Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Miscellaneous | July 20, 2026
Viva Espana! In what was largely a dull game full of bitter behaviour from the opposition, Spain took home their second-ever World Cup on Sunday night, beating Argentina 1-0 after extra time. They are now the first-ever nation to simultaneously hold the men’s and women’s World Cup titles. Lionel Messi cried. Argentina were bad. It was great.
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The match had more than a few problems. Argentina’s Leandro Paredes tackled Eric García and shoved him by the throat before wrestling Gavi to the ground after the final whistle blew. Donald Trump had to be all but dragged off the stage when Spain raised the trophy, so desperate to pretend he was part of the squad that he positioned himself on the edge of the crowd and ensured he would be present in all victory photographs. Mercifully, Photoshop is a thing. The halftime show, the first in World Cup history, was also highly silly. Sure, we could talk about moments that were cute, like seeing the Muppets perform or Ted Lasso giving Justin Bieber a pep talk, but it was tough to overlook how overlong, over-commercialized, and over-American the entire charade was. It also went on for close to half an hour, which broke the IFAB laws of the game stating that the halftime break cannot exceed 15 minutes. But hey, they got in even more ads than the “hydration breaks” would have allowed.
Honestly, it’s almost impressive how FIFA continues to find new and impressive ways to make football worse. Throughout the tournament, all of the new additions and changes reeked of the corrupt organisation’s flop-sweaty need to ensure that not a single red cent is left on the table. So many of the most egregious controversies and f**k-ups from this year’s tournament were the result of FIFA’s ceaseless greed and corruption: their use and justification of dynamic pricing, which led to some match tickets costing four figures; the endless ads and the “hydration breaks” being a shameless excuse for more of them; the endless officiating dramas, but especially the rescinding of Folarin Balogun’s red card amid claims of interference from Trump.
The World Cup has never been a bastion of altruism or charity, but even by their depressing lack of standards, this year’s event felt commercialised and commodified to the point of exhaustion. At past World Cups, resale prices were capped at face value. For 2026, FIFA lifted that restriction and moved into the secondary market itself, taking a hefty cut of sales there. FIFA sold tokens for up to $999 each that did not even get you a ticket but the right to buy one, a move that the Swiss Gambling Authority rightly deemed to be an illegal lottery.
Ads were unavoidable, even for folks like me watching it on the ostensibly ad-free BBC. In-game commercials are now a thing, a naked cash grab that feels like it opened a door that FIFA will never want to close. And it all worked. This year’s event was record-breaking in terms of revenue. FIFA will use those numbers as its justification to strengthen its status as the king of the game, allowing them to take more bribes (allegedly) and further commercialise the World Cup. These losers are already talking up the prospect of a 64-team field and more halftime entertainment. In the American sports model, FIFA found the ideal companion, or at least an excuse for them to pull off all the crap they’d never had the chance to do before.
And they made little effort to tackle the broader issues of bigotry and abuse that continue to plague the sport. In the hilariously inept propaganda movie United Passions, a FIFA biopic the organisation commissioned for itself, FIFA brags about how it has done more to help bridge race relations than anyone else on the planet. It’s a hilarious claim that curdles the moment you hear it, and I thought about that line a lot this year, watching the treatment of the Iranian team and the racism directed towards so many players, most notably Kylian Mbappé. Of course, how could the same group giving Donald Trump made-up peace prizes ever claim to be driven by the common good? There’s way more money to be made in human rights violations, as Qatar proved.
It speaks to both the intrinsic sturdiness of the game and the enduring community of its fans that football is able to withstand the money-grabbing jackassery of those who have become its arbiters on the world stage. Every major sport, alas, is mired in similar drama but it’s FIFA that sets the bar lower and lower with every passing year. Yet football survives, and amid the scams, cruelty, hypocrisies and outright lunacy, it’s still The Beautiful Game and the one that people are so devoted to.
I’m not even a huge football fan and I watched the World Cup with great enthusiasm. Actually, I watched the fans. I loved seeing my fellow Scots drink Boston dry and lead a bagpipes and traffic cones party through the city. I loved the rowing Viking Norwegian fans, the welcome the Algerian team got in Kansas City, the Japanese fans getting excited for breakfast at Waffle House, the Mexican and Korean fans sharing their national foods, the Aussies’ raunchy chants, the tournament debuts of Cape Verde and Curaçao (and the joy of their fans), and Lumumba Vea’s striking silent protest for the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At its best, it was the party we needed, as long as we pretended the host wasn’t invited.
(My dad is in this video! See if you can guess which one he is.)
An op-ed in Le Monde asked a pertinent question: “Can we continue to entrust global sport to organizations more concerned with their financial interests than with the public good?” I think the answer is clear. FIFA sucks and replacing them with anything short of a cartel of syphilitic tigers would be preferrable. Ideally, football would truly belong to the people, but that’ll never happen. I truly fear that from hereon FIFA will sink further into the gutter and find new ways to bleed the community dry. Loving something is to forever be reminded that the people and systems in charge of it do not love you back. Football is forever. FIFA, well, let’s hope not.
