Six complaints about 2026 World Cup, and why it mi...

The 2026 edition of the FIFA World Cup kicks off on Thursday, and there are plenty of common complaints around the tournament that have been circulating for months in the lead-up to the opening game. Travel concerns, climate issues and a bloated schedule have all been floated as things dampening global enthusiasm for soccer's biggest tournament. However, each of the bigger arguments has a clear counter as to why this might end up being a successful summer -- on the pitch, at least -- by the time a winner is crowned on July 19... Complaint one: It's a 48-team World Cup This means the quality will be diluted, the format will be clunky (there are 72 games -- more than the entire Qatar World Cup! -- just to go from 48 nations to 32), there's no real jeopardy in the group stage (win just one game and you're probably going through to the knockout rounds) and we're going to be force-fed four games a day for the first two-and-a-half weeks of the tournament. What fun is it watching teams you don't care about, with players you've never heard of and will likely never see again? Where's the drama in knowing that you can lose two games out of three and still have a chance to qualify? And while we all love the game, surely nobody can stomach four games a day -- eight hours of football -- for nearly three weeks? That's classic overkill, no? - World Cup Predictions: Our picks for winner, Golden Ball, more - Ian Darke's World Cup preview: Teams to watch, favorites and ... Brazil to win? - All fixtures, results and features from 2026 World Cup Counterargument: Admittedly, 48 teams does not make for a good format and yes, we know why FIFA went to 48: they call it inclusion, while cynics call it doling out more slots to nations who will vote in next year's elections, creating more inventory to sell to sponsors and broadcasters and generating more coin keep everyone happy. But the quality dilution argument is a bit silly. We watch the FA Cup, don't we? As for the lack of jeopardy, is it really so problematic if Argentina or France can take a mulligan (or two) in the group stage and still advance? You don't want to see Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappé in the knockouts? Besides, the "jeopardy" will still be there -- just maybe not for the top nations. As for the overkill, yeah, I feel you. But some of us just have a very high tolerance for watching the sport we love. Complaint 2: Dynamic pricing and legal ticket scalping Those terms mean that ticket prices, which were already too high to begin with, are now extortionate. Normal folk are priced out because FIFA and the ticket resellers got greedy. Counterargument: I'd suggest they got "stupid" as much as they got "greedy." The tournament starts this week and it's still not a sell-out. FIFA says that it's a success because it's "nearly" (whatever that means) sold out; I'd argue it's embarrassing when the total population of the three host nations is nearly half a billion, and you've been hyping this thing to high heaven for the past 10 years. As for the ticket resellers and the dynamic pricing: well, the markets work both ways. Seats for last summer's Club World Cup semifinal between Chelsea and Fluminense went from $473 to as low as $13.40 in the space of a few days. We won't know for sure if this will happen again, but the thought of resellers and their armies of bots getting stuck with thousands of tickets, forced to dump them for pennies on the dollar, warms your heart, doesn't it? Complaint three: The combination of price-gouging, safety concerns, political polarisation and visa issues is keeping many fans away Travel is expensive enough these days, but then many fans have to jump through all sorts of hoops and red tape to be a part of this World Cup. And even those who don't sometimes get their travel authorisation withdrawn at the last minute. Counterargument: Yes, the price-gouging is a problem, and the fact that it happens at just about every major sporting event is hugely off-putting (I've been to 23 Champions League finals ... you do not want to know how much my three-star hotel in Budapest cost for Paris Saint-Germain vs. Arsenal a couple of weeks ago.) The good news -- a bit like the dynamic ticket pricing -- is that prices fluctuate and sometimes the market does its thing. Four out of five U.S. hoteliers say their booking are well below projections and many of them are cutting prices drastically as a result. As for folks choosing not to travel? Yeah, that's unfortunate, but we all must live in the real world. One of the qualified nations (Iran) is literally involved in an armed conflict with one of the host nations. Two of the competing nations (Haiti, Iran) are subject to a complete travel ban when it comes to the United States. Elected politicians do what they think is best for those who voted for them and that doesn't always align with the interest of a sporting event, even the world's biggest. That said, Mexico and Canada are also World Cup hosts. And immigrant and second- and third-generation communities are so well represented in the U.S. that I doubt any of the 48 nations will complain about not having fans to cheer them on. Complaint four: It's too hot and humid in many host cities to play proper football, and so we'll get cooling breaks and guys trotting around the pitch and playing with little or no intensity. That will kill the spectacle Counterargument: This old chestnut again? It's World Cup football. The World Cup takes place -- with one notable exception, Qatar in 2022 -- in June and July, and when it's in the northern hemisphere, that means it's played in the summer. When it's often hot. Equally hot for both teams. As for the cooling breaks, we've had them at World Cups since 2014, we even have them in the Premier League and the Champions League final; most folks can live with it. Will it be as intense physically as a Champions League clash under the lights like when Paris Saint-Germain played Bayern on a crisp evening last May? Probably not. But it's the World Cup. It's just ... different. Until we decide that it takes precedence over everything else and it can only be played in temperate conditions in October or April, putting the Premier League and other European club soccer on hold -- and let's not given FIFA president Gianni Infantino any ideas here -- that's not going to change. Complaint five: Many of the pitches will be bad Eight of the 16 venues have natural grass laid over synthetic turf. That applies to where the final, both semifinals and three of the four quarterfinals will be played. Harry Kane complained that the pitch was "dry" and "sticky" when England played their friendly against New Zealand in Foxboro, while this clip of the Senegal players watching the deadest of bounces went viral before their recent warm-up game. Counterargument: This is an even worse complaint than the heat/humidity. For starters, that Senegal game was in Charlotte, which is not a World Cup stadium. Beyond that, players and coaches complain about pitches at World Cups. That's what they do. They're creatures of habit, whenever something is even slightly different (like the ball, I'm sure we'll hear complaints about that one soon) they moan. They did it at the Gold Cup, they did it in Qatar, they did it in Russia, they even did it in Brazil (who may not have invented the game, but took it to dizzying heights). Can we definitively say the pitches will be OK? No, we can't, but what we can definitively say is that FIFA spent a ton of resources and time on them. They're not just rolling out carpets of grass over the turf. Researchers and scientists have been working on this for eight years and in some cases, they've had to restructure the stadiums themselves to make it work. Complaint six: This is going to be about corporate greed and hype and a half-time show during the final that nobody asked for, and the stupid countdown to kickoff and influencers and hype ... and have I mentioned corporate greed? Counterargument: As far as the packaging and the showbiz and the corporates, you're about 20 years too late with your complaints. That ship has sailed; it's embedded in major sporting events. OK, maybe not the half-time show -- that's a peculiarly twisted piece of nonsense -- but as far as sponsors and commercial messaging, Qatar was no different, with it's VIP, VVIP and VVVIP lanes. From FIFA's perspective, money has a lot to do with it and sponsors is how they make money. Ditching parking lots so you can have more and bigger hospitality tents, banning refillable water bottles so you can get gouged at concessions (fortunately, they backtracked on that one) and sneaking commercial messages during cooling breaks is part of it. Infantino promised he'd get to $13 billion in revenue and he's determined to deliver. Yet let's not lose sight of something else. For 99.9% of fans, the World Cup is something that exists on their screens, not in real life. Those screens might be in their living rooms, at the local bar or park, maybe even just on their phones (hopefully not). But, fundamentally, it's content. A big, shared global experience. Like the moon landing. Or Taylor Swift or Bad Bunny or Harry Potter. Most viewers simply won't care about the detail surrounding it, they'll care about the core of what they're a part of. And, for a moment, our disparate and segmented planet will get that little bit smaller and share more common ground. That's not a bad thing.