Power and glory: World Cup promises a spectacle impossible to ignore

This is the end, of our elaborate plans, the end. Of everything that stands, the end. It seems fitting that football’s latest stopping point on its voyage upriver into the blank parts of the map, a mission so choice that when it’s over you may never want another one, should be a World Cup overseen by a haunted-looking man with a messiah complex, out there operating beyond the pale of acceptable sporting governance, the warrior-poet Swiss lawyer football never knew it needed. The 2026 World Cup in the US, Mexico and Canada will finally kick off in earnest on 11 June at the Azteca Stadium. From there the tournament will unspool across 39 days, 16 host cities, 104 matches and a 6,000-mile span from Mexico City in the south to Vancouver in the north to Boston in the east. Ten years in the making, the end product of a century of powerplay and hyper-grift, this is by almost any metric not just the largest sporting event ever staged, but the largest event, as we say in America, period . How football explains the world, part 95. It has been estimated the tournament will generate $80bn (£59.7bn) in global economic output across its full timeline, roughly equivalent to the GDP of Belarus. Basically, if the World Cup were a country someone would have stationed nuclear weapons on it by now. Here we have big sport in its final global form. But also, in the spirit of the times, a spectacle configured in the image of a single opportunist overlord. …