The 2026 World Cup looms, and British planners are already raising the alarm. Shocking, I know. Here we have a tournament of absurd scale, spread across three nations, with costs spiralling into the billions. And what do our planners do? They wring their hands and warn of logistical nightmares, security risks, and infrastructural strain. As if any of this were news.
Let us consider the historical parallels. One need only glance at the late Roman Empire to see the same pattern: grand spectacles designed to distract the masses from the rot beneath. The Colosseum staged gladiatorial games at ruinous expense, all while the legions struggled to hold the frontiers. Today, we have the World Cup, a global orgy of football and commercialism, while our own borders creak under the weight of migration and our public services crumble.
But the rot goes deeper. The 2026 tournament is not merely a fiscal disaster waiting to happen. It is a symptom of intellectual decadence, a refusal to confront the limits of our capacity. We insist on bigger, more complex, more expensive events, as if scale were a virtue in itself. We ignore the warnings of our planners, just as Victorian engineers ignored the dangers of overbuilding before the great bridge collapses of the era. We are drunk on hubris.
What of national identity? The World Cup is sold as a unifying force, but it is more accurately a solvent for local loyalties. The tournament’s spread across the United States, Canada, and Mexico is a celebration of borderless commerce, not of distinct cultures. We are asked to cheer for brands, not nations. The British planners who sound the alarm are not merely worrying about traffic jams and hotel shortages. They are defending a concept of place against the tide of globalised indifference.
And yet, what can be done? The juggernaut rolls on. The contracts are signed, the tickets sold, the sponsors committed. To pull out now would be an act of sanity, but sanity is not what is demanded of us. We are demanded to applaud, to consume, to forget the mounting costs. We will host our modern-day circus, and we will pretend it is a triumph.
But the alarms are sounding, and they will not be silenced by cheap jingoism. The question is whether anyone is listening. Or are we all too busy planning our trips to the stadium?
