World Cup 2026 and the Bill for a Dream: Who Pays for 104 Matches?

On the night of December 18, 2026, I sat in the eleventh row of the Lusail stands, watching Lionel Messi lift the golden trophy under blazing lights and asking myself a silly question amid the roar: after tonight, how long will the feet of those who just ran for 120 minutes be allowed to rest before being called back to a pitch on the other side of the world for a commercial friendly? No one in the press room asked that question. They asked about legacy, about greatness, about tears. I only remember Angel Di Maria's blistered feet, so bad he had to change boots during extra time, and the quiet way he looked down at the new boots as if apologizing for something he couldn't say. Four years later, with World Cup 2026 at the door with 48 teams and 104 matches, I still carry that old question in my coat pocket like a folded scrap of paper. I write this from Liverpool, where I have lived and worked for years, in a flat overlooking a street that every Saturday fills with singing and swearing blended together. Here, people love football so much they will gamble a whole week's joy on a penalty in the 88th minute. And here too, people have grown used to a truth few want to name: the more competitions, the more matches, the more money, the higher the human cost paid in flesh and bone on the pitch. World Cup 2026 is not a promise of a better football. It is a contract someone has already signed, and the one who signed on behalf of the players was not the player. This is major tournament season. In Vietnam, fans are swept up in flags and stories of the national team, eager to see how far our dream of reaching the world can go. I understand that feeling better than anyone, because I was born in a country where every time the national team steps out, the streets stop selling goods to glue their eyes to screens. But precisely because I understand, I do not want us to stand on the stands and forget those running inside the touchline. Every goal on television is a moment for us, but a piece of a body for them. I go to stadiums not to witness victory, but to understand why people cry while holding each other. To begin, let us look at the settled numbers. World Cup 2026, co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico, will feature 48 national teams, kicking off on June 11, 2026 and ending on July 19, 2026. Total matches rise from 64 to 104. The group stage splits into 12 groups of four, and for the first time in history there is an extra knockout round called the round of 32. These are numbers officially announced by FIFA, drawn from the bid dossier and confirmed across several communications over the years. From the perspective of someone working in England, this sounds appealing. More teams means more countries involved, more dreams. And indeed, for Asian football, this is an unprecedented opportunity. The number of berths for Asia has increased considerably, opening a door many generations of Vietnamese players only dared to dream of. This is why the major tournament atmosphere back home is hotter than ever. But I must say what perhaps no one wants to hear: this expansion was not created out of kindness. It was created for money. More teams means more matches, more matchdays, more broadcast packages, more sponsors, more shirts sold. Every extra qualification spot is a ticket sold, a new market opened, a new stream of revenue. I do not judge that. Elite football is a colossal industry, and people have the right to make money from it. What I care about is who pays the price. And the one who pays, as always, is the player. The painful truth is that the football industry operates on a strange mechanism: it sells dreams to spectators and uses players' bodies as raw material. Look at the schedule of a typical international player in this four-year cycle. He starts the club season in August, plays in the domestic league, the national cup, continental competitions. November or December is an international window. March is friendlies or qualifiers. June is a major tournament or a commercial friendly event held on a distant continent. Then August comes again, and a new season begins without any real break. Some players have gone through more than 60 official matches in a single year. I once followed a young player I admired, a full-back not yet 24, across three consecutive seasons. In an interview in the training ground corridor after a win, he told me softly: "I don't remember the last time I slept eight hours." I joked that he should schedule sleep like he schedules training. He smiled, but his eyes did not. Six months later, he tore a ligament. The report said it was unlucky. No one wrote that it was predictable. This is the intersection I call the romanticization of load management. In recent years, analysts have begun talking a lot about workload, rotation, recovery metrics. Clubs hire fitness experts, buy GPS tracking devices, produce charts of running volume. It sounds very scientific, very progressive, very pro-player. But when you peel that shell away, you find another truth: most load management is not about protecting players from being drained, but about allocating their energy so the club can play more, tour more, earn more. People do not rest players because they care. They rest them so they can run again next match. There was a summer commercial friendly I was assigned to cover in Asia. A big European club flew thousands of kilometres to play two games in three days in unbearable heat and humidity. The main players came on in the second half, played just enough to satisfy the local crowd, and left to applause. No one was injured that day. But I sat in the press room watching a famous player with puffy eyes from lack of sleep and travel, and I asked myself: do the fans who bought tickets know that the person they adore should be in a hospital bed, or at least on a sofa at home? Based on my experience watching matches and travelling with teams, I can say most players do not complain about the schedule. They complain in silence, by signing contracts to move to less competitive leagues, by quietly declining in form, by disappearing from the top at an age when they should have five or six good years left. Their bodies hand in a resignation letter before their hearts do. And this is where the story expands into another dimension I want to spend most of this piece analysing: the link between the increasingly dense international match pressure and the transfer market, especially the loan-with-obligation-to-buy mechanism quietly reshaping small football. In a room full of men talking tactics, I heard the sound of a dream breaking. Let me tell the story of small clubs in England and Europe, the clubs that the expanded World Cup will not give a single penny to, but will give one more suffocated season. The loan-with-obligation-to-buy mechanism has become a common tool in deals between small and big clubs. On the surface it is clever. A big club wants to sell a player to balance the books, but does not want to record a loss in the current accounting period. They loan the player to a small club for a year, with a clause forcing the purchase at the end. The small club gets a talented player they could not normally afford, in exchange for committing to pay a large sum at a set date. It sounds reasonable for both sides. But the truth is in the fine print. The small club does not know at signing whether the player will get injured, adapt, or fit the dressing room. If he fails, the small club must still buy him, still pay a sum that takes a large share of the budget, and still carry a wage their financial structure was never designed to bear. They become a parking lot for someone else's asset, taking on risk on behalf of the seller. I spoke with a sporting director at a lower-league English club about this mechanism. He said something I have recorded ever since: "We don't buy players anymore. We're adopting other people's debts and calling it football." That line made me think immediately of the expanded World Cup. If elite football sells dreams to spectators, small football is buying back the torn patches of that dream at a price higher than the original. And here is the link to the international calendar. As the number of international matches rises, the value of a player who can play in multiple competitions rises. Big clubs need deeper squads to rotate through a dense schedule. So they stockpile talent, drive prices up, and push players without a starting spot out of the squad. Those pushed out, who should be pillars of small clubs, are now treated as goods to be moved at any cost. The loan-with-obligation mechanism was born to solve that liquidity problem. It is not a solution for small football. It is a solution for big football's balance sheet. This is what I consider the central paradox of modern football: the more opportunities for national teams, the fewer opportunities for small clubs to develop players sustainably. Look at clubs in Asia, including Vietnam. As World Cup spots increase, expectations rise, and pressure on young players rises with them. A Vietnamese player in the V-League who wants to reach the continent and the world must play more, tour more, endure longer flights and harsher climates. Their bodies will be tested in ways the previous generation did not face. At the age when Nguyen Cong Phuong or Nguyen Quang Hai shone, future young players will face a schedule one and a half or two times as dense. And if we do not prepare load management for them, we will sell golden feet to buy tickets, only to watch them shatter in a meaningless friendly on the other side of the world. I have been very optimistic about Vietnamese football's development. I still am. But my optimism now comes with a condition: we must learn to protect players before teaching them how to win. Because I have seen too many young talents in Europe burned out simply because no one managed their load, and I do not want Vietnamese football to walk that road. This is where I must face a hard question: is the expanded World Cup really as bad as I am painting it? Let me change seats. Let me stand with the supporters of expansion and see whether their arguments hold. First argument: more teams means more countries have a chance. For African, Asian and North American football, this is an unprecedented redistribution of opportunity. More spots means more federations gain revenue, more incentive to invest in youth systems, more voice in global decisions. Football is no longer the club of Europe and South America. That is a valid point, and I do not deny it. Second argument: the average number of matches a player plays in the group stage may fall, because a team in a smaller group can plan its schedule. But this only holds in theory. In reality, with an extra knockout round, the total matches a deep-running team plays will rise. A team reaching the 2026 final could play eight matches instead of seven. That sounds small. But compounded over years, it is a huge difference. Third argument: the dense calendar is not a World Cup problem, but a club and domestic league problem. This is partly true. Clubs organise summer tours purely for money, and domestic leagues have more matches. But FIFA and continental confederations cannot wash their hands. They are the ones who created the World Cup and international tournaments, and they are the ones who negotiate with clubs over releasing players. Responsibility lies with everyone, top to bottom. So what is wrong with my argument? I think I may be too pessimistic about players' capacity to adapt. Humans adapt extraordinarily. Players like Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi have played at the top into their late thirties. They prove that with modern sports science, a well-cared-for body can endure more than one thinks. Perhaps the next generation will not be burned out as I fear. Perhaps they will be nurtured by better experts, better technology, better recovery methods. But even if that is true, it is only true for a small elite group. The rest, those without personal support teams, those in small leagues, those forced on commercial tours by club contracts, will keep paying. And if you think that is a price worth paying for global football's growth, I want to ask you one thing: why are those who pay always those who benefit least? I think of the story of a player who once played for a small English club, whom I met on a reporting trip. He told me he used to feel like the hero of a small city, until his club was bought by a foreign consortium and began loaning players from big clubs to replace locals. He was pushed to the bench, loaned to a lower division, and finally sold for a fraction of the price of a player from a big club's academy. He told me: "I'm not angry they sold me. I'm angry they sold me so cheap." That story reminds me of something I have always felt true: football is a game priced by people who never touch the ball, for people who never get the chance to touch the ball, and played by people treated as replaceable by a number on a spreadsheet. In Vietnam, we are at a very special moment. As the national team has a historic opportunity, as young players begin to attract attention abroad, we have the right to dream big. But we must also be honest with each other: we do not yet have a system that protects players well enough. We do not yet have a professional load management culture. We do not yet have enough medical data, enough recovery experts, enough money to let a player rest when needed. And while waiting for those, we are still selling dreams. I think of Nguyen Xuan Son, a player I followed from his days in Vietnam until a serious injury at what should have been the peak of his career. I do not write this to retell a sad story, but to note that behind every injury is a chain of decisions about schedule, recovery and minutes, and not every decision is for the player. And I think of Virgil van Dijk, whom I had the honour of watching in his peak years at Liverpool. He is an example of a player managed with extreme care, because he is too big an asset to lose. But that only applies to people like him. For a young player in a lower division, or an Asian player trying to hold on in Europe, there is no such privilege. They play hurt, play tired, play when they should rest, because if they rest, someone takes their place. Silence is a language only those who have stood in an empty stadium can understand. I once stood in an empty stadium, after the match ended and everyone had gone home, and I felt clearly that what remained on the pitch was not grass, but tired footprints. There is a truth television never shows you: the way a player drags his feet toward the tunnel after losing a match he accepted trading his body to try to win. I have seen players walk into dressing rooms with bandages around their thighs, knowing they will be on the training pitch tomorrow because the calendar waits for no one. World Cup 2026 will bring many things: more countries with a chance, more fans with joy, more federations with money. But it will also bring a longer summer for players who already had a long season. And because the World Cup is held in June and July, it will force domestic league calendars to stretch, crowd, and lengthen. The 2026-2026 season will be one of the densest in modern football history. And the 2026-2027 season, after a World Cup summer, will be one in which coaches worry about the fitness of nearly the entire squad. What does that mean? It means big clubs will rotate more. It means young players will get more chances. It means older players will be pushed out faster. And it means the transfer market will become crazier. This is where the loan-with-obligation story returns. As big clubs need more rotation options for a longer season, they will tend to keep more players and loan more with buy clauses to clear room for newcomers. This will create a wave of average players pushed to small clubs on financial terms small teams find hard to refuse but also hard to fulfil if the player flops. In that context, small football will become even more dependent on big football. I do not say this to scare anyone. I say it so Vietnamese fans understand that when we dream of a stronger national team, we must also dream of a club system strong enough to keep its players. Otherwise we will become a small version of the machine turning players into goods in Europe. And if that happens, the final payer will still be the player, paying with the strides we once called lightning. There is an interesting thing I have observed in my years working in England: fans are becoming more aware of player workload. They start protesting meaningless friendlies, demanding clubs protect young players, even organising community campaigns on players' mental health. This is a good sign. But it is still not enough. Because when you love a club, you want them to win the next match. And when you want them to win the next match, you want the strongest XI. And when you want the strongest XI, you will agree to let a player play one more game. That vicious circle is why real change cannot come from the stands. It must come from institutions. At the institutional level, one notable thing is that FIFA once faced proposals for a biennial World Cup, and that proposal was shelved after strong pushback from confederations and clubs. This is a victory. But it does not mean the pressure is gone. It only means the pressure has been pushed to another front: the front of expanded tournaments, friendlies, commercial tours and youth competitions. The next generation of players will be burned from the bottom up rather than top down. I want to return a little to Vietnamese football, because that is why I write this. The development of Vietnamese football over the past decade is one of the most beautiful stories I have witnessed from afar. From a football nation remembered mostly for a few historic moments, we have stepped onto the continent with an identity, a system, a vision. Players like Nguyen Quang Hai, Nguyen Cong Phuong, Do Hung Dung, Nguyen Tien Linh and many others have changed how people see Vietnamese football. And as the World Cup expands, as the door to the biggest stage widens, we have the right to hope. But hope, to last, must come with building. And the first building I want to propose is not more stadiums, not more training centres, but a player protection system. A load management system based on real data, not gut feeling. A medical system that can let a player rest three weeks when he needs to, without pressure from public opinion or the coaching staff. A contract system that protects young players from being sent too early and returned too late. And a system in which a player can say "I'm tired" without shame. This is not a pipe dream. This is what advanced football nations are doing, and we can learn. We can start with small things: recording minutes, tracking injuries, building a workload database. These do not need much money. They need patience and respect for people. And that is something Vietnamese football, with all the beauty it has taught us, can do better than many big football nations. And this is where I want to talk about what I call the silent moment in Vietnamese football. There are moments television does not record. The moment a young player sits in a dressing room after a match, looking at his boots and wondering whether he has the strength to keep playing. The moment an injured player watches his teammates celebrate on television and feels left behind. The moment a coach must decide to give a player ten more minutes, knowing it may harm him, but also knowing the team needs a goal. Those are moments no one films, but they are more numerous than all the goals we have ever watched. Your hero is not immortal; that is the cruellest gift of this game. World Cup 2026 will witness glorious moments. There will be goals that make us cry. There will be teams appearing for the first time and making history. There will be players, perhaps Vietnamese players, writing their names into the book. And all of that is beautiful. I do not deny the beauty of football. I only want to remind that this beauty is built on things more fragile than we think. What I want to see at World Cup 2026, beyond the goals, is a stage where a player can say no. No to a meaningless friendly. No to an expensive tour. No to being sent onto the pitch when the body is screaming. And that can only happen when all of us, from fans to leaders, from coaches to journalists, agree that players are not vehicles for us to have a beautiful summer. They are human beings. And human beings need rest. I do not know whether World Cup 2026 is a right or wrong step for football. Perhaps it is both. Perhaps it will open doors we never knew. And perhaps it will open wounds we will endure for years. What I know for sure is that the next generation of players will pay a bill we signed. And if I have one wish for this major tournament season, it is a very small, very ordinary, very human wish: that on an early August day in 2026, when a young player steps onto the pitch for the first match of the new season with feet still tired after a historic summer, he will not have to beg for anything at all. He will only have to play football.