The 2026 World Cup is the largest in the tournament’s history. Forty-eight teams, 16 host cities, 104 matches, and a production budget that has turned every fixture into a set piece. FIFA has presented all of it as progress. As England prepare to face DR Congo in the round of 32 on Wednesday after topping Group L, our England vs DR Congo Odds assess the Three Lions’ chances of taking another step towards the final.
With the tournament now spanning more teams, more venues and more matches than ever before, the World Cup has become a spectacle on an unprecedented scale, and the more you look at what has actually changed at this expanded tournament, the more it resembles something else entirely.
More spectacular
The pre-match spectacles have set the tone from the start. Giant flags carried across the pitch by dozens of volunteers, anthems performed with full orchestras, fighter jet flypasts overhead. It is an event built for the camera rather than the stand. The ceremonies are visually arresting and entirely American in their scale, but they have little to do with football.
The expansion from 32 to 48 teams brought nations like Haiti, Cape Verde, and Curacao to the world stage for the first time, and FIFA framed it as a celebration of the global game. Critics argued it diluted the group stage to the point where a third of teams can qualify for the knockout rounds without winning a single match.
The hydration breaks
FIFA introduced mandatory hydration breaks at every match, taken around 22 minutes into each half. Many viewers, pundits, and those tracking the UK football odds regularly, have openly slated the breaks, with booing heard around the stadium when the breaks are called. The official justification is player welfare in the North American heat. There is some merit to that argument, though it struggles to hold when applied to matches played in air-conditioned, roofed stadiums where temperatures are entirely controlled.
What the breaks have done in practice is hand broadcasters, particularly Fox Sports, a new commercial inventory. Fox has been running full-screen adverts for the entire available window during each pause, effectively splitting matches into four quarters that suit the rhythm of American sports broadcasting. An average 30-second ad slot on Fox costs between $100,000 and $500,000 at prime time, and the hydration break advertising is projected to generate more than $250 million in the USA alone across the competition.
In the opening match between Mexico and South Africa, Fox overran its allotted advertising window and missed the restart of play. FIFA declined to sanction the broadcaster. There is no great mystery as to why. The more valuable Fox’s rights become, the more FIFA can charge the next time they go to market.
Tickets and the corporate shift
The ticket pricing model has reinforced the same trend. FIFA deployed variable pricing, adjusting costs at each sales phase based on demand, with some resale listings reaching more than $2 million for the final. Group stage tickets that once cost a few hundred dollars have hit four figures for high-demand fixtures, and the introduction of premium hospitality packages has pushed the corporate experience to the front of the queue.
The FIFA Pavilion, pitch-side lounges, and private suites have attracted celebrities and executives, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that. The issue is that supporters who have followed their national teams through qualification have found themselves outpriced. The Tartan Army faced one-way flights from Edinburgh to Boston costing £1,472 the day before Scotland’s opening match, with three-star hotels in the city running close to £300 per night.
When a tournament that happens once every four years becomes financially inaccessible to the fans it is nominally for, something has shifted.
The half-time show
Madonna, Shakira, and BTS will co-headline the half-time show at the World Cup final at MetLife Stadium, the first time the tournament has featured a performance of this kind. It is a direct import of the Super Bowl model, and FIFA has made no attempt to frame it as anything else.
It will be spectacular, and it will be watched by hundreds of millions of people who may never have watched a World Cup final otherwise. That is precisely the point. The World Cup is being packaged as an American entertainment product that happens to include football. The sport will survive it, and many of these changes will produce moments people remember. But the fans paying four-figure sums to watch from corporate suites, sitting through ad breaks every 22 minutes, deserve to know what they are really watching.
