We are now, as I record this, just before the kickoff of the 2026 World Cup. A tournament that will be held, for the first time, across three countries — the United States, Canada, and Mexico — in forty-eight participating nations rather than the thirty-two that have competed since 1998. The biggest World Cup in history, by almost any measure, is approaching.
And it arrives into a world where the questions surrounding the tournament are more complicated than they have ever been.
That is the honest way to begin this final episode. Not with a triumphant summary of everything that has come before — though we have had plenty of triumph — but with an acknowledgment that the World Cup of the twenty-first century carries with it a weight of contradiction that any serious engagement with the sport has to confront.
Let me try to do that honestly.
The Qatar Question
The 2022 World Cup was awarded to Qatar in 2010 in circumstances that were, at best, questionable, and have subsequently been shown to involve serious corruption. Multiple FIFA officials were found to have received payments in connection with the vote for both Qatar 2022 and Russia 2018. Several were banned, prosecuted, or both.
Qatar itself — a country of about three million people, of whom only about 300,000 are Qatari citizens, with no previous football culture of note and summer temperatures that made outdoor sport during the usual football calendar impossible — built eight stadiums and associated infrastructure in twelve years. This construction was performed by migrant workers from South Asia and elsewhere, under conditions that human rights organizations documented as severely exploitative: restricted freedom of movement, confiscated passports, excessive working hours in extreme heat, and a death toll that remains disputed but that several investigative reports placed significantly higher than official accounts.
This is not a comfortable thing to put in an episode about the World Cup. It is, however, an honest one. The joy that the football produced in Qatar — and there was genuine joy, and genuine football, and the most extraordinary final the tournament has perhaps ever staged — coexisted with serious ethical compromises in how the tournament came to be there.
This is not unique to 2022. The 1978 World Cup in Argentina was hosted by a military junta that had committed serious human rights violations. The 1934 and 1938 tournaments were associated with fascist governments. The World Cup has always been willing, when it suited powerful interests, to look away from the context in which it was operating.
The question for people who love the tournament — and I love the tournament, genuinely and with very little qualification on the purely footballing level — is what to do with this. Do you separate the football from the politics? Is that separation honest or is it a kind of convenient blindness? Or do you engage with both simultaneously, accepting the contradiction as the price of caring about something that exists in the real world?
I don't have a clean answer. I think most honest people who follow the World Cup don't have a clean answer. I think the discomfort of not having a clean answer is part of what it means to love something complicated.
The Economics of Football
The financial scale of the modern World Cup is almost impossible to comprehend. The 2022 Qatar World Cup generated approximately seven billion dollars in revenue for FIFA. The rights fees paid by television broadcasters globally run into the billions. Player transfer values connected to World Cup performance — the auction for players who have a great tournament and are then sold for extraordinary sums — reflect a financial ecosystem that has grown beyond anything Jules Rimet or even the generation of television executives who built the modern World Cup could have imagined.
The players themselves are compensated at a level that has changed the social composition of football completely. Pelé grew up in a poor family in a poor town and became, through football, wealthy beyond any reasonable expectation. Modern players of Messi's Ronaldo’s or Mbappé's level are not just wealthy — they are among the wealthiest individuals on earth, with commercial portfolios that go far beyond their playing contracts.
This is a transformation that has positive dimensions — players from poor backgrounds achieving financial security that changes their families' lives — and negative ones. The economic gap between the richest clubs and nations and the poorest has grown to a size that distorts competition in ways that affect not just the World Cup but the entire ecosystem of global football.
The 2026 Question
The 2026 World Cup will be the largest in history. Forty-eight teams. Sixteen host cities across three countries. A tournament that will run for five weeks and will be watched by an audience of billions.
The expansion to forty-eight teams is, depending on your perspective, either a welcome broadening of football's global reach or a dilution of the competition that will produce too many mismatches and too little quality in the early rounds. Both arguments have merit. The truth, as with most things about the World Cup, is probably somewhere complicated in between.
What the 2026 tournament offers, above everything else, is the opportunity for stories we haven't yet heard. New nations qualifying for the first time. Players stepping onto the world stage for the first time. Moments of joy and heartbreak that we cannot predict and would not want to.
This is the World Cup's enduring gift: its unpredictability. We know the format. We know the participants. We know when and where it will be played. We do not know, and cannot know, what will happen when the ball is kicked. We do not know which goalkeeper will make the save that defines his career. We do not know which seventeen-year-old will score in a final and weep afterward. We do not know which team will do what nobody expected, or which favorite will fall, or which moment will be replayed on television for the next fifty years.
The Eternal Game
I began this series by asking what the World Cup would have been like if it had never happened. If Jules Rimet had failed in committee, if Uruguay's offer had been declined, if the whole idea had died in a conference room somewhere in the 1920s.
We cannot know, of course. History has no alternate versions. But the question is worth holding because of what it implies: that the World Cup was not inevitable, and that the fact it exists, in the form it has taken, is the result of human choices and human effort and human passion over nearly a century.
People built this. Imperfect people, sometimes motivated by self-interest and nationalism and commercial calculation as much as love of the game. But also people motivated by genuine belief — in football, in competition, in the idea that bringing people together, even in the form of competitive opposition, was better than not bringing them together.
The World Cup has been used for political propaganda. It has been hosted by governments that committed atrocities. It has been contaminated by corruption and by money that corrodes things it touches. All of this is true.
The World Cup has also produced moments of joy that brought people together across every boundary that normally keeps them apart. It has given individuals from poor backgrounds and disadvantaged nations a stage on which their talent could be seen by the whole world. It has created memories that people carry for their entire lives — the goal, the match, the tournament that they were old enough to watch and young enough to be permanently changed by. It has generated conversations between strangers that would not have happened otherwise. It has been, at its best, a genuine expression of the human need to compete and to connect and to care about something together.
These things coexist. They always have. The World Cup is not the world made better. It is the world as it is, with its beauty and its ugliness, compressed into six weeks every four years.
What keeps me coming back to it — what keeps billions of people coming back to it — is the beauty. The specific, irreducible beauty of a game that is simple enough to be played in any street in any country with any round object, and complex enough that the greatest practitioners of it have spent their lives trying to master it fully and never quite succeeded.
Football is still the game. And the World Cup is still the game's greatest stage.
In 2026, the stage will be bigger than it has ever been. Players from forty-eight nations will take the field with the weight of their countries' hopes and their own extraordinary journeys behind them. Goalkeepers will make saves they will describe for the rest of their lives. Fans will cry in ways they will be embarrassed about and proud of simultaneously. Someone will score a goal that we will still be talking about in 2050.
We don't know who. We don't know when. We don't know what the moment will look like.
That is the World Cup. That is why we watch.
A final question for you:
what would it mean for you to watch the 2026 World Cup with the full weight of this history behind you? Will you watch it differently now? Will the names on the back of the shirts carry more meaning, the goals carry more resonance, the eliminations carry more sorrow?
I hope so. Not because sorrow is pleasant but because depth is. Because understanding the history of something is the difference between watching it and inhabiting it — between being a spectator and being part of the story.
You are now part of the story. Welcome to the World Cup.
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