2026 World Cup - FIFA’s biggest own goal?

The FIFA World Cup is back and bigger than ever before. Kicking off today, 48 teams are set to take to the global stage over the course of 104 matches spread across 16 cities between the USA, Canada and Mexico.  

Yet for all its scale, the mood feels unusually flat. While we have the usual huffs around lacklustre pitch conditions, late-night kick-offs and frustrations around squad selections, the dominant headlines have swirled around unprecedented ticket prices, tightening geopolitical restrictions and the reality that this tournament is on course to be the most polluting in history.  

Due to its expansive geographic footprint stretching across North America, scientists have estimated that this year’s tournament will generate more than four times the average carbon emissions of World Cups held between 2010 and 2022 due to the distance between matches and lack of low carbon travel alternatives. In fact, the BBC calculated that an English supporter flying from London and attending every England match through to a potential final would travel nearly two-thirds of the circumference of the Earth, generating around 3.4 tonnes of CO₂ per person. As such, with over seven million fans set to fill the stadiums, the carbon emissions from air travel alone are set to be extremely high. Sustainability has clearly been pushed to the sidelines in pursuit of scale and spectacle.  

FIFA’s track record on climate does little to reassure. At COP26, FIFA pledged to halve its emissions by 2030 and reach net zero by 2040. Since then, it has expanded its flagship tournament to its largest ever incarnation and signed a headline partnership with Aramco, the Saudi state energy company, which happens to be the single largest corporate greenhouse gas emitter on earth. For someone who insists, as the FIFA President does, that “we live on planet Earth rather than the Moon”, Infantino does not make much of a go of protecting it. 

For many fans though, a carbon-intensive journey following their team was never on the table. US border policy is, unintentionally, reducing potential air travel emissions through increasingly restrictive visa rules. Days before kick-off, Somali referee Omar Artan - who was set to make history - was turned away at the border upon arrival in Miami due to “background-check issues”. In fact, eleven of the 48 qualified nations face US visa refusal rates above 40%, with fans from Haiti and Iran forced to watch from afar under full US entry bans. As such, the familiar chant of “it’s coming home” feels somewhat ironic this time around since, for many fans, home is exactly where they must remain. For a tournament billed as a global celebration, concentrating 78 of 104 matches in a country with increasingly strict entry conditions sits uneasily with the spirit of inclusivity FIFA claims to champion. 

The fans who cannot attend will, of course, continue to follow their teams. They will stream matches across more devices and time zones than ever before. NESCO has estimated that, in the UK alone, a single England or Scotland game could draw electricity equivalent to the combined consumption of Glasgow and Leeds. This expanding digital footprint is rarely accounted for in official carbon budgets, yet it increasingly represents a growing share of the tournament’s hidden environmental cost. 

FIFA now finds itself caught between climate commitments it has repeatedly undermined and a geopolitical landscape it cannot control. Its instinct, as exemplified by Infantino’s call for critics to “just relax” in response to UN concerns, has been to minimise and deflect. Yet the more credible path, for FIFA as for any organisation operating under global scrutiny, is to acknowledge what it cannot control and take responsibility for what it can. This means ensuring its partnerships and structural decisions do not actively contradict the values it asks the public to embrace.