The biggest World Cup ever. Will it be the best?

Through the lens of brand, Philip Davies, president, EMEA at Siegel+Gale, asks: what actually makes a great World Cup?

Never mind it’s coming home. It’s going everywhere. Every four years, Fifa launches the next edition of its most valuable global property: the World Cup. Not merely a tournament, but a recurring product release. A quadrennial drop in what might be the most successful cultural branding franchise on the planet.

We tend to talk about the tournaments as though they exist in isolation. Russia was one thing, Qatar another, Germany something else again. But the World Cup can also be viewed as a body of work, a succession from a portfolio, like the catalogue of a musician, perhaps, or the filmography of a director whose themes evolve but never quite disappear.

Seen this way, the World Cup resembles the output of a creative house more than a sporting calendar. Each edition must feel entirely novel while remaining recognisably part of the same lineage. Luxury fashion houses manage this trick every season. So do great movie directors or artists or musicians.

Consider David Bowie. His albums rarely resembled one another, yet together they formed a coherent catalogue. Often shaped by the location in which they were recorded. Glam theatricality in London gave way to Berlin minimalism, which wound up in LA introspection, then Philadelphia soul, and so on, eventually dissolved into sleek pop futurism. Listen closely and the records appear to talk to one another, the closing note of one quietly foreshadowing the next.

World Cups behave in much the same way: different songs, different characters, different settings, yet the same themes recur. And the temptation, particularly when we’re on the brink of the next instalment this summer, is to rank them, like we do albums or movie franchises, which was the greatest World Cup.

The canon has its classics. And they’re easy to identify.

Mexico 1970 is usually placed at the summit. Sunlit stadiums, colour television’s first proper football spectacle, and the footballing apotheosis of Pelé and a Brazil side that played football as though the sport had finally reached its ideal form.

Then there was 1986, also in Mexico, which produced the most mythologised individual performance the tournament has known. Diego Maradona, weaving through England’s defenders in the Azteca, less like an athlete and more like an unusually talented pickpocket operating in daylight.

And recently we had 2022 Qatar World Cup, which delivered a final so deliriously perfect. Lionel Messi versus Kylian Mbappé in a match that felt scripted by someone who had spent too long studying Greek tragedy. So much so that it threatens to dominate the tournament’s memory entirely.

So what, through the lens of brand, actually makes a great World Cup?

It helps, obviously, to have a footballing genius in residence. The tournament’s mythology tends to condense around a single gravitational body. Pelé in 1970, Maradona in 1986, Messi in 2022. The World Cup likes a protagonist. Football, after all, is a team sport played by individuals who occasionally behave like minor gods.

Second, there must be a stylistic identity. In 1970, Brazil shimmered with aesthetic idealism. While at Italy 1990, though beloved by nostalgia merchants, it was a tournament of defensive suspicion. Every World Cup has a tone, like a novel written in a particular mood.

Third comes geography. Some tournaments breathe, others suffocate. The World Cup thrives when the host nation becomes a stage rather than merely a landlord. Mexico’s altitude and colour gave the 1970 and 1986 tournaments their mythic glow. By contrast, Qatar in 2022 offered a curious novelty, which makes a strong argument for a one location tournament: the hyper-compressed World Cup. Fans could watch two games in a day without consulting anything more complex than a shuttle bus timetable.

Which brings us to the approaching extravaganza: the 2026 World Cup, jointly hosted by the US, Mexico and Canada.

If Qatar was chamber theatre, 2026 promises Wagnerian opera. Forty-eight teams (yes, more than ever) scattered across a continent. Matches separated by time zones, flight schedules and the occasional existential crisis at airport security. A supporter who casually took in two games in Doha might, in 2026, need to cross 3,000 miles and a dietary culture or two.

There is a risk here. The World Cup’s magic partly resides in the sense that the world – players, journalists, fans, opportunists – has temporarily gathered in the same place. A roaming caravan has always followed the tournament, and its density creates its atmosphere. Spread the event too thinly and you risk diluting the magic.

Yet 2026’s scale may also suit the tournament’s current moment. Its expanded cast and continental sweep may simply acknowledge that reality.

There are some exciting narrative possibilities. Mexico returns for a third time as host, a country whose football culture has always produced atmospheres bordering on operatic. The US offers stadiums the size of minor planets and a sports-entertainment culture that understands spectacle better than anyone alive. Canada contributes both geography and a sense of northern curiosity.

And somewhere within this logistical sprawl will emerge the thing that actually determines the tournament’s place in history: a story nobody predicted.

Perhaps a young star will seize the narrative. Perhaps a traditional power will collapse. Or perhaps the tournament will produce that rarest of footballing artefacts: a match so extraordinary it rewrites the memory of the entire event, just as the final in Qatar did.

The strange truth about the World Cup is that its greatness is rarely engineered. Hosts can build stadiums, choreograph ceremonies and negotiate broadcasting rights across half the planet. But the things we remember – Maradona’s dribble, Pelé’s leap, Zidane’s headbutt, Tardelli’s celebration, Messi’s coronation – arrive uninvited.

In the end, the World Cup may be the purest branding exercise on earth. It repeats every four years with just enough change to feel new, yet enough continuity to remain unmistakable. The hosts vary, the stars evolve, the geography shifts but the rituals endure. And somewhere in the middle of it all, a moment appears that nobody planned. The kind of moment that reminds you that even the most carefully managed global brand is still, ultimately, written by the audience.

Like great albums or theatrical franchises, World Cups reveal their status only with time. One day, years from now, someone will cue up the memory of 2026 and decide where it belongs in the catalogue.

For now, it sits unwritten, like the next track waiting for the needle to drop, the last goal to be scored.