The next World Cup will run for 38 days, making it the longest ever, and it will ask fans to treat the tournament less like a sporting event than a separate viewing shift. Some matches will start at 5pm, others at 5am, and for the first time in 24 years viewers will have to set an alarm just to follow the game.
That is why Gianni Infantino’s tournament is already being talked about in the hour that suits it, not just the football it promises. Scotland v Haiti will kick off in Boston at 2am Irish time, Argentina v Algeria is set for the early hours of Wednesday, June 17th, and Norway v Senegal is down for the 23rd at 1am, with Ghana v Panama, Uzbekistan v Colombia and New Zealand v Egypt also pushed into the first few weeks. For fans trying to keep up with the beautiful game, the schedule now looks less like a calendar and more like a sleep problem.
The size of the tournament is only part of the picture. FIFA has kept stretching the World Cup, turning football’s biggest event into something bigger, longer and harder to ignore, even if the source makes plain that the event is not really about quality of play. It is still presented as the sport’s showpiece, but the expanded format means more games, more late nights and, for the first time, ad breaks in the middle of matches.
That is the friction in this version of the World Cup. The tournament is being sold as the peak of the sport, yet it is also described as being played out at walking pace in the searing heat, with a Round of 32 that could feature teams that were thrashed only a week earlier. The result is a competition that seems designed to keep growing even as it loses some of the purity that once made it matter.
FIFA’s track record explains why the next edition feels less like a one-off and more like the latest step in a long remoulding of the event. The World Cup has already been a plaything for Putin, played in a desert in winter, and handed to a leader described in the source as a mad king who spent the run-up bombing participants, threatening to invade them or kidnapping their heads of state. Against that backdrop, 38 days and a 5am start are not an accident of scheduling. They are the latest sign that the tournament keeps becoming something else.
