The 2026 FIFA World Cup opened in Mexico City on Thursday with Mexico beating South Africa 2-0 at Estadio Azteca, a high-altitude arena where the hosts were heavily favored and where the tournament’s first crackle of disorder came quickly: three players were sent off. Mexico had home crowd noise, altitude and about 80,000 supporters behind it, while South Africa finished the night with two red cards and Mexico one.
For readers asking is china in the world cup 2026, this is not China’s moment but the opening act of a tournament that will unfold over weeks and, by the final on July 19, is expected to draw roughly one-third of the world’s population. The next match on the schedule was South Korea against the Czech Republic later on Thursday in Guadalajara, another reminder that the early rounds are being staged outside the United States before the competition shifts into its fuller, more familiar global rhythm.
That scale is exactly why the World Cup keeps its hold: it is football-and-or-soccer as a global ritual, a spectacle so vast that it can feel like a civic holiday. It is also, by the description attached to it here, an egregiously expensive festival of interlocking consumerism and nationalism, a competition plagued by staggering levels of corruption and built around the showmanship of FIFA under Gianni Infantino, who is portrayed as a more shameless, soulless and sycophantic figure than Donald Trump. The tournament is framed as a semi-criminal enterprise and, in the harshest language used about it, a garbage fire.
Even the opening day carried that contradiction. Everyone who needed a visa to attend the match got one with minimal fuss, a sign of how carefully the event is being managed, even as Mexico City has also seen teachers’ strikes and left-wing street protests around the tournament. The first games may be launching cleanly, but the event itself is still the same combustible mix of pageantry, power and paperwork that has long defined FIFA’s biggest stage. After this opener, the question is not whether the World Cup matters. It does. The question is how much chaos it can absorb before July 19 and still look like a celebration rather than the mess its critics say it has always been.
