In June 2018, the architects of the United Bid gathered for the last time in London, which a month earlier had become the base for their campaign to sell the world on the first-ever World Cup shared by three countries. The following morning, they would hand over their cell phones as a security precaution before boarding a flight to Moscow, where the 211 members of FIFA were primed to vote on whether to place its 2026 tournament jointly in Mexico, Canada and the United States.
Eight years earlier, soccer’s governing body had voted to award its 2022 showcase to Qatar — a tiny desert nation with not a single stadium ready for World Cup play and summer temperatures exceeding 100 degrees — over the favored United States. The result stunned American soccer executives and triggered years of bitterness, suspicion and eventually federal investigations that helped bring down much of FIFA’s old leadership structure.
In a private room at the River Cafe on the north bank of the River Thames, those who had spent years plotting an American comeback participated in a ritual that carried the feel of a closing dinner before a decisive battle. Over plates of Italian food and wine, they reflected at what would be at stake in Moscow — a referendum on the United States’ place in the world of soccer.
“We didn’t know for sure what the outcome was going to be,” said Neil Buethe, then-chief communications officer at the US Soccer Federation. “We felt strongly that if North America hosted 2026 we would put on the biggest and best World Cup ever, but we didn’t know for certain if the rest of the world thought the same.”
Now, eight years after that dinner in London, FIFA has kicked off a tournament far larger than any it has ever hosted before — a 48-team, three-country competition that is stretching from Guadalajara to Vancouver to the Meadowlands. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is expected to join FIFA President Gianni Infantino in Los Angeles Friday to watch the United States play its opening match, against Paraguay.
The decade-long maneuvering to bring the World Cup back to the United States represented a venture in trilateral cooperation just as other relations with Mexico and Canada were growing more fractious than they had been in recent memory. The unlikely success of that collaboration transformed the internal politics of FIFA, became a defining aspect of President Donald Trump’s second term and may permanently change the way the U.S. government participates in sporting mega-events.
This insider account of the long road to the 2026 World Cup is drawn from interviews with organizers and government officials, some of whom were granted anonymity to discuss private deliberations, along with internal documents and contemporaneous notes reviewed by POLITICO. This is the story of how the U.S. government broke FIFA and then helped build the organization back into something even bigger and more politically powerful than before.