subs, please check) might be some kind of antidote.

But it is also just too much football. At the end of a season that has already featured too much football.

We could be and were queasy about the 2018 and 2022 World Cups but at least they both still had one key thing going for them: an unimprovable and perfect format. We should never have taken it for granted, but we had something glorious for a while there.

The World Cup having a ropey format is in fact nothing new. It’s easy to forget how rare and recent the 1998-2022 consensus actually was. Formats had hopped and jumped about every few tournaments at best before that.

Yet from France 98 we hit upon something that just worked. The 32-team tournament was an absolute sweet spot of a thing and we will never, ever get it back. It was big enough and inclusive enough to feel truly global without becoming unwieldy. It was simple to understand. It had baked-in sporting integrity and fairness. Nobody could feel they were dumped out early without a fair chance to show what they could do, but nor did weaker teams hang around long enough to become a drag. There was a perfect balance of peril and opportunity.

The 48-team version we’re saddled with now jeopardises or outright destroys all of that. The 32-team World Cups contained 64 matches from start to finish. The 48-team World Cup will take eight games longer just to get down to 32 teams.

The safety net that will deliver eight third-placed teams into the knockout bracket dilutes the jeopardy of the group stage and rips up the integrity of the knockout bracket. There are benefits, obviously. We don’t really want to complain too hard about having more football matches to watch because a lot of football matches are great. And we’re definitely not complaining about an extra round of knockout football matches because knockout football matches are the best kind of football matches.

But… it’s just so much football. By the time that extra knockout round kicks off, football fatigue may well have kicked in. We’re serious. We really might not be ready for it after a four-day period from June 24 to 27 when TWENTY-FOUR World Cup matches will take place.

Pick any three of those four days and you’ve got more World Cup football going on than in the entire 1934 World Cup.

Hydration Breaks

You’ll have probably heard quite a bit about this. It’s probably – and ironically, in a way – boiled a little bit of your p*ss already. But our most confident prediction for the World Cup is that these are going to be massively despised and impossibly annoying.

We have multiple issues here. Let’s start right away by saying the concept itself isn’t mental. Everyone knows we’re woke beta cuck snowflakes here at F365 and thus we don’t actually want to see exhausted players literally collapsing on the field in extreme conditions from dehydration. Allowing for a quick drinks break in each half when conditions reach an agreed upon level of extreme is absolutely fine, and has been on the books for ages.

But we must be absolutely clear that however much FIFA try to pretend that’s what this is, that’s not what this is. These are mandatory breaks midway through every half of every game at the World Cup, no matter the conditions or circumstances. Nor are they a quick drinks break. It’s a three-minute stoppage. In every half. Of every game.

We’re sure it’s a complete coincidence that these new and mandatory stoppages are the exact length of a standard advert break, but how serendipitous that is nevertheless.

But let’s call this what it is. It is a de facto transformation of the game. It is a fundamental shift from a game of two halves to a game of four quarters. And you don’t need us to tell you that there’s no chance this change starts and ends at this particular World Cup. This will become the norm for any football competition that wants to rake in a bit more coin. Which is… all of them.

So there’s that grievance; that this is a change that messes with the fundamental fabric, the building blocks, of what we know a football match to be, and does so hot on the heels of VAR doing the same to such devastating effect. It’s a massive issue on its own.

It’s the biggest but not only issue. The other one is that it is being done with such gleeful intelligence-insulting dishonesty. Just look at how stupid your favourite sport’s governing body thinks you are.

We wouldn’t be happy if FIFA had come out and said ‘Look, we’re sorry, we get you probably won’t like this but there’s an absolute f*ckton of money to be made if we move to four quarters so that’s what we’re going to do’. But we could respect the honesty, at least.

Instead, they’ve hidden behind player-welfare guffspeak.

That is a paragraph that should make you so angry. Even just the trade mark. But then the sheer neck of it. The massive swinging brass balls required to pretend that any of that is the primary motivator here.

And they know, of course. They know that sounds ridiculous even as they’re saying it. They know how ludicrous it is to stage a tournament that crams in an extra 40 games while being only 10 days longer than its predecessor  – time that has in any case just been clawed back from the official calendar time allotted to the build-up – and then claim to be remotely interested in player welfare. But they’ve done it anyway. Because they don’t care and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about any of it.