Football World Cup 2026 in the USA under Donald Trump: more show than sport

Perhaps the symbol par excellence for the recurring reach for the top show shelf: the “Rocket Man,” which floated through the Olympic Stadium in Los Angeles at the opening ceremony of the 1984 Summer Olympics. There, in Los Angeles Memorial Coliseumthe 2028 Olympic Party will also begin. It is less than ten miles from the Coliseum to the football palace in Inglewood, where eight World Cup games will take place this summer, including two group games for the US team.

So it’s high time to take a look at the turn of the year: What kind of World Cup will be in the summer? The Cosm in the south of Los Angeles, a ball hall that can accommodate 2,000 people provides some interesting insights.

The Rams play on the road today in Atlanta. But it doesn’t matter. The inside of the dome is a screen, built to create the illusion that you are sitting as a spectator in the stadium – in this case the Falcons stadium in Atlanta. The mood is great; You can get beer delivered to your table, or champagne – for $750 a bottle of Ace of Spades. The cheapest ticket for this Rams party costs 133 dollars, the most expensive 317 dollars. For a game in which nothing is at stake: the Rams have already qualified for the playoffs, the Falcons have been eliminated.

$317 entrance fee – around not to really be there? Hopefully no one at FIFA, the notoriously business-minded world football association, caught wind of this. Otherwise there is a risk of the next World Cup ticket category: seat with the best view of the screen lawn is somehow included, right?

You got around a bit as a US sports reporter for this newspaper in 2025. You followed the US professional series, of course, but also what it looks like when external associations want to set something up in the USA: the FIFA Club World Cup in the summer, for example, or the Formula 1 Grand Prix in November in Las Vegas. And there were some events again that made you ask yourself: Is this still sport – or is it already a circus?

At the end of December, for example: a boxing match between Anthony Joshua and Jake Paul, broadcast live on Netflix from the party city of Miami. The Brit Joshua, 36, was once the heavyweight world champion of several associations and once defeated Wladimir Klitschko. The American Paul, 28, is something between a professional athlete and a provocateur, ideally suited to events that are more of a show than a sport. Not only did his knockout loss to Joshua have nothing to do with boxing, Paul made it worse by boasting that Joshua broke his jaw twice.

A telling detail: Paul came into the ring against Joshua in a Hulk Hogan costume. Hogan is an all-American wrestling legend. Shortly after the Gulf War in 1991, he “defeated” an opponent modeled on an Iraqi officer in one of those choreographed wrestling matches in which the winner is already determined. After his victory, Hogan waved the US flag. Before his death at the age of 71 in July 2025, he attracted attention through campaign appearances for Donald Trump; At the Republican convention, he tore off his shirt with a grand gesture, his trademark before fights.

“America is healing under President Trump,” says Jake Paul, for which he naturally receives praise from Trump on his social media platform. Everything is connected to everything, many people here call it: sport.

And now men’s football is coming to the USA for the second time after 1994 with its World Cup. A question that is often asked is: Is this country finally ready for this number one world sport, which it continues to do here? Soccer call, when he is everywhere else Football is called?

However, the question is just as exciting the other way around: Is football ready for this country? The way Americans understand, celebrate, market and stage sports? It seems clear that Fifa President Gianni Infantino wants football exactly there: where show and making money flow together. “104 Super Bowls” will be performed in five and a half weeks, he said at the group draw in December in Washington. Infantino doesn’t do it anymore.

“The world visiting friends” was the motto of the 2006 World Cup in Germany. What could be better for an Infantino World Cup in Trump America than: “The circus as a guest in the circus”?

Speaking of staging: The USA celebrates its 250th birthday on July 4th. One of the round of 16 games – possibly Germany against France – will take place on Independence Day in Philadelphia, of all places, where the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776. This is the symbolism that emerges when FIFA’s emotion purveyors team up with spectacle directors from the US entertainment industry. On the other hand, Donald Trump is still unlikely to come to the stadium in Philadelphia. A gala is scheduled for that day in the yet-to-be-built $350 million East Wing Ballroom in the White House, financed by companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Comcast, Union Pacific Railroad, Microsoft, Palantir and T-Mobile.

An exciting topic in general: Will Trump attend a US team game? In a knockout game? Trump doesn’t want to witness a defeat because that would contradict everything he wants to be and represent. And given the current quality of the US team, the risk is enormous. On the other hand: Who believed on New Year’s Eve 2005 that the German team would reach the semi-finals six months later? Trump would certainly use a national team race for his own purposes – but he is playing it safe and putting together an alternative program by linking the 250th anniversary with his 80th birthday three weeks before. A UFC fight night is scheduled to take place in the Rose Garden of the White House this June 14th. Ultimate Fighting on a bread-and-circles scale that even the Roman Emperor Nero would have liked. Word is that UFC legends Conor McGregor and Jon Jones will be reactivated for this Trump fight.

Which event will interest more Americans: this fight night in a 6,000-seat arena in the Rose Garden plus screens for 100,000 fans behind it? Or the World Cup game between Germany and Curaçao at 1 p.m. local time in Houston?

Or on June 17th: The potentially decisive game for the Stanley Cup in ice hockey competes with the World Cup game between Uzbekistan and Colombia in Mexico City. Or on June 22nd: a possible game seven in the NBA finals series – or the World Cup clash between Jordan and Algeria in San Francisco?

104 Super Bowls? The Football World Cup with its inflationary continuous operation doesn’t even have the American sports summer to itself. The currency is people’s interest in marketing the games as must-see events. It must be at least gigantic and unprecedented. The most polarizing event of the year therefore takes place in May, of course in the USA: the Enhanced Games in Las Vegas, where performance-enhancing means are expressly permitted. Participating as an investor: Donald Trump Jr. There, the heated debate about the calculated breaking of taboos is generating the necessary interest.

And Donald Trump has already announced the next major sporting event for autumn, invented by himself: the “Patriot Games”. Two high school students from each US state will compete against each other in a four-day competition. Of course without transgender categories, as Trump explicitly emphasized during the announcement: “You won’t see men in women’s sports. You will see everything – but not this.”

Sport in America is the eternal show about winners and losers. And Donald Trump has already decided who he wants to present to the Americans as the real winner of the US sports year 2026: Trump. Perhaps Fifa Emperor Infantino actually believes that Trump will tolerate a second winner next to him. That he, Infantino, can plant his football flag into US soil and that it will fly beyond the final on July 19th. Until the next Club World Cup, the Women’s World Cup in 2031. For the American professional league MLS as the home of international soccer legends like Lionel Messi. More precisely: to make money.

But that is likely to be at least difficult given the string of major events: Super Bowl, Olympics in Milan (with NHL stars and the USA against Canada game), Stanley Cup, Laver Cup, NBA Cup, US Open, Enhanced Games, UFC on Trump’s birthday, Patriot Games. And you can do all of that here Cosm watch in Los Angeles. Or in Cosm in Dallas. And soon also in Cosm in Detroit, im Cosm in Atlanta, im Cosm in Cleveland. Without travel, enjoyment in your own bubble, the feeling of being there for a few hundred dollars: that’s probably the best way to describe this sporting nation.