Gavin Cooney

A QUICK CHECK in on how things are going ahead of the World Cup. 

Having qualified for the tournament on merit, Iran now say they won’t compete in the competition as a consequence of the illegal war declared upon it by the leader of the World Cup’s primary co-host, who also happens to be the inaugural winner of Fifa’s Peace Prize. 

And then consider that the reason Iran won’t travel is because the war was launched by the inaugural winner of Fifa’s Peace Prize. Gianni Infantino’s next award should be to himself for the greatest self-own in the history of sports administration.

Having said on Wednesday that Trump assured him that Iran would be welcome to compete, Infantino then watched with the rest of us as Trump added a fairly significant caveat to that welcome on Truth Social. 

“The Iran National Soccer Team is welcome to the World Cup,” posted Trump, “but I really don’t believe it is appropriate that they be there, for their own life and safety.” 

Fifa will point to their gargantuan profits from this World Cup when ballyhooing about its awesome success, but the 2026 World Cup is already a fundamental sporting failure if a competing team cannot participate for political reasons.

On an alternate timeline, Fifa would be busy courting sympathy as the victims of circumstance, as they had been uniquely unfortunate to see their quadrennial cash cow stop to chew grass in America just as the place is being torn down by Trump’s erratic narcissism.

But instead Infantino has utterly implicated himself and his organisation in this chaos by making it clear that this would be the Trump World Cup, and so they must own all of this and whatever wild consequences are still to come. 

It’s true that the World Cup has always been hijacked by malign political actors, but up to now, Fifa have been generally happy to look the other way, a fact best encapsulated by their refusing to accept an Amnesty International report detailing human rights abuses under Argentina’s military junta on the eve of the 1978 World Cup.

But Fifa have lately gone from quiet tolerance to enthusiastic backing, with the absurd Peace Prize following Infantino’s appearance at a conference in Miami in which he said, “we should all support what [Trump] is doing because I think it’s looking pretty good”.

So what more is to come? Trump, for instance, this week reheated an old jibe by referring to Mark Carney as “the future governor of Canada”. Will this be the first World Cup in which one co-host invades another before the trophy is presented? Perhaps Fifa will tell us this is yet another example of Football Uniting The World… under an American flag. 

Bundle this and the rest of the incipient madness along with the price-gouging on tickets and the possibility of gatherings around games providing targets for ICE raids and you have one of the most morally objectionable sporting events of modern times. 

So now we invite you to return all of this queasy stuff to a corner of your brain and then open the file marked PRAGUE.  

You may be going to Ireland’s World Cup play-off against Czechia or you may be watching from home: either way you’ll have known for weeks that it is on 26 March and thought about it with that strange mingling of daunted excitement that has been appropriate for far too few Irish matches across the last decade.

You’ll have panicked over Josh Cullen’s injury, resigned yourself sadly to Evan Ferguson’s absence, and held your breath over the health of Troy Parrott. You’ll have been outraged at Sheffield United for not playing Chiedozie Ogbene, baffled at Keith Andrews for dropping Nathan Collins, and forgiven whatever sins you still apportion to Martin O’Neill because now he trusts Liam Scales. 

You’ll have discovered Alan Browne has been playing, and you’ll have remembered the name David McGoldrick.

You’ll have been encouraged by the penalties Caoimhín Kelleher has saved and found a way of rationalising those he has conceded. There’s a law of averages at play here and best not save too many before he may have to do so for Ireland. 

You’ll have greatly expanded the number of games worth paying attention to on LiveScore: not only for the Irish players but for the Czech players too. Is Patrik Schick fit to start this week? Have Lyon picked Pavel Sulc? Is Tomas Soucek still bundling in goals at the back post? Is it worrying that he is? Or is it worrying that he isn’t and might be due one against Ireland? 

Yes, since November you have spent a part of every week simply thinking about Irish footballers, swaying from low-key anxiety to strait-jacketed excitement according to their various selections, achievements, injuries, and disappointments, all because Ireland are trying to make a World Cup and all of this matters because there is nothing – nothing – like a World Cup.

Don’t feel any guilt about this expedient compartmentalisation.

It’s how the World Cup has always worked because it’s the only way the World Cup can work. 

Fifa own a terrible sort of glory.