Even loveless Infantino and Trump could not ruin the undefeated World Cup | OneFootball

For obvious reasons I decided to boycott the World Cup this year. I said so to my wife, who replied: “That’ll last about 10 minutes.” As always, she was right. I wound up watching every minute of every game, for the 11th straight World Cup.

Football-wise, it was a good tournament. Lots of exciting games, a few of them all-timers: England-Mexico, Argentina-Cape Verde, Argentina-Egypt, not to mention the wonderful exhibition by France against Sweden. Spain’s semi-final win over France, while not a thriller in the traditional sense, was as superb a performance of top-level football to come along in some time.

Boosting the spectacle was some serious star power and a surprisingly large number of first-class goals. My personal favorite was Erling Haaland’s second against Brazil, a strike of the purest footballing arrogance. But for quality and timing, Sidny Lopes Cabral takes the Puskas.

The 48-team format was clunky, but worked out better than expected. Even teams that were outclassed produced some memorable moments. And even with the awful head-to-head tiebreaker, 10 of the 12 groups had serious tension in the final round. Who can forget the finishes of Egypt-Iran and Algeria-Austria?

The greatest risk of the format was always the plethora of knockout games, which long and painful experience shows are usually cagier than group stage games. Put an extra round in and you’re really asking for trouble. But overall we did fine. The round of 32 was very good, and a couple of genuine classics saved an otherwise blah round of 16. The quarters and semis had plenty of fine play and drama. (Not always of the right kind, if like me you were supporting England.) The third-place game was sublimely bonkers.

As for the refereeing, we could spend years on it. FIFA is automatically suspect, of course. But who except the winners is ever satisfied anyway? And no one actually likes VAR. VAR’s parents have cut VAR out of the will and won’t return VAR’s phone calls. VAR’s spouse left with the kids and now lives in a Buddhist retreat in North Wales. Still, it has its uses, although it seems some of them are becoming less useful.

But the problem isn’t VAR, or even refereeing in general. It’s football itself. In a game with so few scoring plays, every refereeing decision has an outsized effect. Sometimes there are grey areas, and sometimes players cheat, and humans, even VAR-assisted humans, remain both fallible and subject to unconscious influences. As the saying goes, you pays your money and you takes your choice.

The Final? Well, that’s always a crapshoot. We got lucky in 2018 and 2022, not so lucky this time around. Spain, at least, were worthy winners. It would have been nice to crown an entirely new champion, but that was never really on the cards. In the 17 tournaments since 1958, only once has a team won its very first World Cup without playing at home. (Spain in 2010.)

Bottom line: 104 games, glad I watched them all. Good tournament!

From the start, however, as we all knew, this World Cup was about more than football. Someday historians with strong stomachs will provide painstaking analysis for future generations. But for most of us, it all came down to two names: Gianni Infantino and Donald Trump. And guess what? The World Cup triumphed over both.

Now Infantino is just a dime-a-dozen businessman, somewhat more tiresome than most, puffed up by the usual shabby greed and ambition. World Cup football now has four quarters and a long final halftime show, big surprise. And they’re selling championship rings, wow! During the tournament he seemed to be at every game, not because he cared, but because he had to pretend he cared. That’s what businessmen do.

But even that backfired. Naturally he was booed whenever he appeared on screen, but more importantly, since he was always there, you ignored him and looked at the other VIPs. And those were the guys we really wanted to see: Ronaldo, Jorge Campos, Hristo Stoichkov, Diego Simeone, heck, even Philippe Senderos and Jozy Altidore. Infantino became mere background noise, or maybe just the wallpaper, and singularly unattractive wallpaper at that.

Trump, his politics aside, is something darker altogether, a figure more of pity than derision, a man so damaged he is literally incapable of caring about anything but himself. His insecurities run so deep that he needs the entire universe to warp and twist, each day a different way, to keep his ultra-brittle self-esteem from shattering. And while Infantino plastered himself everywhere, Trump stayed away for a long time, in part because the World Cup was too big and too diverse for him. He couldn’t see a way to focus it on himself and his personal excellence.

When he did eventually step in, he shat on it, because that’s what he does. His self-absorption is so total that he can’t do anything else. So inevitably he fell victim to Tickner’s Law, that the best result is the funniest. The team Trump purported to help, the USMNT, not only had its image irrevocably tainted, but got slaughtered by a team that was galvanised by his interference. Then, as is his wont, he tried to associate himself with a prominent alpha male, proudly telling us he had golfed with Harry Kane, whom he called “a great player” – and who stopped playing like one at that exact moment. Here in the USA we have a saying: everything Trump touches dies.

But the World Cup didn’t die, and that’s the main point. It lived on because football is about love, and the World Cup is about the joy that goes with it. Over this last month, everywhere we looked we saw joy. From the Norwegian rowers to the Scottish bagpipers to Merlín the duck, the face of this World Cup wasn’t Infantino, and it wasn’t Trump – it was us. Us having an absolute blast. And it just so happens that love and joy are precisely the things Infantino and Trump can neither experience nor even understand, much less conquer.

Much of the world is run by bad people. Often this seems inescapable, and in some sense it is. The besetting sins of humankind, the hunger for wealth and thirst for power, will always make things like freedom and justice seem ephemeral. But love and joy, the love and joy that inhabit football everywhere, are eternal. So the lesson of the 2026 World Cup is not that a better world is possible, but that it’s already here.