A brief warning before we begin: this article contains no images. Apparently, asking readers to endure an uninterrupted argument has become a mildly hostile act, but this subject deserves better than decorative relief. There will be no dramatic stadium photographs, no melancholy floodlights and no carefully positioned visual pause to make the criticism more pleasantly consumable. The text is the point. This time, it will have to survive without assistance.
Spain are world champions, and the most honest emotion after the final is relief. Relief that the best team eventually won, relief that Argentina’s attempt to turn 120 minutes into an extended negotiation with the referee failed, and relief that FIFA did not receive the ending it had spent much of the tournament making suspiciously convenient: Lionel Messi lifting another trophy at the conclusion of a farewell story prepared for broadcasters, sponsors and anyone professionally dependent on destiny.
Spain’s 1-0 victory did not arrive easily. Ferran Torres finally scored in the 106th minute, with Spain’s twentieth attempt of the match, after Argentina had been reduced to ten men by Enzo Fernández’s second yellow card. By then Argentina had completed the entire regulation period without a single shot. Their first attempt of any kind came in the 116th minute, when the match was almost over and the original plan had failed.
That plan was not difficult to identify. Argentina came to obstruct, interrupt, provoke and survive until penalties, while hoping that Messi, a set piece or a charitable interpretation from the officials might produce something along the way. There is nothing dishonourable about defending deeply against a technically superior opponent. Defending is part of football, and disciplined resistance can be magnificent. What Argentina produced was something else: persistent holding, late contact, tactical fouling, obstruction and the careful destruction of almost every promising Spanish transition.
A referee with a serious disciplinary threshold could have produced a double-digit card count without becoming remotely theatrical. Instead, Slavko Vinčić spent long periods treating Argentina’s methods as an acceptable tactical variation. The Slovenian is not an inexperienced official drafted from obscurity for reasons of geographical decoration. He has refereed a Champions League final, which makes the indulgence less understandable rather than more excusable.
Vinčić eventually dismissed Fernández in stoppage time, when the accumulated evidence had become too obvious to ignore. Even then Argentina nearly reached the penalty shootout for which they had apparently been preparing since kick-off. After the final whistle, Leandro Paredes was sent off amid another confrontation, an appropriate final contribution from a side that had spent more energy managing conflict than creating football.
Spain were not blameless for allowing the match to remain alive. Their familiar inefficiency returned at precisely the wrong moment. They controlled possession, reached promising positions and then repeatedly tried to improve chances that were already good enough to shoot from. Too many finishes were weak, central or delayed until the Argentine defence had recovered. At times Spain seemed determined to carry the ball across the line after completing the necessary paperwork.
Their inability to finish almost became catastrophic. Nico Williams appeared to score in extra time, only for the goal to be disallowed by another questionable decision of the referee. I have watched the incident repeatedly and still cannot identify an offence proportionate to cancelling a World Cup final goal. The replay did show an infringement, but not the one the referee awarded: Otamendi was holding Mikel Merino before releasing him and collapsing theatrically. The German VAR, Bastian Dankert, found no reason to intervene. VAR has developed a remarkable capacity to discover decisive infringements when required and become modestly philosophical when they point in another direction.
Spain nevertheless deserved the title. They were the best team in the tournament, and their semi-final victory over France was the performance that established it. France had looked physically and offensively superior to almost everyone before Spain denied them space, rhythm and authority. Spain conceded only one goal throughout the World Cup and reached the final through football rather than mythology. Their triumph was not a rescue operation performed by one ageing genius or a collection of favourable incidents. It was the result of a functioning football culture.
That does not redeem the tournament Spain won.
The first 48-team World Cup was presented as an expansion of opportunity. In practice, it was an expansion of inventory. FIFA created 104 matches and a group stage from which 32 of the 48 participants advanced, turning what was once the first serious examination of a World Cup team into an elaborate sorting exercise. The arithmetic remained complicated enough to occupy television graphics, but the sporting jeopardy had largely disappeared.
There were exceptions. Several smaller nations exceeded expectations, played with courage and acquired genuine affection. That should be celebrated. A World Cup must not become a private club for the traditional powers, and football would be poorer without the possibility of an outsider embarrassing a supposedly established nation. But a handful of charming stories do not prove that every expansion improves the tournament. They prove that good stories can survive a bad format.
Too many group matches were played at a level that did not belong at the supposed summit of international football. The difference in speed, organisation and individual quality was sometimes enormous. Even when results remained close, the football often did not. Stronger teams could conserve energy, rotate players and qualify while remaining far below their best, because the structure had made genuine failure surprisingly difficult.
The tournament therefore began in June but became serious much later. The round of 32 offered elimination without consistently offering quality. Only around the last 16 did the competition begin to resemble the World Cup people thought they had been watching for the previous several weeks. Everything before that felt increasingly like content produced to justify the size of the event.
FIFA is already considering whether 64 teams might improve matters in 2030. It is difficult to see the sporting question to which this would be the answer. If 48 teams turned qualification into a generous administrative process, 64 may eventually turn it into registration. FIFA will call this inclusion, because expansion sounds more respectable when described as morality rather than revenue.
The same commercial logic appeared inside the matches. Every game was interrupted by two mandatory three-minute “hydration breaks”, regardless of temperature, weather or whether the stadium was climate-controlled. The official explanation was player welfare, and in genuinely dangerous heat a cooling break is entirely reasonable. A medical intervention, however, should respond to medical conditions. Once it is imposed universally at a fixed moment, even where it is unnecessary, it has become part of the entertainment format.
The breaks divided football into four convenient quarters and gave broadcasters predictable opportunities to insert advertising. They also allowed coaches to gather their players and conduct tactical sessions in the middle of each half. What was supposedly a drinking pause became a timeout, giving the technical staff a new opportunity to repair problems from outside the game.
That changes football. One of the sport’s defining qualities is that coaches cannot continuously stop play, reorganise the team and send everyone back out with corrected instructions. Players must understand what is happening, communicate and solve problems while the match continues. That is part of their intelligence and part of the contest. Turning hydration into coaching time transfers more control from the players to the technical staff and makes football resemble a sport it was never designed to be.
The problem was not that the World Cup took place in the United States, Canada and Mexico. The problem was that FIFA treated North America as permission to import the most intrusive habits of American television sport. Matches acquired scheduled interruptions, an enlarged entertainment programme, championship rings, celebrity choreography and a commercial frame increasingly determined to become more important than the football inside it.
Football does not need to apologise for refusing to fit neatly between advertisements. Its continuous rhythm is not an obsolete European eccentricity. It is one of the reasons the game works. Momentum develops naturally. Pressure accumulates. A team cannot escape a difficult period simply because the broadcast schedule has reached the appropriate minute. Once that continuity is broken for commercial convenience, something fundamental has been exchanged for revenue.
The officiating caused even greater damage. A World Cup must use referees from around the world, but global representation cannot replace relevant experience. A referee’s passport should neither qualify nor disqualify him. The decisive question is whether he is accustomed to the speed, physical intensity and tactical sophistication of the match he has been assigned.
Throughout this tournament, FIFA too often appeared to treat the final stages as an officiating development programme. Referees whose domestic competitions rarely approach Champions League speed were placed in charge of matches between elite national teams, sometimes with VAR crews lacking comparable experience. The result was not diversity but inconsistency, particularly when the pace increased and players began testing the limits of what the officials could recognise.
FIFA’s general reluctance to issue yellow cards made matters worse. The intention may have been to preserve flow and avoid deciding matches through dismissals. In practice, it rewarded teams whose best method of reducing the difference in quality was to foul repeatedly without consequence. Every unpunished tactical foul encouraged the next one, and matches gradually became more physical without becoming more competitive.
This suited Argentina perfectly. Their aggression was repeatedly described as experience, passion or competitive intelligence, terms that football uses when it wishes to make unattractive behaviour sound culturally interesting. Against Spain, it was neither sophisticated defending nor heroic resistance. It was the repeated destruction of play by a side that offered almost nothing with the ball and trusted that the referee would allow the method to continue.
The VAR system should have corrected the worst failures. Instead, it became one of the tournament’s central sources of distrust. Technology can provide angles, slow motion and precise information, but it cannot supply judgement to officials who do not possess enough of it. Moving uncertainty into a room containing more screens does not transform it into competence.
Argentina’s route to the final still deserves scrutiny, although not every match belongs in the same category. Against Egypt and Switzerland, they survived through a mixture of aggression, favourable decisions and VAR interventions whose logic changed according to the occasion. Against England, the eventual victory was deserved. England retreated almost completely after taking the lead, surrendered control and invited Argentina to attack. Argentina accepted the invitation and punished them for it.
That does not excuse what happened before England withdrew. For roughly an hour, the semi-final deteriorated into an open brawl. Bellingham and others were subjected to late challenges, persistent intimidation and physical contact that went far beyond legitimate aggression. Argentina repeatedly tested how much the referee would tolerate and discovered that the answer was almost everything. At times, the match looked less like elite football than MMA with a ball occasionally reintroduced to satisfy the official definition.
This was not merely a refereeing problem, nor merely a VAR problem. It was the interaction between both. On the pitch, officials allowed cynical and sometimes plainly violent conduct to continue under the convenient labels of passion and competitive intensity. In the VAR room, the same tournament produced interventions where the protocol did not permit them, while remaining silent when clear and decisive incidents demanded correction. Against Switzerland, VAR entered a situation in which it had no lawful role. Elsewhere, when the referee’s leniency directly shaped the match, the technology suddenly rediscovered restraint.
That inconsistency was one of the defining failures of the World Cup. FIFA did not simply fail to control brutality. It created an officiating environment in which unfair teams could exploit a permissive referee, then rely on a VAR system whose involvement was selective, unpredictable and occasionally contrary to its own rules. Argentina understood that environment better than anyone. The shame is not only that they used it. The shame is that FIFA allowed a World Cup to reward it.
The damage lies elsewhere. FIFA allowed the refereeing standard to become so inconsistent, the application of VAR so selective and the commercial value of the Messi narrative so obvious that suspicion became entirely rational. Argentina repeatedly benefited in the incidents that shaped their matches, while FIFA continued explaining each one in isolation. Divide the sequence into sufficiently small pieces and officially there is no sequence at all.
The final did not redeem this World Cup. It merely spared it from its most grotesque possible conclusion. Ferran Torres ensured that the trophy went to the team that had tried to win matches through football rather than endurance, obstruction and institutional good fortune. Had Argentina reached penalties after offering almost nothing for 120 minutes, the tournament would have ended as a caricature of everything that had diminished it.
The sporting failures were only half of the indictment. Around the matches, FIFA supplied political theatre, hostile bureaucracy, obscene ticket prices, an official resale market barely distinguishable from the black market, empty seats and attendance figures flexible enough to survive almost any visible evidence. None of that altered the quality of Spain’s passing or Argentina’s tackling, but it revealed what the organisation running the tournament now considers normal.
I have covered those scandals in detail elsewhere: the political vanity surrounding the tournament in World Cup 2026 Draw: The Day FIFA Finally Stopped Pretending, the ticketing racket in FIFA Did Not Fight the Black Market. It Became the Dealer, and the empty seats, invented atmosphere and remarkable elasticity of official attendance figures in FIFA Has Won. Football Can Sit Somewhere Else. The details differ, but the conclusion is always the same: FIFA no longer organises the World Cup around football. It uses football to justify the operation surrounding it.
The truly depressing part is that nothing will change. Gianni Infantino is now the ultimate mafia boss in world sport. He smiles into the faces of Germany, England, Spain, France and the other major football nations and, in effect, tells them: fuck you. I will do whatever I want, and there is nothing you can do about it. He can do it because the arithmetic protects him. Every FIFA member association has one vote, whether it represents one of the world’s great football cultures or a country whose domestic competition barely registers beyond its borders. The DFB may be one of the largest sporting associations on the planet, but inside FIFA it remains a single vote among more than two hundred. Its refusal to support Infantino may preserve a little dignity. Politically, it costs him almost nothing.
Infantino controls an organisation with enormous revenues and distributes that money through grants, projects and development programmes. Some of those programmes undoubtedly do useful work. They also create dependence. He can effectively bribe smaller associations with FIFA’s own money, buy their loyalty and then present the transaction as generosity. The recipients know who distributes the funds, and Infantino knows who elects the president. Call it development, patronage or political bribery. The result is the same: he has built an electorate that allows him to rule FIFA almost without restraint.
That is why statements from the major nations achieve so little. They condemn, withhold endorsements and express concern in carefully approved language, while Infantino continues to control the money and the votes. He has no reason to fear their disapproval because they are unwilling to attach consequences to it.
The only action that could genuinely threaten this system would be a coordinated withdrawal by the major football nations. Germany, England, Spain, France, Italy, Brazil, Argentina and the other countries that give the World Cup its sporting legitimacy would have to leave FIFA and create a competition of their own. Not another letter, another symbolic protest or another solemn speech about governance. They would have to walk away.
That remains unlikely, because football’s major associations are considerably braver when issuing statements than when risking revenue and influence. Perhaps Euro 2028 will at least remind us what an international tournament can look like when the game and its supporters matter more than the president’s court. But until the major nations are prepared to turn that alternative into real leverage, Infantino can continue smiling.
FIFA will nevertheless declare 2026 an historic success. The numbers will support the claim: more countries, more matches, more tickets, more broadcast hours and more commercial inventory. Modern sports administrators adore scale because it can be counted, packaged and sold. Quality, credibility and proportion are less cooperative. They resist the spreadsheet and occasionally ask whether the product has improved while the business surrounding it has grown. By every measure FIFA cares about, the tournament was a triumph. By the measure that should matter most, football lost.
Spain leave with the trophy they deserved. FIFA leaves with the money, the votes and the certainty that it can do the same again. Football is expected to accept the damage and remain grateful for the spectacle.
As always… just my five cents.
//Alex
alexreusch 