What was the 2026 World Cup’s legacy? Proving that relentless expansion is unsustainable… | OneFootball

The 2026 World Cup was sold as football’s biggest celebration yet. By the time Spain lifted the trophy in New Jersey after dismantling Argentina in a one-sided final, it had certainly delivered on scale.

Forty-eight teams. One-hundred-and-four matches. Three host nations. Six weeks of football stretched across an entire continent.

It was louder, longer and more commercially powerful than any World Cup before it. Whether it was better depends on what part of its legacy ultimately proves most enduring.

On the pitch, there was enough drama to justify the expanded format. Spain emerged as deserved champions, capping an outstanding tournament with a commanding victory over Lionel Scaloni’s Argentina. Luis de la Fuente’s side combined technical quality with remarkable tactical flexibility, looking every inch the heirs to Spain’s greatest international teams.

There were emotional moments too. At 39 years old, Lionel Messi somehow remained capable of producing them. No longer able to dominate matches through relentless dribbling, he instead orchestrated games in shorter bursts, conserving energy before producing decisive passes or moments of invention that reminded everyone why football’s greatest players often age differently from everyone else. His final World Cup ended in defeat, but not decline.

England, meanwhile, somehow managed to turn the largely ceremonial third-place play-off into one of the tournament’s most entertaining spectacles, defeating France 6-4 in a match that often resembled an exhibition game played at Premier League pace. Nobody will pretend it carried the weight of a World Cup final, but it offered one last reminder that football remains capable of producing joyful absurdity even when the stakes are relatively modest.

Away from the pitch, though, the tournament frequently felt less like an international festival than a demonstration of football’s growing entanglement with political power.

The treatment of Iran’s national team throughout the competition cast a shadow over proceedings, while Donald Trump’s highly public intervention to help overturn Folarin Balogun’s suspension raised uncomfortable questions about FIFA’s willingness to insulate sporting decisions from political influence. Gianni Infantino’s increasingly conspicuous public relationship with the US President only reinforced the perception that football’s governing body had become remarkably comfortable operating in the orbit of powerful political figures.

Those controversies may fade with time. The environmental questions almost certainly will not.

For years, FIFA has insisted that sustainability sits at the heart of modern tournament planning. In some respects, the 2026 World Cup genuinely represented progress. Unlike many previous mega-events, every match was staged in an existing stadium rather than purpose-built venues destined to become expensive white elephants. That decision alone avoided an enormous amount of embodied carbon associated with large-scale construction.

Many of those venues also arrived with impressive environmental credentials already in place. Stadiums including Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Seattle’s Lumen Field and Monterrey’s Estadio BBVA either hold or were designed around recognised Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification standards, reflecting investments in energy efficiency, water conservation and sustainable building practices.

Those achievements deserve recognition. Building greener stadiums matters. Reusing existing infrastructure matters even more.

The difficulty is that stadiums account for only part of a tournament’s environmental footprint.

The defining image of this World Cup may not be Spain’s passing triangles or Messi’s final bow. It may instead be aircraft crossing North America in every direction. Teams, supporters, media and FIFA officials routinely travelled thousands of miles between matches. Fans following their countries often faced journeys comparable to flying across Europe several times over simply to complete a group-stage itinerary.

An independent University of Cambridge study estimated the tournament’s footprint at about 4.23 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, with spectator travel responsible for roughly 82 per cent. That reality overwhelms many of the gains achieved through efficient stadium design. An arena can recycle rainwater, generate renewable electricity and divert waste from landfill, but none of those measures meaningfully offset millions of long-haul passenger journeys.

Even FIFA’s own leadership inadvertently illustrated the contradiction. Analysis of Gianni Infantino’s tournament schedule showed extraordinary levels of air travel as he attempted to attend matches across all 16 host cities, highlighting just how aviation-intensive a continental World Cup inevitably becomes.

Climate change also stopped being an abstract concern and became part of the sporting narrative itself.

Several matches were played in temperatures that player representatives argued approached unsafe thresholds. Hydration breaks became routine. Air-conditioned indoor stadiums offered relief for players, but supporters outside often endured dangerous conditions while travelling to and from venues.

Elsewhere, storms disrupted schedules and wildfire smoke periodically threatened air quality. The tournament designed for North America’s summer became an illustration of what staging elite sport in a warming climate increasingly looks like.

Perhaps that is the true legacy of the 2026 World Cup. It demonstrated that football can organise a genuinely global event using existing infrastructure and more sustainable venues than ever before. Yet it also exposed the limits of those improvements when the competition itself continues to grow. Expansion creates more matches, attracts more supporters and demands more travel. The environmental arithmetic becomes harder with every additional team and every extra host city.

That matters because this version of the World Cup is unlikely to be an exception. FIFA has embraced bigger tournaments as the future of international football. If that trajectory continues, organisers will eventually need to confront a question that efficient stadiums alone cannot answer: not how to make mega-events greener, but whether mega-events of this scale can ever truly be sustainable.