City by city, piece by piece, the World Cup has started to disappear over the last two weeks. Workers have slowly, carefully dismantled the lurid branding that festooned the stadiums; the fan parks constructed across North America have been abandoned; the bunting and the flags have been taken down as the party stops and the circus leaves town.
With every World Cup, the question is quite what it leaves behind. In the case of 2026, it will not be infrastructure: while some of the stadiums, including the Azteca in Mexico City, were renovated ahead of the tournament, many of the others will now have to revert, the modifications made to turn them into football venues removed so they are ready for the NFL come autumn.
Instead, the lasting impact of this summer will be something less concrete, less tangible. The hope among America’s football community was always that hosting the World Cup would win the sport a whole new audience. Television figures have been sufficiently impressive that it seems to have come to pass; more pertinently, the tournament’s social impact has been astonishing.
Footage of tens of thousands of fans descending on North America have attracted billions of views over the last few weeks: the Tartan Army taking over Boston, Argentina’s fans transforming sleek superdomes into writhing seas of blue and white, European tourists meandering through the deep south, discovering waffles and grits and just how big petrol stations can be, if only they are prepared to dream.
It is always the people who make the World Cup. That has been the case again this time round: a tournament that many feared would be overshadowed by Donald Trump, by the aggressive muscularity of his movement, by the insatiable greed of Fifa, has instead been defined by joy, by pride, by a reciprocal willingness not just to perform national identity but to play with it, too, a World Cup enriched by just a hint of high camp.
That is what this tournament will leave behind, it is hoped: memories on the pitch, of course, of Cape Verde and of Kylian Mbappé and of Lionel Messi, but far more will have engaged with it off the field, captivated not by the sport of it but by the staggering scale, by how much it means, by what it can do.
For six weeks, local news across the US has been dominated by footage of fans from all over the world dancing and singing and smiling, always smiling, and America smiling back. That has to make a difference, however small and however brief. It has to matter, somehow.
Photograph by Hannah Peters/FIFA/Getty Images
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