Feedzy Read More By the time this article appears on Salon, the men’s national teams of Mexico and South Africa will be almost ready to take the field — sorry, the pitch — at Mexico City’s cavernous Estadio Azteca for the opening match of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Playing at home, at 7,300 feet above sea level and before 80,000 or so rabid supporters, El Tri will be heavily favored to win. But however many supporters of Bafana Bafana (Zulu for “The Boys”) have made it there all the way from South Africa are certain to put on an upbeat, colorful display.Whether that game is thrilling or boring, and no matter who wins, the focus will be on spectacle, showmanship and soccer, in roughly that order. There has been a predictable amount of disorder around the tournament in the Mexican capital, including a teachers’ strike and left-wing street protests. But neither the game nor any of that has anything to do with Donald Trump, who will not be on hand to get booed and pretend he’s being cheered. However security is handled, there will be no ICE officers surveying the crowd with facial-recognition software and abducting people for unstated reasons. Everyone who needed a visa to attend this game, as far as I know, got one with minimal fuss.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementIt’s a happy accident of sorts, if you choose to look at it that way, that the first couple of games in the largest and most troubled tournament in the ambiguous history of this overinflated event are taking place outside the United States, and may serve as modest reminders of what the World Cup is somehow, still, vaguely supposed to symbolize. (Later on Thursday, South Korea will play the Czech Republic in Guadalajara.)It might also serve as something of a reality check. Almost everything negative that could possibly be said about this World Cup is true: It’s an egregiously expensive festival of interlocking consumerism and nationalism, plagued by staggering levels of corruption and set against a visibly crumbling but wildly ambitious quasi-authoritarian regime. When earnest liberals called upon FIFA, the governing body of world football-and-or-soccer (both words are legit and I refuse to litigate that issue), to bar the U.S. from competing or to cancel the tournament, an enormous epistemological error was involved: FIFA president Gianni Infantino is, if anything, a more shameless, soulless and sycophantic specimen than Donald Trump.Still and all, the World Cup is literally too big to fail. It’s the biggest global showcase for the world’s most popular sport, not to mention a television and marketing enterprise many times larger than the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals or the Oscars. In an era increasingly dominated by “narrowcasting” and web streaming, roughly one-third of the world’s population is likely to watch the final match on July 19. Furthermore, for hardcore fans the idea that FIFA is a semi-criminal enterprise and the World Cup tournament something of a garbage fire