The 2026 World Cup kicks off Thursday, and the internet has been in complaint mode for months. Too many teams. Too expensive. Too hot. Too corporate. Some of those criticisms land. Most don't hold up under scrutiny.
Let's go through them properly.
The format and the football
Yes, 48 teams is too many. Nobody serious disputes that. FIFA went there for the obvious reasons — more voting blocs appeased, more broadcast inventory, more sponsor revenue. The 72-game group stage phase, just to whittle down to 32, is clunky. Four games a day for nearly three weeks is a lot.
But the quality dilution argument is weak. We watch the FA Cup. We watch qualifying campaigns. Watching a country reach their first World Cup and believing in it for three games isn't nothing. And the lack of jeopardy for the elite nations? Nobody is actually upset that Argentina might lose a group game and Messi still plays on. The jeopardy exists — just lower down the table where it belongs.
The ticket pricing situation is a separate beast. Dynamic pricing and legal resellers have made attending games eye-wateringly expensive, and FIFA's spin that the tournament is "nearly" sold out a week before it starts is transparently hollow when the combined population of the three host nations is nearly half a billion people. The good news: markets move. Club World Cup semifinal tickets dropped from $473 to $13.40 in days last summer. Scalpers holding inventory they can't shift and dumping it at a loss is a real possibility — and a satisfying one.
Hotel prices are already falling in host cities. Four out of five U.S. hoteliers report bookings well below projections and are cutting rates accordingly. The price-gouging problem has a self-correcting mechanism. Not ideal, but not terminal.
Pitches, heat, and things players complain about everywhere
Eight of the 16 venues have natural grass laid over synthetic turf — including the venues for the final, both semifinals, and three of the four quarterfinals. Harry Kane called a Foxboro pitch "dry" and "sticky" during England's warm-up against New Zealand. A dead-bounce clip from Senegal's pre-tournament game went viral.
Here's the context nobody mentions: that Senegal game was in Charlotte, which isn't even a World Cup stadium. And players complain about pitches at every major tournament — Qatar, Russia, Brazil, all of them. Coaches and players are creatures of habit. The ball will probably get complained about next.
FIFA has had researchers and scientists working on these surfaces for eight years. In some cases they restructured the stadiums themselves to make the grass viable. Can anyone guarantee the pitches will be perfect? No. But this isn't FIFA unrolling turf carpets the week before kickoff.
The heat concern is similarly overstated. The World Cup has been played in summer heat in the northern hemisphere for most of its existence. Cooling breaks have been in place since 2014 — they appear in the Premier League and Champions League finals too. Both teams play in the same conditions. It's not new.
The bigger picture
The corporate packaging complaints are about 20 years late. That argument was lost a long time ago. The half-time show for the final is genuinely strange — nobody asked for it and it belongs at a different event — but sponsors, commercial messaging during cooling breaks, and VIP hospitality tents replacing parking lots? Qatar was the same. Every major tournament is the same. Infantino has publicly targeted $13 billion in revenue. He's not hiding it.
The travel and access issues are real, though. Iran — one of the qualified nations — is in an active armed conflict with the United States, one of the host countries. Two nations (Haiti and Iran) face complete U.S. travel bans. Some fans have had authorisation withdrawn at short notice. None of that is cosmetic and none of it has a clean counterargument beyond: yes, geopolitics is complicated, and major sporting events are not exempt from it.
- 48 teams: bloated format, but the quality dilution argument is weaker than it sounds
- Ticket prices: already correcting downward in some markets
- Travel barriers: genuinely difficult for some fan bases, no easy fix
- Heat and humidity: a World Cup tradition, not a 2026-specific crisis
- Pitch quality: eight years of scientific work behind them; the Charlotte clip doesn't count
- Corporate excess: real, embedded, and not going anywhere
For 99.9% of the global audience, this tournament exists on a screen — living room, pub, phone. They will not be thinking about FIFA's revenue targets or dynamic ticket pricing. They will be watching the football. And on that front, with the field that's assembled, there's no real reason to expect disappointment.
The winner gets crowned on July 19. Everything else is noise until then.
