New norms, and never calling it Fifa while we still can
Fifa didn't have the authority to extend half-time to 27 minutes but it did. And the people got to see Coldplay telling them to sign up to an email list to save the planet: you do want to save the planet, don't you? Well, that's Fifa.
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International tournaments are supposed to leave what their promoters like to call a legacy, but what that looks like is often out of the organisers' control. Mexico 1970 made the world's game colourful and free-scoring. After Italia '90 everyone realised a reset was needed: hello to the backpass rule. Vuvuzelas didn't catch on after South Africa in 2010, but sometimes there will be a trend carrying forward into league football, like long shots or teams bleaching their hair.
After the World Cup 2026 it feels to me like a lot of things got broken all in a hurry and I'm not sure how we'll be able to put them back together. This was not Donald Trump's World Cup the way many people had feared it might be, as but for getting Folarin Balogun's suspension suspended and getting in the way of Spain's trophy lift the USA president was not front and centre. He'd have had to push Gianni Infantino out of shot, for a start. But the World Cup reflected Trump's world anyway, in the way it has smashed through long-established norms and established a new, uglier landscape.
Football, a game of two halves, became a game of four quarters. That prospect has been feared and debated for as long as the USA has been interested in soccer. It was mooted sarcastically before the USA '94 World Cup and murmured on through Major League Soccer's experiments in entertainment (like no draws and 35 yard shootouts) and sponsor-stuffing. Whenever quarters were mentioned, it was to say that would be a leap so much further towards rank commercialism that it must never be allowed to happen.
Fifa's president Gianni Infantino will argue that it still hasn't. Football does not have quarter-times, it has hydration breaks to help player welfare. He will stand in front of you for the full three minute pause, while coaches impart tactical advice to their players from tablet screens and TV stations run adverts and the stadium plays three minutes of pop music, and while the crowd boos every second of it, and he'll tell you this is a non-commercial, non-tactical necessity that only serves to water weary footballers.
We can see the ugliness of this implementation more clearly through our Leeds United lens. Last season, Leeds fans and players were so sick of goalies faking injuries for tactical timeouts that Ethan Ampadu was ready to fight Chelsea about it at Wembley. True enough, players were stopped from talking to their coaches while a goalie gets treatment at the World Cup. But, instead, the practice was codified and commodified under cover of hydration, so there's no need to fake an injury any more. The only problem with before, it seems, was that Fifa couldn't sell advertising while a keeper faked hurt to their hammy.
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