World Cup set to Bublé over with three opening ceremonies

Brace yourself. The coming World Cup is getting not one, not two, but THREE opening ceremonies. I’ve been doing the maths, and by my calculation, and taking all the variables into consideration, that’s at least seven opening ceremonies too many.

Typical, no? You wait four years for a World Cup to come along in the quiet hope that this time they’ll simply abandon altogether the idea of having an opening ceremony… and then, lo and behold, the horizon abruptly fills with them. Fifa have clearly asked themselves: ‘How many flashmobs of choreographed schoolkids in brightly coloured cagoules is enough?’ And with the gift for room-reading for which Gianni Infantino’s organisation is famous, they’ve answered: ‘Three times as many as we put people through last time.’

Which, as I say, is at least seven times as many, when you run the numbers.

So Mexico City gets an opening ceremony (a big welcome from South African singer Tyla and Colombian reggaeton artist J Balvin), and then Toronto in Canada gets an opening ceremony the day after (hello from Michael Bublé and Alanis Morissette), followed swiftly by an opening ceremony in Los Angeles (let’s hear it from Katy Perry, and also the rapper Future). And surely by the end of that, no World Cup in the history of World Cups will ever have been more thoroughly open. And no audience will ever have been more tired of watching street dancers in Zorbs.

Because that’s normally what we get, isn’t it? That’s usually what the promise to (in Infantino’s words) “bring together music, culture and football” usually boils down to in this context: street dancers in Zorbs and a gymnastic ballet dancer turning slow-motion tumbles under a balloon. And this summer we’ll be getting it three times.

I must admit, I had big hopes for climate change this time around. Conversations were being had about the likely impact of the heat on the football – earnest discussions around suspension protocols for lightning, regulated mid-half cooling breaks, etc. It didn’t seem entirely fantastical to think that the debate would eventually expand to consider the opening ceremony – that we’d soon hear the alarm sounded for the potential effects of the heat on opening ceremony performers, not least those in Zorbs, and that the case would then be made on legitimate scientific grounds for radically shrinking, or even eliminating, the opening ceremony on the basis of… I don’t know: logistical difficulties regarding the supply of in-Zorb misting stations, or something. There were get-out clauses in abundance here, surely.

But no. Quite the opposite, in fact. And look, I know there is history here. There was an opening ceremony for the first World Cup in 1930 (squads in tracksuits trooping behind their national flags, Olympics-style), and there has been one for every tournament since, including 1966 at Wembley, when 350 London schoolboys in football kit marched about on the pitch and the Queen delivered a short and to-the-point speech.

It looks quaint now in the entire absence of daylight fireworks and a three-song set from Katy Perry. Yet, if you’d been able to ask anyone who was there that day, I bet they’d have told you that even that was too much. The ideal opening ceremony was always two teams coming out of the tunnel for the first match. The ideal opening ceremony has never been three opening ceremonies.

If this was the 1980s, Phil Collins would have jumped on Concorde and appeared at all three of these proposed ceremonies, mirroring his time-zone-defying Live Aid stunt. So in some senses, I guess, we’re lucky. That said, looking at the schedule, there’s probably just about scope to perform a heritage recap of that stunt using scheduled flights. Bit tight, maybe, between Toronto and LA.

But if someone could be persuaded to get their finger out, go hand-luggage only, and skip the Duty Free on the way through… Well, perhaps it would lend this otherwise torpid prospect a bit of jeopardy and give us a thread to cling to. Let’s face it, we’re going to need something. Right now, it’s Zorbs and Michael Bublé as far as the eye can see.

Photograph by John Parra / Getty Images