2026 World Cup: US President Donald Trump takes center stage for bigger, unprecedented celebrity-filled drawing ceremony | Football news

If you think sports and politics don’t mix, you might want to miss Friday’s World Cup draw.

Next summer’s tournament will be the biggest tournament ever organized by FIFA. There will be more teams, more matches, more fans, more host countries, more host cities, more expensive tickets and more money to be won.

It will be about power and glory, with a leading trio of Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Donald Trump.

Make no mistake. Gianni Infantino may be president of FIFA, but Trump is the president of the richest and most powerful country in the world, and he has a very real interest in the World Cup his country is co-hosting next summer.

Under other circumstances, Friday’s draw would have taken place in Las Vegas, but it appears Trump had other ideas and that is why the most powerful men in world football – and they are still almost all men – are heading to Washington this week and not the self-proclaimed entertainment capital of the world.

The entertainment offered at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is generally more cerebral in nature than middle-aged men shooting bullets into glass bowls, but that was before Trump took over as chairman of the board in February.

Friday’s glitzy draw will be hosted by a model Heidi Klum and actor Kevin Hart and present performances of Andrea Bocelli, Robbie Williams And Nicole Scherzinger. Lowering the curtain will be The people of the village, singing the MAGA Trump YMCA anthem that last topped the charts when FIFA held the 1978 World Cup draw in Argentina.

Of course, the only purpose of a draw is to find out who your team is going to play against, but Trump’s presence at the big FIFA spectacle will guarantee front-page and back-page coverage in Saturday’s papers.

Expect to see photos of a beaming Gianni Infantino presenting Trump with what is known as the first FIFA Peace Prize. It’s unclear what this has to do with football, but Infantino’s doctrine has always been to get as close as possible to the leaders of the World Cup host countries.

With this in mind, no one should rule out Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia receiving the prize in the 2034 World Cup draw.

The draw, the busy program and the ticket prices…

As for the mechanics of the draw itself, it’s pretty simple – or as simple as things can be when it’s the first 48-team World Cup and there are 64 teams involved, as 22 countries can still secure the remaining six spots via the play-offs in the spring.

The teams were divided into four pots with England in pot 1, Scotland in pot 3 and play-off hopefuls Wales, Ireland and Northern Ireland in pot 4.

On Friday, we’ll know who is in each group of four, but the match schedule – the locations and kick-off times of each game – won’t be announced until Saturday afternoon.

With the media attention focused on Trump, it would be easy to forget that this World Cup is also being played in Mexico and Canada. The bulk of the matches – 78 – will take place in the United States, with 13 each in Canada and Mexico, including the opening match on June 11 in Mexico City.

From there, the games multiply and accelerate. There are group matches until June 27 and between June 13 and 23 there will be four matches per day instead of the usual three.

There are 16 additional countries and 40 additional matches as well as a new knockout round of 16 for the top two in each group and the top eight third-placed teams. In total, there will be 33 match days and the final at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium in New York will take place on July 19, 38 days after the opening match.

Thanks to FIFA’s controversial decision to use dynamic pricing, ticket prices are set to become a major talking point over the next seven months. As the cost depends on demand, expect to see tickets at attractive prices, especially for the highest-profile matches. FIFA says 8% of tickets for each match will be reserved for each team and distributed to fans – without dynamic pricing – by national associations.

FIFA’s official ticket resale platform will be just as controversial as dynamic pricing. Tickets can be sold on the platform, with the seller setting the price and FIFA taking a commission of 15 percent from the seller and 15 percent from the buyer.

Of course, FIFA will say that they are a non-profit organization and that all the money they make is put back into the game. They will say that it is for the good of the game, but so is having as many affordable tickets as possible for as many fans as possible.

So, what can we expect from the World Cup next summer? You can bank on Ronaldo playing when he was on the verge of being banned, high temperatures, expensive tickets, huge NFL stadiums – and Infantino declaring it “the best World Cup ever” once it’s all over.