World Cup: Empty Hours and the Anticipation of History
The clocks drag when a World Cup pauses. Sixty-three hours without a ball being kicked can feel like a month, especially in the final week, when every conversation seems to bend back towards the same questions: who’s left standing, who’s broken, and who’s about to write themselves into history.
So the world waits. And while it waits, it talks.
England on the road, and a family gamble
For some, this tournament is unfolding on a screen. For others, it’s a boarding pass, a drained bank account and a story that will be told for decades.
One England supporter, Al Daw, took his 70-year-old mother to see the Panama match at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. It poured down. The stadium felt, in his words, like a prison. But the pull of England and the World Cup remained strong enough that, a couple of weeks later, he found himself staring at another decision.
Book the semi-final before knowing if England would even be there.
He and his wife have five children, with a sixth due at the end of July. The anxiety was obvious. Flights from Manchester to Atlanta via Paris, hotel by the stadium, match tickets for him and their eight-year-old son. “Crackers pricing,” he called it, but he went for it once he got the green light at home.
He then watched England’s quarter-final “through his fingers”, voice shredded by the end. Now his son Digby is preparing to watch England and, potentially, Lionel Messi’s last match for his country. That’s the World Cup: a fixture list on paper, a lifetime memory in reality.
Tactical puzzles and selection sins
While supporters juggle flights and finances, managers juggle something more delicate: the balance of a team under pressure.
One rule, though, seems to hold. Whatever problem you have with your side, the answer is almost never:
Leave out Bernardo Silva. Substitute Bruno Fernandes.
Fernandes, especially, is a player who needs time on the pitch. His game is built on constant risk, on repeated attempts to unlock a defence. Cut 20 minutes from his evening and you slash the odds of him finally threading the pass or finding the shot that changes everything. Ask him to take the ball off the back four all night and you’re already blunting the very edge you picked him for.
Which makes Roberto Martínez’s work with Portugal all the more baffling. How do you take a double Champions League-winning midfield, put Fernandes in front of it, and still produce something so dour, so lifeless? The raw material screams ambition; the product whispers caution.
The mind wanders to José Mourinho. Many expected him to have stepped into international management by now, and Portugal always felt like the obvious fit. Instead, Real Madrid have rolled the dice again, gambling that the old magic can be coaxed back at the Bernabéu. It will be pure box office, of course, but there is little sense that this is a guaranteed return to former glories.
England’s defensive doubts and Argentina’s menace
Selection headaches are not confined to Portugal. England’s back line remains a running debate, and John Stones sits at the heart of it.
As a footballer, his elegance on the ball is beyond dispute. As a pure defender, the doubts linger. His lack of pace could be exposed by Julián Álvarez and Lautaro Martínez. Tracking Messi, even in the autumn of his career, demands a level of defensive cunning that few possess. Stones may yet rise to the task, but the risk is clear.
On the flanks, the options carry different threats. Djed Spence offers something unique off the bench: raw pace, direct running in behind, a different physical test for tiring defenders. Against Argentina, the smart money says Reece James starts at right-back with Nico O’Reilly on the left. But if everyone were available, Lewis Hall and Luke Shaw would be ahead of O’Reilly in that pecking order. They are not. They are at home. Tournament football is always part plan, part compromise.
France, Spain, England, Argentina: who can stop the machine?
Hovering over all of this is a simple question: who, if anyone, can stop the current French team?
Spain might have the best shot. Rodri is edging back towards his imperious, pre-injury form, and when he controls a midfield, he often controls the match. They still need more from Lamine Yamal, who doesn’t yet look fully fit, but the structure and rhythm are there.
England, on paper, have the legs to outrun France in midfield. They can swarm, they can press, they can break lines. The concern lies behind them. Over 90 minutes, or 120, that defence feels like it would eventually crack under the weight of French firepower.
Argentina? Their hopes rest, as they so often have, on Messi and on a collective will that has carried them further than many expected. But in pure midfield terms, they lack the depth and control of France or Spain. Against a side as complete as this French generation, that may not be enough.
Bellingham, Tuchel and the modern flashpoint
In a different corner of the football universe, another story flickered, flared, and is already fading.
Thomas Tuchel and Jude Bellingham exchanged sharp words in the heat of the moment. Tempers, adrenaline, the glare of the spotlight – the usual cocktail. Both are serious professionals, both obsessed with winning, and both know they need each other. They spoke in a moment of high emotion and relief; it would be a surprise if any tension lasted long. If it ever truly existed beyond that brief flash.
This is modern football: every raised eyebrow becomes a storyline, every sideline exchange a talking point.
Diego, Messi and the myth of the team game
The present always sits in the shadow of the past. As Messi edges towards the end of his international road, the conversation inevitably loops back to Diego Maradona.
Some will always argue that Messi is the greatest of all time. His consistency and longevity are unmatched, his numbers almost absurd. But Maradona, in that month at Mexico 86 and in the season that followed when he dragged Napoli to their first Scudetto, hit a level that feels almost supernatural.
That second goal against England in Mexico City – the one that left Barry Davies exclaiming, “And you’ve got to say that’s magnificent” – rewrote what a seven-year-old might think is possible in football. One man running past everyone between him and the goal, on the biggest stage of all. It gave a false impression of the sport as a whole, because no one else has ever really been able to do it like that. No one did more than Diego to challenge the old truism that football is a team game.
The pubs, the tills and a changing culture
World Cups used to mean packed pubs, sticky floors and takings that doubled on matchdays. That picture is starting to blur.
Steve Hopkins, landlord of the Shovel Inn in Stourbridge – the town where Jude Bellingham was born – is walking away from the trade after this tournament. He has been in pubs for six World Cups. Most of them, he says, were fantastic for business. This one has been different.
Turnout has been poor. People are staying at home or arriving at the last minute. Where once a pub would be full by mid-afternoon for an 8pm kick-off, that swell of anticipation has thinned. “Ever since Covid, people have been staying at home, it’s a different way of life now,” he says. At 64, after running pubs since he was 18, he is ready to get out.
A good night’s takings at the Shovel Inn would be around £3,000. For this semi-final, on at a decent hour and offering the kind of communal experience you can’t truly replicate in a living room, Hopkins says if he makes £1,000, he will feel he has done well.
The game still unites people. It just does so in different places now.
The World Cup, 64 teams and the battle for its soul
Over all of this hovers the looming shape of the tournament itself. Gianni Infantino’s FIFA is pushing for expansion. More teams, more matches, more money.
The idea of a 64-team World Cup feels instinctively wrong to many, an overreach driven by commercial hunger. Yet the arguments are not all on one side. The gap between the 48th and 64th-ranked teams in the world is not vast on paper. The addition of more nations would not necessarily dilute the quality of the football in any dramatic way.
There is a clear sporting upside: a return to groups where only the top two go through. No more third-placed teams sneaking into the knockouts having beaten only the weakest side in their section. No more 72 group games just to eliminate 16 countries. A bigger field, paradoxically, could give us a cleaner, sharper competition structure and more jeopardy in the early rounds.
The costs are real, though. Qualification would become even more bloated. Hosting would become a logistical monster: more teams, more stadiums, more hotels, more training bases, more media. Only a handful of nations might be able to cope.
The Euros have already shown how expanded tournaments can bring fresh stories and new voices, countries otherwise excluded enriching the experience. The World Cup could do the same on an even grander scale. The question is whether the sport can stretch this far without snapping something essential.
For now, the pitches are empty. The arguments roll on. The next ball is only hours away, and when it’s kicked, all these debates will be pushed aside by something simpler and older: 22 players, one ball, and the knowledge that, somewhere in the stands or halfway around the world, an eight-year-old is about to see something they’ll never forget.
